Comradeship // Freechat

I've hated much of philosophy but it's because I have a somewhat contrarian and view which I am very convinced is correct but few else agree with me.

Most every philosopher implicitly or explicity adopts a dualist structure similar to (or directly taken from) Kant's phenomenon-noumenon distinction. Although Chalmers later popularized a renaming of this to the "subjective experience" and "objective reality" distinction.

Idealists point out that the noumenon is problematic because by definition it is outside of observation therefore fundamentally unobservable directly or indirectly so we can never say anything about it, so they advocate getting rid of it, leaving us just with the phenomenon.

That is where 99.9% of philosophers sit: either they believe in this dualist distinction (which I will just refer to as "representationalism" but maybe it's not the best label), or they only believe in the phenomenon (idealism).

But Kant himself stated quite clearly that his noumenal-phenomenal distinction requires both concepts together because they are defined in relation to one another, so logically it makes no sense to speak of the noumenon without explicitly or implicitly contrasting it with the phenomenon, and vice-versa.

That is to say, the two concepts come and go together... and I don't take this to mean we should keep both, but the opposite: the two must be discarded together.

Idealism is a bizarre one-sided philosophy that personally I don't even agree is fully coherent because it relies on concepts to define itself which inherently imply an "outside" "noumenal" world to even make sense yet then denies it.

They are right to question the noumenon but end up at nonsense because they don't go the full way: you have to throw out the entire representationalist framework. Every book that tries to establish idealism starts by assuming representationalism and then later denying half of it. Not a single one of them just derives it from its own premises, and that leaves me skeptical it's even possible to do so.

I'd highly recommend the book Toward a Contextual Realism by Jocelyn Benoist. He's one of the few I'm aware of who criticizes representationalism. If you abolish the whole dualist framework, then you also by extension abolish the supposed "explanatory gap" between what we observe and the real world. As Benoist argues, there is actually nothing logically inconsistent about taking what we perceive for being reality as it is, not a "representation" of reality "in the mind" but reality as such.

Benoist does a great job tearing down all the arguments that supposedly establish that we can't see the real world, such as arguments from illusions or dreams or "phenomenoality" or whatever. People constantly repeat arguments that they think are slam dunks in favor of representationalism that fall apart with like five seconds of scrutiny.

When you come to this position, a significant portion of philosophy becomes boring. Without representationalism, you can't derive, for example, Chamlers' so-called "hard problem" or even his concepts of "subjective experience," and thus you cannot even derive his concept of "consciousness."

A significant portion of western philosophy is to supposedly "solve" Chalmers' hard problem by introducing a "theory of consciousness," but all of this is entirely meaningless if you are not a representationalist to begin with.

I have seen so many books and papers where I start reading and they start immediately using representationalist categories like "subjective experience" or "phenomenonality" and I roll my eyes and immediately put it down.

When it comes to philosophy I tend to have an extremely conservative stance, which tends to make me very contrarian because philosophy books sell better if they are weird and mysterious, but any time someone says something bizarre, I become highly skeptical and ask if we really need to believe that bizarre claim and if they have genuinely established it as necessary.

Representationalists I just do not find have convincingly established that you have to abandon the idea that you can perceive the world. Especially since it leads directly to problems like the "hard problem," it doesn't seem logically consistent to claim you can't perceive the world, and then somehow later explain how the world is knowable through perception that supposedly had nothing to do with it.

I tend to be very contrarian because I apply this conservative approach to everything. I've been critical of the whole change from "materialism" to "physicalism" you see in the literature which originated by the reification of fields, but I've written articles on my blog criticizing this because nothing about the mathematics of fields implies we have to think of them as physical entities in the world, but rather ways of describing the dispositions of the objects we do perceive, and so traditional materialism is perfectly compatible with the mathematics of fields.

I also wrote a whole book on how people misrepresent the mathematics of quantum mechanics and special relativity to necessarily imply we need to abandon materialism, and I step through the mathematics of every famous paper on the subject and show that none necessitate that conclusion at all, but they ways arise from a long list of assumptions which we could drop one of those other assumptions instead.

(i.e. if you assume X, Y, and Z to disprove materialism, it could mean materialism is false, but it could also mean X, Y, or Z are false.)

My views are wacko and contrarian because I believe we can see reality and that reality consists of matter governed by nomological laws of motion, whereas almost every modern day thinker invents far more complicated towers of metaphysics, claiming we live in some giant multiverse governed by consciousness or some bizarre shit, and my view is that a critical analysis of their arguments all shows them to fall short of necessitating these conclusions.

Of course, you may say you believe in something for reasons other than necessity. But my contrarian view is that we should be skeptical of any extraordinary philosophical claim unless it is shown to be necessary, and that's a burden people constantly pretend they have met while never having actually met.

This has made my views on much of modern philosophy and especially western philosophy very negative because just any paper or book you start reading clearly begins with a bunch of questionable metaphysical claims they never justify and it makes me hard to get past the first page before I'm already completely off of the train with what they're trying to argue.

Anyways sorry for the rant but it is tiresome how obsessed philosophers are with abstract towers of bizarre metaphysical and how little they ever care to scrutinize their premises, to actually question whether or not those bizarre claims are actually necessary, probably because of audience capture: everyone wants to be told something bizarre because that makes the philosophy "interesting," and I am the boring skeptic who always comes a long and says "erm actually..."