Would I be correct to say that you think the third-person perspective emerges from the first-person perspective? Or would you say that they’re simply separate?
If I had to choose between those two phrasings I would prefer the second one, for being the most compatible between both of our notions. My notion of “emerges from” is probably too different from yours.
The main difference seems to be that you’re a realist about the third-person perspective, whereas I’m a nominalist about it, to use your earlier terms. Maybe “agnostic” or “pragmatist” would be good descriptors too. The third-person is a useful concept for navigating the first-person world (i.e. the one that we are actually experiencing). But that it seems useful is really all that we can say about it, due to the epistemological limitations we have as human observers.
I think this is why it would be a good double crux if we used the issue of epistemological priority: I would think very differently about Hard Problem related questions if I became convinced that the 3rd person had higher priority than the 1st person perspective. Do you think this works as a double crux? Is it symmetrical for you as well in the right way?
If I had to choose between those two phrasings I would prefer the second one, for being the most compatible between both of our notions. My notion of “emerges from” is probably too different from yours.
The main difference seems to be that you’re a realist about the third-person perspective, whereas I’m a nominalist about it, to use your earlier terms.
That actually sounds more like the first phrasing to me. If you are a nominalist about the third-person perspective, then it seems that you think the third-person perspective does not actually exist and the concept of the third-person perspective is borne of the first-person perspective.
Do you think this works as a double crux?
I’m not sure whether this is a good double crux, because it’s not clear enough to me what we mean by first- and third-person perspectives. It seems conceivable to me that my conception of the third-person perspective is functionally equivalent to your conception of the first-person perspective. Let me expand on that below.
If only the first-person perspective exists, then presumably you cannot be legitimately surprised, because that implies something was true outside of your first-person perspective prior to your experiencing it, unless you define that as being part of your first-person perspective, which seems contradictory to me, but functionally the same as just defining everything from the third-person perspective. The only alternative possibility that seems available is that there are no external facts, which would mean reality is actually an inconsistent series of experiences, which seems absurd; then we wouldn’t even be able to be sure of the consistency of our own reasoning, including this conversation, which defeats itself.
I’m sorry that comparing my position to yours led to some confusion: I don’t deny the reality of 3rd person facts. They probably are real, or at least it would be more surprising if they weren’t than if they were. (If not, then where would all of the apparent complexity of 1st person experience come from? It seems positing an external world is a good step in the right direction to answering this). My comparison was about which one we consider to be essential. If I had used only “pragmatist” and “agnostic” as descriptors, it would have been less confusing.
Again, I think the main difference between our positions is how we define standards of evidence. To me, it would be surprising if someone came to know 3rd person facts without using 1st person facts in the process. If the 1st person facts are false, this casts serious doubt on the 3rd person facts which were implied. At our stage of the conversation, it seems like we can start proposing far more effective theories, like that nothing exists at all, which explains just as much of the available evidence we still have if we have no 1st person facts.
You seem to believe we can get at the true third person reality directly, maybe imagining we are equivalent to it. You can imagine a robot (i.e. one of us) having its pseudo-experiences and pseudo-observations all strictly happening in the 3rd person, even engaging in scientific pursuits, without needing to introduce an idea like the 1st person. But as you said earlier, just because you can imagine something, doesn’t mean that it’s possible. You need to start with the evidence available to you, not what sounds reasonable to you. The idea of that robot is occurring in your 1st person perspective as a mental experience, which means it counts as evidence for the 1st person perspective at least as much as it counts as evidence for the 3rd. So does what it feels like to think eliminitivism is possible, and so does what it feels like to chew 5 Gum® and etc, and etc.
To me, all of this is a boring tautology. For you, it’s more like a boring absurdity, or rather it’s the truth turned upside down and pulled inside out. This is why I’m more interested in finding a double crux, something that would reveal the precise points where our thinking diverges and reconverges. There are already some parallels that we’ve both noticed, I think. I would say that you believe in the 1st person but with only one authentic observer: God, who is and who sees everything with perfect indifference, like in Spinoza’s idea. You could also reframe my notion of the 1st person to be a kind of splintered or shattered 3rd person reality, one which can never totally connect itself back together all at once. Our ways of explaining away the problems are essentially the same: we both stress that our folk theoretic concepts are untrustworthy, that we are deceiving ourselves, that we apply a theory which shapes our interpretations without us realizing it. We are also both missing quite a few teeth, from biting quite a few bullets.
There must be some precise moment where our thinking diverges. What is that point? It seems like something we need to use a double crux to find. Do you have any ideas?
Would I be correct to say that you think the third-person perspective emerges from the first-person perspective? Or would you say that they’re simply separate?
If I had to choose between those two phrasings I would prefer the second one, for being the most compatible between both of our notions. My notion of “emerges from” is probably too different from yours.
The main difference seems to be that you’re a realist about the third-person perspective, whereas I’m a nominalist about it, to use your earlier terms. Maybe “agnostic” or “pragmatist” would be good descriptors too. The third-person is a useful concept for navigating the first-person world (i.e. the one that we are actually experiencing). But that it seems useful is really all that we can say about it, due to the epistemological limitations we have as human observers.
I think this is why it would be a good double crux if we used the issue of epistemological priority: I would think very differently about Hard Problem related questions if I became convinced that the 3rd person had higher priority than the 1st person perspective. Do you think this works as a double crux? Is it symmetrical for you as well in the right way?
That actually sounds more like the first phrasing to me. If you are a nominalist about the third-person perspective, then it seems that you think the third-person perspective does not actually exist and the concept of the third-person perspective is borne of the first-person perspective.
I’m not sure whether this is a good double crux, because it’s not clear enough to me what we mean by first- and third-person perspectives. It seems conceivable to me that my conception of the third-person perspective is functionally equivalent to your conception of the first-person perspective. Let me expand on that below.
If only the first-person perspective exists, then presumably you cannot be legitimately surprised, because that implies something was true outside of your first-person perspective prior to your experiencing it, unless you define that as being part of your first-person perspective, which seems contradictory to me, but functionally the same as just defining everything from the third-person perspective. The only alternative possibility that seems available is that there are no external facts, which would mean reality is actually an inconsistent series of experiences, which seems absurd; then we wouldn’t even be able to be sure of the consistency of our own reasoning, including this conversation, which defeats itself.
I’m sorry that comparing my position to yours led to some confusion: I don’t deny the reality of 3rd person facts. They probably are real, or at least it would be more surprising if they weren’t than if they were. (If not, then where would all of the apparent complexity of 1st person experience come from? It seems positing an external world is a good step in the right direction to answering this). My comparison was about which one we consider to be essential. If I had used only “pragmatist” and “agnostic” as descriptors, it would have been less confusing.
Again, I think the main difference between our positions is how we define standards of evidence. To me, it would be surprising if someone came to know 3rd person facts without using 1st person facts in the process. If the 1st person facts are false, this casts serious doubt on the 3rd person facts which were implied. At our stage of the conversation, it seems like we can start proposing far more effective theories, like that nothing exists at all, which explains just as much of the available evidence we still have if we have no 1st person facts.
You seem to believe we can get at the true third person reality directly, maybe imagining we are equivalent to it. You can imagine a robot (i.e. one of us) having its pseudo-experiences and pseudo-observations all strictly happening in the 3rd person, even engaging in scientific pursuits, without needing to introduce an idea like the 1st person. But as you said earlier, just because you can imagine something, doesn’t mean that it’s possible. You need to start with the evidence available to you, not what sounds reasonable to you. The idea of that robot is occurring in your 1st person perspective as a mental experience, which means it counts as evidence for the 1st person perspective at least as much as it counts as evidence for the 3rd. So does what it feels like to think eliminitivism is possible, and so does what it feels like to chew 5 Gum® and etc, and etc.
To me, all of this is a boring tautology. For you, it’s more like a boring absurdity, or rather it’s the truth turned upside down and pulled inside out. This is why I’m more interested in finding a double crux, something that would reveal the precise points where our thinking diverges and reconverges. There are already some parallels that we’ve both noticed, I think. I would say that you believe in the 1st person but with only one authentic observer: God, who is and who sees everything with perfect indifference, like in Spinoza’s idea. You could also reframe my notion of the 1st person to be a kind of splintered or shattered 3rd person reality, one which can never totally connect itself back together all at once. Our ways of explaining away the problems are essentially the same: we both stress that our folk theoretic concepts are untrustworthy, that we are deceiving ourselves, that we apply a theory which shapes our interpretations without us realizing it. We are also both missing quite a few teeth, from biting quite a few bullets.
There must be some precise moment where our thinking diverges. What is that point? It seems like something we need to use a double crux to find. Do you have any ideas?
I don’t think I disagree with what you’re saying here, though we may be using different terms to say the same thing.
How does what you say here inform your thoughts about the Hard Problem?