Comment by naasking
3 years ago
Would you take a "day job" to be ontologically real? It is a way in which the aggregate of particles that make up your body regularly behave on a semi periodic schedule. That would seem to fit your definition of "encompassing every way in which things are or can be".
If it is real, isn't there still a need to distinguish ontological primitives from aggregate properties like the above? Why shouldn't this be what we mean by "real"?
>Would you take a "day job" to be ontologically real?
I do. I'm quite pluralistic with what I deem "real". Quarks are real as well as chairs and day jobs. Roughly speaking, I take all fundamentals and all invariants in space and time over the fundamentals to be real. Invariants seem to be attractors in conceptual space that are apt to be picked out and labeled by cognitive systems like us. These invariants play various explanatory roles in our conceptualization of the world, and so they are real.
>If it is real, isn't there still a need to distinguish ontological primitives from aggregate properties like the above? Why shouldn't this be what we mean by "real"?
Definitely. I just use the qualifier fundamental to make that distinction. Real is a term that plays a key explanatory role in our conceptualization of the world and so how we define it for the purposes of theory should respect this pre-theoretical usage. The idea of ontological primitives distinct from everyday existence is a result of theory and so should use a distinct term. When people say chairs exist, they mean it in this broad pre-theoretic sense. There's no reason to blow that up.
> When people say chairs exist, they mean it in this broad pre-theoretic sense. There's no reason to blow that up.
I'm not sure switching to, "qualia do not fundamentally exist", really buys us much. Saying they're illusory is already acknowledging the existence of some process that yields a false conclusion.
Pluralistic existence also seems to inevitably run head first into the Sorites paradox.
What you gain is not having to defend your terminology or confusions derived from disagreements on the meaning of key terms. Following Kieth Frankish on twitter, it seems like he spends far more time defending against misconceptions about illusionism than actually defending the content of the theory. And it's an entirely self-inflicted wound. (Though it works for him as it raises his h-index.)
When your terminology results in you saying things like "consciousness is an illusion (doesn't exist)" and "the existence of qualia (features of our subjective experience) is false", you're just undermining your own project. I mean, you're literally engaging in a verbal dispute with the other guys in this thread. I just don't see the point. There would be far more agreement if we could align the usage of key terms with how most people understand them.
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