Does sweetness exist, really, or does it only taste that way to us?

[awatkins69]

Not at all. Being able to describe a physical process is not the same as undergoing the physical process. You’re putting 2 and 2 together and making 7.

Let me make it clear. If the experience cannot be described in physical terms it cannot be physical. It must be non-physical. The experience, if it is physical and only physical, should be able to be explained in physical and only physical terms.

To prove my point, I ask you to describe sweetness in terms of physical facts. If you can, you’ll have solved one of the largest problems for modern analytic philosophy. If you cannot describe sweetness in terms of physical facts, that means that there are non-physical facts.

Again, modern physicalist philosophers realize all of this, leaving them with two options: dualism (e.g. Searle, Kim, Davidson, Nagel), or denying that qualia exist (e.g. Dennett).

 

[wanstronian]

Let me make it clear. If the experience cannot be described in physical terms it cannot be physical. It must be non-physical. The experience, if it is physical and only physical, should be able to be explained in physical and only physical terms.

It was perfectly clear in your previous post.

To prove my point, I ask you to describe sweetness in terms of physical facts. If you can, you’ll have solved one of the largest problems for modern analytic philosophy. If you cannot describe sweetness in terms of physical facts, that means that there are non-physical facts.

What it actually means means is that there’s experiential knowledge, and experiential knowledge can’t be described, it needs to be experienced. For one thing, one person’s experience of sweetness may not be identical to another’s.

**Unless **you’re working from a literal definition of non-physical that means that we don’t currently have the physical capability to describe it (rather than that it’s forever beyond the realm of physics). In which case, I agree.

As an analogy - lightning used to be considered supernatural. Then science explained it, and now it’s a natural phenomenen. Is that what you mean when you refer to non-physical?

 

[Touchstone]

This is a primary problem in holding a purely materialistic account of the universe. I.e. if our perceptions are predicated, not on truth, but on survival value, it seems highly unlikely that most of our knowledge is true. The reason we obtain what is in our mind would be driven by a pragmatic necessity without relation to what is true, except coincidentally or on accident.

All you have to do with an idea like Plantinga’s EAAN is apply to see the “low or inscrutable” premise break down. A frog that is blinded from an encounter with, say a cat, is at a survival disadvantage precisely it is at a “truth disadvantage” compared to his brother frogs in the yard who’ve not lost their eyesight. Visual perception and mental modeling of reality based on eyesight is an evolutionary advantage BECAUSE it is a truth advantage. Knowing the location of a nearby quarry via eyesight, as well as any other senses that can be brought to bear on the situation.

As soon as Plantinga has to look at evolutionary biology as it is observed in nature, that premise is shown to be (laughably) unsound. Something like the reverse emerges from the evidence – truth finding is a crucial survival skill. Information is a powerful weapon, and as humans often show the dominating weapon in the field. This doesn’t just destabilize Plantinga’s premise, but negates, and promotes the opposite conclusion of what he is aiming for with EAAN.

There’s very little survival value in getting one’s theology correct in the direct sense, in the way that having a clear-eyed view of environment and the prey one is hunting so that one may eat that day. So biology affords us the luxury of indulging our theological fancies, because there is very little direct cause to being out to lunch on those questions. Moreover, there’s a good evolutionary case to be made that religious delusion has a secondary benefit, even if the theology is completely mistaken; the ‘liturgy’ and social mores and shared social hierarchies that emerge from the cult may well have a beneficial survival dynamic for communities. Tribes that “delude themselves together survive together”, so to speak – the value is in social collaboration and unification and order, the mythic/non-factual basis of their beliefs being unimportant.

Concerning Dennett’s example: it is the case that the interaction between subject (the knower) and object (sugar) is itself what gives rise to the particular knowledge of sweetness. Indeed, all knowledge whatsoever is only knowledge insofar as it is in a knower. Now, sweetness cannot be known in sugar itself. I.e. sugar, since it lacks intellect, cannot know itself to be sweet. Rather, sweetness, as a phenomenon of taste experience, can only be known in a being with sense perception and an intellect.

Sure. “Intellect” may be too far, but I take your point. Ants, anecdotally at least, also have a “sweet tooth”, a predilection for sugar. I have a hard time ascribing 'intellect" to an ant, but that notwithstanding, they appear to have the same “knower” role of the sweetness of sugar, and ostensibly for the same reasons (high energy fuel source that fits their metabolism).

Now, if Dennett wants to maintain that sweetness doesn’t exist, we may ask him what he means.

If you listen to Dennett’s video, he wasn’t concerned with the existence or non-existence of sweetness, but rather the causality and optimization dynamics. An easy way to focus on this principle is the “inversion” that Darwin proposed – where Christian culture has tradiitionally seen the world and environment as “designed for man”, Darwin’s insight is that no, that view is backwards, and per the evidence, man is “designed for nature”.

Just like that argument doesn’t dispute man’s existence, Dennett’s point is not that "sweetness doesn’t exist’, but rather a reversal of our understanding: we don’t choose what’s sweet, sweet chooses us, and we come to preference and orientation toward sweetness in conformance with the environment. Similarly, men aren’t attracted to “sexy” females because they are “inherently” sexy. It’s just an imperative that females with good genetics for male DNA propagation are found to be attractive. “Sexy” women could be what we find repulsive in other situations (that was the point with the baboon pictures), there’s nothing intrinsically “sexy” about Jennifer Aniston in a bikini. It’s just a necessity that drives our survival. If our DNA performed better in finding 400lb short bald women as mates, that would be “sexy” for us.

So it’s not about the existence of these judgments and perceptions, per Dennett, but yet another overthrow of our crude intuitions, another blow the efficacy of “common sense” (“of course there’s something inherently sexy about Jennifer Aniston’s body”!) as an authority in real questions of knowledge.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

The Exodus:

If he means that *knowledge *of sweetness doesn’t exist independent of a *knower *capable of experiencing sweetness, we would agree. But it seems he is trying to imply that, since, outside the knower (us humans who taste), sweetness is not known in itself, it cannot be known *at all *. He therefore concludes that it does not exist at all.

OK, see above. That sounds like you watched a different video than I did. He’s saying something totally different. “Cuteness” in a baby is not a property of the baby itself. It’s just a construct we superimpose on it because it’s imperative that we do see – there must be a compelling aesthetic for babies to get the parents and other caretakers to bother to take care of them (and I, having six kids, well understand both the wonder and draw of kids, and the burden that goes with being a parent).

Dennett’s just point out that our “folk knowledge” or our “common sense” intuitions (and this is important as this is the same substrate many religious beliefs grow out of) is once again at odds with a rectified view of the natural evidence. The baby isn’t cute because it “has cuteness”. It is cute, because We Must Think She’s Cute in order to survive. The attractions are not choice-based in the way our intuition suggests, and there’s nothing intrisic about those features that makes them “cute”, or “sexy”. A female baboon appears to be “sexy” to a male baboon, but (hopefully) not to us? Why? It’s the same object we are considering. The difference is our biological imperatives. The baboon MUST think the female of the species is “sexy” in a wants-to-mate sense, or else we wouldn’t even know what a baboon was – they wouldn’t exist.

There’s this intuition that we like babies for their intrinsic cuteness. It’s not intrinsic at all, is Dennett’s point, and this is the ramifications of our knowledge of evolution.

This, however, begs the question. No one maintains that knowledge of sweetness can be had outside a knower in which sweetness is possible. Indeed, knowledge of a thing requires a knower. However, it does not therefore follow that the mere existenceof a thing requires a knower. It only follows that *knowledge *of existence requires a knower.

Again, I feel like you are perhaps responding to someone other than me? This doesn’t ring familiar to anything I’ve written here, or what Dennett says in the video. I think “exist” in the OP was a bit of an unfortunate choice of words. Sweetness and cuteness exist, according to all parties here. Its the “illusion of intrinsic-ness” that Dennett is focusing on the idea that the baby is cute because it’s just intrinsically cute. That’s an intuition that doesn’t hold up.

Hence sweetness can exist and not be known. Or it can exist and be known. In either case, if it is known, it cannot be the case that it does not exist, since knowing is just such an interaction between subject (knower) and object (in this case, sugar,)

I think we are violently agreeing on something that wasn’t ever in dispute?

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

According to that argument we are just cogs in the machine of nature. All our choices are caused by physical events - including what we choose to think. So your theory that we didn’t choose sugar turns out to be self-destructive. If we can’t choose what to think what are our thoughts worth?

They are worth precisely what they worth before you came to this understanding, and the knowledge is only destructive in the sense that (perhaps) treasured misconceptions and understandings come crashing down. But that’s nothing more than noting that learning often involves abandoning inadequate ideas – “destroying” them as “master of the castle”. But if I understand my predilection for sweetness to be “sweetness choosing me” via the dynamics of evolution in the environment I exist in, that doesn’t devalue that knowledge at all, nor does it make a bit of honey on my tongue any less sweet or delightful, nor does it change my preferences for sweet over, say just bland or intensely bitter as a food sensation.

I feel like I’m being asked why life is good if it turns out Zeus is imaginary, and how we get by the destruction of facing an illusion that Zeus was The Dude. Well, take a walk, feel the sun on your skin, have dinner with good friends, go dancing, do some fly fishing in the morning. Work hard to build an enterprise that creates wealth and solves problems and helps people. There’s your worth, and if you can’t get over a death-grip on intutiions that are untenable in light of the evidence, then seriously, by all means, “use your illusions”, as the famous philosopher Axl Rose has suggested.

I can’t think why my thoughts would be worth anything less in that case. Arguably, I’d say they are worth more, if anything, if only because they have additional understanding and utility for others than my earlier, mistaken thoughts.

It’s not science that can’t be bothered with all that but a certain brand of scientist who assumes science can explain all human activity - a materialist, to be precise.

I don’t think you can cite a scientist who makes this claim. “All” is a severe, requirement, and I think unreachable even in principle. If you doubt this, ask yourself when you would know you had reached the “all point” explanations and natural knowledge.

The claim that scientists do make is that their performative knowledge… performs. What they do produce works, which is why you feel OK getting in an airplane or taking medicine, etc. Moreover, this performance is very hard to come by in other disciplines and epistemologies, so the scientist, looking around, rightly wonders, *well perhaps science cannot ever answer this, but even if so, what makes us think that in light of shortcoming, that theology would make any headway at all (or astrology or New Age oracles, or whatever). * It isn’t that science can or could claim to be exhaustive; it just notest that for all its limitations, the other enterprises out there remain in the starting blocks, having gotten demonstrably nowhere. It’s “the only game in town”, not by rule or law, but just by doing a survey. It might be otherwise in the future, but as it is now…

Yet materialism is not based on science but on the assumption that everything originates in matter. There is no possible way in which that assumption can be justified.

I think you are again confusing starting points with end points. Materialism, for man, and for every materialist I personally have talked to about this, is not a starting point, a “given”. It’s the conclusion reached after looking around and thinking critically about what has been reviewed. There’s no a priori principle against the supernatural for me; I was a Christian for thirty years. It’s welcome as a competitor, it just can’t compete, and founders terribly under stress testing and analysis. Materialism doesn’t. It’s minimal, conservative, nominalist, objective in its disposition. It performs better against the evidence, as a conclusion, not as a premise.

Logical positivism became extinct precisely because it is impossible to verify the verification principle - if verification is restricted to what we can see, hear, taste, smell and touch. There is far more in life than biological machinery! Materialism is literally a soul-destroying view of reality that leads inexorably to nihilism. If nothing exists but matter nothing matters…

That makes no sense at all. Why would “being matter” or being “real” in the natural sense make it not matter? On materialism, it’s not soul-destroying in the supernatural sense because there is no supernatural soul to destroy in the first place. You might as well lament the Unicorn-soul-destroying effects of your own a-unicornism, your denial of the reality of our inner unicorn-soul.

In any case, what I hear you telling me is that you simply do not like the prospects of giving up a “supernatural basis for meaning”, It’s displeasing to you, and you cling to it. But that is not to say meaning and value are not and cannot be created out of real things. They are real things, after all.

-TS

 

[Betterave]

It was perfectly clear in your previous post.

What it actually means means is that there’s experiential knowledge, and experiential knowledge can’t be described, it needs to be experienced. For one thing, one person’s experience of sweetness may not be identical to another’s.

**Unless **you’re working from a literal definition of non-physical that means that we don’t currently have the physical capability to describe it (rather than that it’s forever beyond the realm of physics). In which case, I agree.

As an analogy - lightning used to be considered supernatural. Then science explained it, and now it’s a natural phenomenen. Is that what you mean when you refer to non-physical?

I will jump in here and suggest that you have obviously miss awatkins’ point with your analogy: First, sweetness has never been considered ‘supernatural.’ Second, lightning as a natural phenomenon is obviously just like sweetness: there are the physical facts and the allegedly non-physical facts (the qualia).

As for ‘experiential knowledge’, i.e., knowledge that must be gained by means of qualitative experience since it cannot be reduced to physical facts/the ‘performance’ of mathematical models aiming to capture those facts… I’m not sure how this is supposed to be an argument against awatkins’ view. (Hopefully he will understand.)

 

[Windfish]

Man, I am really embarrassed, here, since so much of what you guys are writing is going over my head. I mean, I get the “gist” of what you are all saying, but not necessarily what mean by it. What is at stake, I think, with Dennet’s point of view, and Touchstone got this, is the notion of a thing having intrinsic value. Chocolate cake is not really sweet - it’s just made of atoms and other compounds - but it tastes sweet to us because we’re wired that way. If we were wired differently, the chocolate cake might taste sour. Well, first, is this point of view actually true? And, if it is, how does this influence Catholic beliefs, if at all?

 

[Betterave]

Man, I am really embarrassed, here, since so much of what you guys are writing is going over my head. I mean, I get the “gist” of what you are all saying, but not necessarily what mean by it. What is at stake, I think, with Dennet’s point of view, and Touchstone got this, is the notion of a thing having intrinsic value. Chocolate cake is not really sweet - it’s just made of atoms and other compounds - but it tastes sweet to us because we’re wired that way. If we were wired differently, the chocolate cake might taste sour. Well, first, is this point of view actually true? [This is true, but it is not at issue.] And, if it is, how does this influence Catholic beliefs, if at all?

I haven’t been able to watch the Dennett, but TS seems to be saying that he thinks there is some real thing called sweetness that “chooses us” by helping us to survive, and in turn we reward sweetness by “choosing it”, although this second choosing is really just an illusion, because we aren’t really choosing sweetness at all, we are just surviving as a result of sweetness’ sweetness to us…? He thinks that this view is proven by science and so it doesn’t matter that it sounds absurd. The truth is whatever science-according-to-TS says it is; that is TS’s basic dogma and for him it trumps any other consideration.

(If you don’t fully understand this view, that’s probably a good thing. BTW, I’m hoping that my take on TS’s view will turn out to be something of a caricature that he will straighten out for us…)

 

[Windfish]

I haven’t been able to watch the Dennett, but TS seems to be saying that he thinks there is some real thing called sweetness that “chooses us” by helping us to survive, and in turn we reward sweetness by “choosing it”, although this second choosing is really just an illusion, because we aren’t really choosing sweetness at all, we are just surviving as a result of sweetness’ sweetness to us…? He thinks that this view is proven by science and so it doesn’t matter that it sounds absurd. The truth is whatever science-according-to-TS says it is; that is TS’s basic dogma and for him it trumps any other consideration.

(If you don’t fully understand this view, that’s probably a good thing. BTW, I’m hoping that my take on TS’s view will turn out to be something of a caricature that he will straighten out for us…)

I guess I am just concerned what effects, if any, this view has on our free will, our knowledge, and our Catholic beliefs.

 

[tonyrey]

I guess I am just concerned what effects, if any, this view has on our free will, our knowledge, and our Catholic beliefs.

It destroys the lot - lock, stock and barrel - and his own into the bargain!

 

[The_Exodus]

Visual perception and mental modeling of reality based on eyesight is an evolutionary advantage BECAUSE it is a truth advantage.

In which case you are assuming that we can, first of all, know truth based on our senses. If however our senses arrived at their conclusions through purely materialistic mechanisms, this very assumption is without foundation.

touchstone:

As soon as Plantinga has to look at evolutionary biology as it is observed in nature, that premise is shown to be (laughably) unsound. Something like the reverse emerges from the evidence – truth finding is a crucial survival skill. Information is a powerful weapon, and as humans often show the dominating weapon in the field.

“Truth finding” is an ability which cannot be gained from any other proposition. It must be assumed before anything else. Therefore, any theory which tries to maintain our truth finding ability came about through purely random means would cut its feet out from under itself.

 

[The_Exodus]

“Cuteness” in a baby is not a property of the baby itself.

It does not follow that, since, without our constructing “cuteness” in a baby, that therefore “cuteness” does not exist in the baby. This train of logic would lead us to conclude that, if a tree fell in the woods, and no one saw it, therefore no tree fell in the woods.

The properties in a given phenonmena do not have to be sensed in order to exist. They only have to be sensed by us in order to be known to exist by us.

touchstone:

The difference is our biological imperatives. The baboon MUST think the female of the species is “sexy” in a wants-to-mate sense, or else we wouldn’t even know what a baboon was – they wouldn’t exist.

I note in passing that this model cannot account for free choice. This is because, ultimately, the strongest desire in any situation is what produces the following action, and all desires are derived from evolution.

touchstone:

Again, I feel like you are perhaps responding to someone other than me? This doesn’t ring familiar to anything I’ve written here, or what Dennett says in the video. I think “exist” in the OP was a bit of an unfortunate choice of words. Sweetness and cuteness exist, according to all parties here. Its the “illusion of intrinsic-ness” that Dennett is focusing on the idea that the baby is cute because it’s just intrinsically cute. That’s an intuition that doesn’t hold up.

My response is appropriate because you seem to be claiming that a thing cannot exist in itself unless it is known by humans to exist. Hence, you say, cuteness or sweetness cannot exist in things because humans only know those things by their intellects. Yet this because is not a proper therefore. There is nothing in the antecedent (cuteness cannot exist in a thing) that garners the necessity of your consequent (because humans only know cuteness by an intellect.) It does not follow that, simply because our knowledge of a thing gives rise to our knowledge of x, that, unless we have knowledge of x, x does not therefore exist.

 

[tonyrey]

If we can’t choose what to think what are our thoughts worth?

You underestimate the destruction wrought by the implication that **all our thoughts are caused by physical events and are totally beyond our control. **

I feel like I’m being asked why life is good if it turns out Zeus is imaginary, and how we get by the destruction of facing an illusion that Zeus was The Dude… Work hard to build an enterprise that creates wealth and solves problems and helps people. There’s your worth, and if you can’t get over a death-grip on intuitions that are untenable in light of the evidence, then seriously, by all means, “use your illusions”, as the famous philosopher Axl Rose has suggested.

None of your statements alters the fact - with which you have not come to grips - that uncontrolled thoughts take you not much further than the end of your nose!

I can’t think why my thoughts would be worth anything less in that case. Arguably, I’d say they are worth more, if anything, if only because they have additional understanding and utility for others than my earlier, mistaken thoughts.

You** think** they have additional value but in reality they are self-destructive. “Your” thoughts are not even your thoughts - in the context of materialism - because they just happen to occur in a brain which belongs to a body with no other identifying features than itself. The self, soul, spirit, mind - call it what you will - has been totally eliminated.

It’s not science that can’t be bothered with all that but a certain brand of scientist who assumes science can explain all human activity - a materialist, to be precise.

I don’t think you can cite a scientist who makes this claim. “All” is a severe, requirement, and I think unreachable even in principle.

The following statement makes your view abundantly clear:

We didn’t choose sugar from the environment, the environ chose sugar for us, in other words, and “sweet” is the cumulative effect of that choosing for us – we are honed by evolution to prize food types that are high-energy fuels, and “sweet” is the psychological draw and reward driving that beneficial predilection.

Don’t you believe the environment determines what we choose? What aspect of human activity cannot ever be explained by science?

The claim that scientists do make is that their performative knowledge… performs. Moreover, this performance is very hard to come by in other disciplines and epistemologies, so the scientist, looking around, rightly wonders, well perhaps science cannot ever answer this, but even if so, what makes us think that in light of shortcoming, that theology would make any headway at all (or astrology or New Age oracles, or whatever)…It’s “the only game in town”, not by rule or law, but just by doing a survey.

Do you base your most important decisions solely on scientific facts? If not what else?

Materialism, for man, and for every materialist I personally have talked to about this, is not a starting point, a “given”. It’s the conclusion reached after looking around and thinking critically about what has been reviewed.

How did you reach that conclusion?

There’s no a priori principle against the supernatural for me; I was a Christian for thirty years. It’s welcome as a competitor, it just can’t compete, and founders terribly under stress testing and analysis.

The supernatural certainly can’t compete in the domain of analysis but materialism founders terribly in the realm of synthesis.

Materialism doesn’t. It’s minimal, conservative, nominalist, objective in its disposition. It performs better against the evidence, as a conclusion, not as a premise.

Materialism performs infinitely better than Christianity within its own minimal, nominalist and objective sphere - which, alas, excludes all the most precious and significant aspects of life: truth, goodness, freedom, justice, beauty, friendship and love.

Logical positivism became extinct precisely because it is impossible to verify the verification principle… If nothing exists but matter nothing matters…

That makes no sense at all. Why would “being matter” or being “real” in the natural sense make it not matter?

How do you obtain value or purpose from inanimate matter - unless by a conjuring trick?

On materialism, it’s not soul-destroying in the supernatural sense because there is no supernatural soul to destroy in the first place. You might as well lament the Unicorn-soul-destroying effects of your own a-unicornism, your denial of the reality of our inner unicorn-soul.

Then you explicitly reject the reality of your inner self and acknowledge that you are no more than - in Hume’s words - a “bundle of perceptions”. Materialism is not only soul-destroying but self-destroying. For you a person amounts to no more than an animal.

In any case, what I hear you telling me is that you simply do not like the prospects of giving up a “supernatural basis for meaning”, It’s displeasing to you, and you cling to it. But that is not to say meaning and value are not and cannot be created out of real things. They are real things, after all.

I could just as well say that that you simply do not like the prospects of giving up a natural basis for meaning, it’s displeasing to you, and you cling to it. What are these “real things” you refer to? Material objects and nothing else? Can you explain how you derive meaning and value from a meaningless and valueless existence?

 

[awatkins69]

What it actually means means is that there’s experiential knowledge, and experiential knowledge can’t be described, it needs to be experienced. For one thing, one person’s experience of sweetness may not be identical to another’s.

**Unless **you’re working from a literal definition of non-physical that means that we don’t currently have the physical capability to describe it (rather than that it’s forever beyond the realm of physics). In which case, I agree.

As an analogy - lightning used to be considered supernatural. Then science explained it, and now it’s a natural phenomenen. Is that what you mean when you refer to non-physical?

If qualia can’t be described in physical terms, ever, then they are not in themselves physical. It’s very simple. Just try to explain to me what sweetness is and you’ll see that no amount of physical facts can accurately portray what sweetness truly is in itself. But in materialism, all facts are physical facts. If there is something non-physical, then materialism is false.

Your analogy is not what I mean. The problem was a lack of knowledge about the physical causes for lightning. In our example, Mary knows everything about the physical causes of sweetness, but she’s still missing some knowledge, namely, the non-physical quale.

Now, I can’t keep going on and on. I’m really not trying to be rude in saying all of this, but if you don’t understand the problem or what its ramifications are, you may want to look up “Mary’s room” in Wikipedia.

 

[The_Exodus]

Then you explicitly reject the reality of your inner self and acknowledge that you are no more than - in Hume’s words - a “bundle of perceptions”. Materialism is not only soul-destroying but self-destroying. For you a person amounts to no more than an animal.

I could just as well say that that you simply do not like the prospects of giving up a natural basis for meaning, it’s displeasing to you, and you cling to it. What are these “real things” you refer to? Material objects and nothing else? Can you explain how you derive meaning and value from a meaningless and valueless existence?

Tony,

I do not think one need even go so far as this to refute materialism. If there is only matter, how is it that “knowledge” can even take place? Knowledge is an interaction between a person and an object, whereby an object is joined in some sense to a person. But how can a material object interact with a material object in a way in which the two material objects do not physically become one?

When we know, our brains do not become the matter that we are knowing. Rather, it is as the medievals understood, the immaterial intellect *abstracts *what it knows from the material objects.

 

[Betterave]

I guess I am just concerned what effects, if any, this view has on our free will, our knowledge, and our Catholic beliefs.

It seems to be a simplistic to incoherent view, so as such it should have no effect on anyone’s views of anything.

Here is the basic form of Dennett’s claim (and I quote):

*Honey is sweet because we like it; NOT we like it because honey is sweet. *

I have to agree that Dennett is a bad philosopher. Funny guy, though, who knows how to play to a friendly audience that probably doesn’t have much in the way of critical thinking skills.

 

[tonyrey]

Tony,

I do not think one need even go so far as this to refute materialism. If there is only matter, how is it that “knowledge” can even take place? Knowledge is an interaction between a person and an object, whereby an object is joined in some sense to a person. But how can a material object interact with a material object in a way in which the two material objects do not physically become one?

When we know, our brains do not become the matter that we are knowing. Rather, it is as the medievals understood, the immaterial intellect *abstracts *what it knows from the material objects.

You are right but having discussed materialism several times on this forum I know it is necessary to attack it from different angles - and even then its adherents usually refuse to be dislodged from their entrenched positions. Some argue that the correspondence of a belief to reality is simply an isomorph of atomic particles!

 

[The_Exodus]

It does not follow that, since, without our constructing “cuteness” in a baby, that therefore “cuteness” does not exist in the baby. This train of logic would lead us to conclude that, if a tree fell in the woods, and no one saw it, therefore no tree fell in the woods.

The properties in a given phenonmena do not have to be sensed in order to exist. They only have to be sensed by us in order to be known to exist by us.

I note in passing that this model cannot account for free choice. This is because, ultimately, the strongest desire in any situation is what produces the following action, and all desires are derived from evolution.

My response is appropriate because you seem to be claiming that a thing cannot exist in itself unless it is known by humans to exist. Hence, you say, cuteness or sweetness cannot exist in things because humans only know those things by their intellects. Yet this because is not a proper therefore. There is no logical necessity between the antecedent (cuteness cannot exist in a thing) and the consequent (because humans only know cuteness by an intellect.) It does not follow that, simply because our knowledge of a thing gives rise to our knowledge of x, that, unless we have knowledge of x, x does not therefore exist.

 

[Touchstone]

I haven’t been able to watch the Dennett, but TS seems to be saying that he thinks there is some real thing called sweetness that “chooses us” by helping us to survive, and in turn we reward sweetness by “choosing it”, although this second choosing is really just an illusion, because we aren’t really choosing sweetness at all, we are just surviving as a result of sweetness’ sweetness to us…?

Of course not, it was anthropic language, is all. We are inclined (some of us, anyway), to think that a baby is “cute”, because it is “intrinsically cute” – possessed of some traits that make it objectively “cute”, independent of the observer. We just happen to notice and appreciate its “cuteness”…

On evolution, the environment shapes our preferences, and the appreciation of a baby obtains through expedience, as a matter of practical necessity rather, and focused on whatever it happens to be that aids our attachment/affection/protection as a means of promoting survival and genetic propagation. It matters not what the particular features are – relatively large eyes for a baby, perhaps, as one “attraction point” of babies – but only the pragmatic effects of that attraction. It’s only as “cute” as the feature is functional in service to our genetic imperatives.

That’s the long form of “sweet choosing us” or “cute choosing us”, and this was Dennett’s point in the video. “Cute” is as real and efficacious as ever, it’s just not grounded in the baby’s features, but instead as a survival-serving response by our cognitive wiring. If all the “cute features” of a baby were changed into something we would now call “ugly” or “grotesque”, we would treasure that grotesqueness as “cute” if that’s how evolution had selected for our development. Beady eyes and gaunt, bony features would be just as adorable in that scenario, so long as that served the evolutionary imperative.

He thinks that this view is proven by science and so it doesn’t matter that it sounds absurd.

I resist the term “prove” for science – it signals a basic misunderstanding of scientific epistemology, or at least shows a recklessness toward confusion about it. The explanation Dennett lays it is just bread-and-butter evolutionary theory, and it’s a theory that’s been so successful, there aren’t even any serious competitors out there at this point. The evolutionary application here isn’t controversial; Dennett is just observing that the knowledge we have accumulated in this are has some “overturning” implications for our “folk wisdom”, “common sense” and other intuitions.

The truth is whatever science-according-to-TS says it is; that is TS’s basic dogma and for him it trumps any other consideration.

I don’t even need to control the terms. I will just point out that this is a model which performs empirically, and that’s enough. If “conforms to experience, objectively” isn’t enough grounds for you to call it “truth”, knock yourself out. I can’t be bothered. Just noting the performance, that which is conspicuously lacking in other models, religious and otherwise, is sufficient for me, here.

(If you don’t fully understand this view, that’s probably a good thing. BTW, I’m hoping that my take on TS’s view will turn out to be something of a caricature that he will straighten out for us…)

It’s right there to grab if you want to.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

In which case you are assuming that we can, first of all, know truth based on our senses.

Yes, that is the “bootstrapping” metaphysical assumption of science, and empirical empistemology – reality is real. The alternative is solipsism – if experience is a non-starter for knowledge, we are perfectly incapable of developing knowledge of an extramental world.

That could be the case, logically speaking. It’s just a non-starter for knowledge, so if you want to acquire knowledge, you commit to the reality of reality and see how things go. It helps that we are physiologically hardwired to this very commitment, and cannot act far out of line with it, even if we tried. If someone fakes a punch at your jaw, you will flinch, even as you are explaining how reality isn’t real, and your reflexes betray your sophistry.

As a grounding, then, yes, reality is real. No investigation, not to mention discourse here, is possible without that commitment. I can show anyone here who supposes they can deny that same commitment that their actions prove they are mistaken or deceiving us, by just watching what they do for an hour or so. Everyone operates on the ‘reality is real’ basis. It’s just some go farther and imagine there’s an “extra reality” out there (stolen concept), somewhere (stolen concept) in an immaterial dimension (stolen concept) beyond (stolen concept) real reality.

If however our senses arrived at their conclusions through purely materialistic mechanisms, this very assumption is without foundation.

It has the very best foundation any premise can have – necessity. It’s a requirement for the enterprise of knowledge building. One can choose solipsism, or one can seek knowledge of the extra-mental world, and that necessitates the stipulation that reality is real. For consistency, I add the note once again, that this is also how we are hard-wired, biologically. This is also a physiological imperative for us.

“Truth finding” is an ability which cannot be gained from any other proposition. It must be assumed before anything else. Therefore, any theory which tries to maintain our truth finding ability came about through purely random means would cut its feet out from under itself.

No, it wouldn’t affect it at all. The epistemic weight of a scientific theory obtains wholly from its performance, from its execution on accounting for empirical evidence, making successful, novel predictions, and avoiding falsification, while still being liable to it. The provenance of the idea in light of its performance on those criteria is perfectly irrelevant, and can’t undercut the achievement garnered through any account of its origins. That’s the beauty of science as the overthrow of insular, purely subjective philosophy – it’s not attached to “pedigrees”, but is merit-based. The scientific is not judged by the “color of its skin”, but by the content of its character, so to speak.

-TS