19
votes
Accepted
Is my yellow same as your yellow?
This is a fairly well-developed area of philosophical literature called the Knowledge Argument for Qualia. The general way this argument is constructed today comes from Frank Jackson's 1982 paper, ...
- 1,021
18
votes
Under what circumstances is the observation of X proof of the existence of X?
Observation is never theory-free. Even when a person relies on sight, they have a theory of perception that they are implicitly or explicitly relying upon. When we use sensitive scientific instruments ...
- 5,823
12
votes
Is my yellow same as your yellow?
Your yellow is functionally the same as my yellow (assuming normal colour vision).
Take any two colours, and create a smooth transition between them, like these (from here):
And those smooth ...
- 1,372
11
votes
Is it possible to imagine a color one has never seen before?
The answer is controversial. Hume, 18th century British philosopher, famously argued that such a possibility is conceivable, that if we are presented with a spectrum of color where some intermediate ...
- 44.2k
7
votes
Is something physical if and only if we can perceive it (directly or indirectly) with our bodily senses?
Referring to perception is an erroneous restriction. We can't perceive planets in far off galaxies, but that doesn't stop there being planets in far off galaxies or make them unphysical. Physical ...
- 26.4k
7
votes
Are your memories part of you?
Your actual post builds again a dichotomy and splits the concept of a person in two entities, named “me” and “my mind”. And after the splitting your actual post asks how the two relate to each other, ...
- 42.5k
7
votes
Under what circumstances is the observation of X proof of the existence of X?
The present formulation of the title question can be improved:
Taken
literally your question supposes the existence of “X” when is starts
“Under what circumstances is the observation of X ...”.
But ...
- 42.5k
6
votes
Is there a level at which energy and matter are indistinguishable?; viz. can space exist without perception?
If you heat matter to a high enough temperature- as existed in the first moments of the big bang- then the distinction between matter and radiation fades away, and physicists deal mathematically with ...
- 9,392
6
votes
Accepted
What do panpsychists think a rock’s consciousness is like?
Everything we know about sensation indicates that it requires cells to react to a stimulus and cells to transfer that stimulus to where it can be experienced. If you cut the nerve cells between a man'...
- 18.9k
6
votes
Accepted
What is it called when perception of a thing is replaced by an pre-existing abstraction of that thing?
Our sensory processes do this even prior to thought. It's called predictive coding or predictive processing - In neuroscience and cognitive science, there's an idea that our brain constantly makes ...
- 492
6
votes
Accepted
Under what circumstances is the observation of X proof of the existence of X?
Welcome to Plato's Cave. 2500 years later and we're none the wiser. :)
If I observe my mother, is that proof of the existence of my mother?
Technically and strictly, this is only proof that whatever ...
- 3,710
5
votes
Difference between Locke's Primary and Secondary Qualities
See An Essay Concerning Human Understanding : Book II, Chapter VIII by John Locke.
Primary qualities of bodies.
Qualities thus considered in bodies are,
First, such as are utterly inseparable from ...
- 41.1k
5
votes
How do philosophers understand intelligence?
Hey this is absolutely a problem for philosophy, don't close it. Basically it's, how do we investigate what we mean by the word 'intelligence' which being a question of definition of a contentious ...
- 23.8k
5
votes
Under what circumstances is the observation of X proof of the existence of X?
You ask:
Under what circumstances is the observation of X proof of the existence of X?
It depends on your definition of proof in accordance with your theory of evidence, however, because ...
- 35.6k
4
votes
What is the ontological basis for sentience arising from complexity?
David Chalmers takes the reasoning you describe and flips on its head: Levels of complexity can never account for the purely ontological nature of consciousness (his famous "hard-problem of ...
- 27.9k
4
votes
How can we understand the "intentional fallacy" mentioned by Pylyshyn?
Pasnau calls this the "content fallacy", quoting Pylyshyn's alternative description of it as "the seemingly innocent scope slip that lakes image of object X with Property P to mean (image of object X) ...
- 44.2k
4
votes
What perceptual error is this?
Sounds like Sampling Bias to me.
Andy's mental sample of gay men is more likely to include flamboyant ones than non-flamboyant ones, leading to overrepresentation of flamboyant men in the sample.
- 141
4
votes
Accepted
Proof that red and blue are different
Your definitions of your terms will ultimately decide about the answer, and they are far from clear here.
But indeed, your sentiment can be understood as correct: The difference is trivially there (as ...
- 14.8k
4
votes
Can we ask an infinite amount of questions or is there a limit to how many questions we can ask?
If I am correct, you asked if, as humans, we can always find a new question for which we do not know the answer. This means that there will never be a human that knows the answer to any question he/...
- 159
4
votes
Could color be a fundamental thing about the universe?
We have scientific understanding of a lot that is relevant to color perception, not only wavelengths but also of photoreceptors, how they relate to color blindness, etc. But the subjective experience ...
- 2,508
4
votes
Accepted
Is there any good argument that time moves?
Answer
Literally, time cannot move, because time determines motion of matter by way of v=x/t. However, it helps to think metaphorically about time, that we are an object and time comes towards us. ...
- 35.6k
4
votes
Is the speciousness of the specious present specious?
Continuing the SEP quote shows that we can "perceive a relation between two [successive] events" by using memory.
... a paradox in the notion of perceiving an event as
occurring after ...
- 7,650
4
votes
Unperceived Existence
What the question is getting at is the fact that when you perceive something, such as a yellow cup of coffee, what you actually experience is the sensation of seeing a yellow cup of coffee. The ...
- 26.4k
4
votes
Accepted
How does the direct realist explain illusions like the Müller-Lyer illusion?
Following Maloney (2018) we can say that evaluating the length of the lines relative to one another (or the continuity of the stick in water) is introducing a different level of cognition, beyond mere ...
- 1,470
4
votes
Which philosopher, if any, has defined matter as persistence of experience?
Physicists have known the answer for about 100 years - and your guy has the right answer too.
In disk 5 of his Australia lectures (and in his easy pieces book), Nobel winning Richard Feynman explains ...
- 1,882
4
votes
What is it called when perception of a thing is replaced by an pre-existing abstraction of that thing?
Nominal Fallacy is the fallacy that giving a name is tantamount to understanding.
Also called Labelling Fallacy.
I guess you could say Reification fallacy is the special case when the label has "...
- 5,394
4
votes
What is it called when perception of a thing is replaced by an pre-existing abstraction of that thing?
Proactive interference seems close if not exactly what you’re describing. It’s a psychology term, usually about memory forming but I’d be surprised if there’s something closer.
Proactive interference ...
- 3,560
4
votes
Accepted
Are there any texts which talk about "moral hallucinations" in a good amount of detail?
Substantive discussions seem to center around M. S. Moore's (no relation) defense of retributivism started in Moral Worth of Retribution against Nietzschean objections. The idea is to analogize moral ...
- 44.2k
4
votes
Under what circumstances is the observation of X proof of the existence of X?
An observation is evidence but not proof, nor definition. There can be all kinds of errors involved (illusions), and even if not, the thing that was observed may not be the thing we think it is (e.g. ...
- 7,417
3
votes
What is the physical world if everything is perception?
Here is a lecture by Noam Chomsky where he argues that there is no mind-body problem because we do not know what the physical is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0
- 5,075
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible