Ep. 308: Moore’s Proof of Mind-Independent Reality (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 308 is still something like, can we be certain of the existence of the external world? One episode was not enough on that question. We'll be discussing G.E. moore's Proof of the External World from 1939. We'll actually get to that this time. And we added another essay, certainty from 1959. For more information, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin, and I'll need to verify the legitimacy of some NFTs before I can be certain I'm not dreaming.

0:44 Seth: This is Seth Paskin using puzzling and misleading phrases like in my mind and external to my mind in Austin, Texas.

0:51 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, A Thing Outside of your Mind in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:57 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey feeling certain that I am certain that I know for certain that. That I'm certainly sitting down in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:04 Mark: Very nice.

1:05 Seth: Are you in a room with windows? Are you certain that you're in a room with windows?

1:10 Wes: It's all certainty all the way down.

1:13 Mark: So, yes, the one that we just added was the third essay that Wittgenstein's On Certainty is reacting explicitly to. So we'll have hit the trifecta, and it was nice to have a little extra time to think about this. I kind of dove into one of his series of lectures to kind of get a better idea where overall he was coming from. But I think that we already gave our overall reactions to more and this experience last time, so we can jump right into proof of an external world.

1:38 Wes: You know, it's a complicated paper in the Moore way, where there's a lot of clear, seeming repetitious language, but the structure of the argument, it's hard to suss out. Right. Because he's making a lot of early distinctions, which it's unclear how that's going to serve the later point, which in a way he gets to in the end. Right. And seems somewhat anticlimactic because here is a hand, therefore it exists. Seems like to be the substance of it. But if you draw in some of these earlier steps and do a bit of work to see how it's all connected, you can see it's a little bit subtler than that caricature.

2:17 Mark: Yes. I'm going to get past my initial impression here that nothing in this is really important until you get to that here's a hand thing in the last Two pages. And that is what it all. Which is just kind of a variation of the proof that we gave in the last paper. It'll be interesting to see how this differs. I mean, it's different already just in a singular statement here as a hand is different than in general. There are people on the earth. Those were the things that he was starting out the defense of common sense paper with these things that are common sense, whereas I am holding my hand up right now, is not common sense.

Like it might be certain. You know, we'll discuss whether it's certain or not, but it is not definitionally true. Or part of the background knowledge that we all approach life with. The background knowledge would be something associated with that, which is when someone holds up their hand and says, here's a hand, they couldn't possibly be wrong about that. Or it is very unlikely they are wrong about that. Something like that would have to be the translation.

3:15 Dylan: I mean, the link between them is going to be these things about effectively, intuitions, I guess Kant would call them, intuitions about space and time and the way in which we know them. And maybe that's why it makes sense that he starts with Kant. In the end, he's going to basically disagree with Kant about the way in which these intuitions have to be processed.

3:37 Mark: Right?

3:38 Dylan: Well, he doesn't think we have to do a transcendental deduction to get to the things about the external world at all.

3:44 Wes: You know, And I think we should skip over some of these distinctions between external, all the verbal stuff and just. He settles on things existing outside of our minds, becomes his terminology for what I would call mind independent reality. Right. I don't even like the word outside because part of the argument here is it's not spatial. So Kant says, okay, it turns out that primary qualities, space and time, are not the things outside of our minds. Whatever those things are things in themselves. Sometimes he says object equals X. It's just that we don't know it's some kind of structured reality.

It is mind independent. We need mind independence, but we don't have access to it. We have access to these appearances which are really representations within our own minds. It's a, you know, he calls it empirical reason, realism, transcendental idealism. But Moore makes what I think is a very, very important point. It's going to be similar to a point he makes about dreaming in the certainty paper, which is that actually we can make and we do, and we have to account for distinctions within experience between error and not error. And some of these things Seem like they're in space.

Right. So they count as spatial representations too. And then you say, well, how do you distinguish them and how do you account for them? They're supposed to be ultimately related to a mind independent reality. So don't they in a way reflect that mind independent reality? Right, the mind independent reality is the basis of those distinctions. But anyway, to start with at the beginning of the argument is that, yeah, we can make these kinds of distinctions between the things that are presented in space or the types of things that are presented in space, merely in space, but are not, as he puts it, to be met with in space.

Like hallucinations, dreams, negative after images and stuff. And the things that are, I would just say, are really in space, that are to be met with in space. We make that distinction and we successfully make it. We know we successfully make it. I think it's really important.

5:38 Mark: Let me give a little context. Just. The article is called Proof of an External World. And Moore starts by reporting what Kant has said about this, that Kant has said, nobody before me, Kant, has ever proven that the external world actually exists. And Moore thinks that this is very strange and starts to dive into how. Then Kant is describing what he considers to be the external world and that within the Kantian system. Right. If you know anything about Kant, you know that this is actually ambiguous. If what you mean by the external world is the kind of thing science would investigate. But that is not psychology.

6:11 Seth: Right.

6:11 Mark: In other words, like chemical things, physical things, those are still, for Kant, not actually external to the mind. They are part of the phenomenal world that minds create their external to.

6:26 Wes: That he calls outer sense. Yes, very confusingly.

6:29 Mark: Yeah. As opposed to whatever is external to the phenomenon and is at the root of the phenomenon. So the noumenon, the world in itself, that would be the thing that Moore actually thinks we should be shooting for. Of course he's really going to deny this distinction, but the question of the paper is whether he can, with the little bit he says in critiquing Kant's language here, of how Kant is delineating things external versus merely presented in space, but hallucinatory anyway. Right, so that you were just saying, Wes, that Moore talks about things like after images, when you look at a light, like straight into a light, but then you look a little bit to the left of the light, the light will have burned something on your retina such that it will look like an image of that light is still right there at the same place in your visual field.

But clearly it presents itself as if it's in space. But clearly that's not what Kant should mean by an external object.

7:24 Wes: Yeah, I mean, it turns out that this is one of the interesting things about Moore is like, most people would just start with the dreams and hallucinations. He has to start with that type of stuff. And it's a little confusing because later on it turns out that dreams and hallucinations fall into that same category, and they're much more obvious. But I think he likes this kind of augmented reality situation where you actually are awake and seeing something spatial that's not there.

7:50 Dylan: Yeah, I took him to like those because they seem to be closer to things in themselves, where you take something that he would say you have a common sense experience of, like the sun is there or the bright light is there, and you look at it and then you have this remnant of it. And so it has those features that he wants to acknowledge. He wants to straightforwardly just admit there are hallucinations. There are things that we see that are very much like perceiving with our senses that aren't real, aren't true. And he's trying to sort through how his claims about common sense can make sense.

If I admit that there are things like error and hallucinations and stuff that I'm no longer sure of. And Wes, you've brought this up before. He sort of rightly understands that those are real challenges, instead of throwing up his hand saying, well, yes, of course, you know what? It's just our minds, some version of idealism he wants to push hard in the other direction. Actually, we can tell, and we need to be really careful about the way in which we talk about how hallucinations work, how leftover images work, because the way in which philosophers have talked about them before is wrong.

They're misinterpreting them.

9:00 Wes: Well, we have to distinguish between global and local error, which is one of the ways I would put it. So you say for any given experience at time t, you know, yeah, I could be dreaming. But actually, in general, we don't have a problem distinguishing dreams from reality. And it's kind of a coherence theory of truth type of thing at work. We understand dreams don't work coherently and they do all kinds of weird things. And we don't notice that while we're dreaming, but we notice it later such that we can, for the most part, successful. I can't look back in the past and say there's anything where I wonder, was that a dream or was that reality?

Maybe stuff from childhood? So I call that Local. I could be confused about some particular experience, whether it's a hallucination or not. But overall, that's not the way it works. And if you want to talk about global like everything's a dream, well, then we still make the local distinction. So you have like dreaming and dreaming prime, Right? There's the everything's a dream dream. But we know that within that dream we make the more common sense local distinctions between dreaming and not dreaming that are undeniably successful. So that's parallel to this whole idea that we can make the distinction within space between what's real and what's not.

10:09 Mark: When he asked the question in here, is it actually even conceivable that if we were always dreaming, we would even come up with this distinction between dreaming and not dreaming?

10:19 Seth: Yeah, that's kind of the denouement of that last essay. He says, if you can assert that you have had dreams, then you must be able to know the difference between dreaming and waking. And if you then introduce the notion of radical skepticism in that sense of anything could be a dream, you really don't have a basis for saying that, you know, that you have ever dreamt.

10:39 Wes: You undermine the motivation for skepticism. Right. It's self contradictory. He thinks it's self contradictory. Where. What reason do I have to say that they're actually dreams?

10:47 Mark: But the way you put it, Wes, that there could be, you know, dreaming prime actually does make me think that. Well, it's by analogy, right? Let's say we are all in the matrix, but we have this sensation of sometimes that we're dreaming and sometimes that we're not dreaming. And then we ask, like Chuang Tzu, you know, am I the butterfly dreaming I'm Chuang Tzu, dreaming I'm the butterfly. We could say, well, we have this model within our experience of something that we know is dreaming. Maybe not literally that the waking world is dreaming, but it is similarly faulty,

11:20 Wes: like a dream, you know, in either way there's a mind independent reality. I've made this point before, right? If it's Berkeley, and the mind independent reality is what God's doing, putting ideas in our heads and coordinating those ideas. That happens in Leibniz as well, by the way. So that's a mind independent reality, what God's doing, or if it's the collective mind, let's say that's a mind independent reality. Even if it's. It's independent of our particular minds. Just say that it's made of mind doesn't mean that it's not independent of our particular Minds.

And then you can go on, if it's brain in a vat, if it's matrix, yes, then the computer program that runs all of our little simulations is still a mind independent reality. And then one could go even farther. I won't do it now, but and say, well, what is it? Is it just random? Suppose that we're all just random, right? There's no mind independent reality making all our experiences coherent and coordinated. If there is a we, but even at the individual level, coherence has to be accounted for. But one might say, well, it's an accident that it's all coherent.

But then the structure within experience, one might call that mind independent, even if it happened randomly. Do you know what I mean? So it's hard to get away from mind independence is what I'm saying, and the need for that. And that's what Kant realized. He's like, I can't really get rid of the things in themselves, even though I don't think we can prove them right.

12:37 Mark: You saying this last time made me re listen to our Fichte episode to see with Fichte he gets rid of the thing in itself. So it's not that there is a mind independent reality that brings the data into it is just minds. I mean, it is more than just my mind. So like you said, it's a group project. But you know what's really important for Moore though, is that if something is really mind independent, then it should still be there, even if no one is perceiving it. And even with this group idea, you still have the idea that the world itself is made of qualia, right?

Is made of sense data. And that is exactly the kind of thing that Moore wants to deny that says common sense, says what a physical object is, is something that is still there even if nobody, even if God is not perceiving it and it is not mental. Those are at least two of the things that, you know, for something to actually be a physical object. So this is what he has to prove in this essay.

13:31 Seth: I felt like the proof of the external world. It really reeled me in because I really felt compelled by the proof he was trying to give. But it requires really hashing out those distinctions between presented in space to be met with in space, in my mind, external to my mind. I don't know if it's worth trying to hash through that or even before jumping to the certainty essay, I thought there was some really interesting stuff in the proof of the external world.

13:58 Mark: Start us on it. I mean, Wes was suggesting we skip this initial stuff. And then I immediately jumped in and said, maybe we shouldn't skip this stuff. And we've already given some of it. In talking about the afterimages, you know,

14:09 Seth: he's talking about Kant, and he's talking about all these different ways to try to understand what Kant means by things external to ourselves or things.

14:18 Wes: It's external things. Things are external to us.

14:22 Seth: So, you know, he first says, okay, we could define things external to ourselves as things to be met with in space. And then he says, dogs, trees, whatever, are definitely things to be met with in space. They're clearly that. And he says, if we were able to prove the existence of a dog or a tree, then we would be able to say that there are things external to ourselves. But then he says, well, but there are things that are external to ourselves which aren't to be met with in space. What's an example of that? A shadow. A shadow is something that clearly is external to ourselves, but you don't meet with it in space. And he says, also, if I think about other minds that have thoughts like I do, or have perceptions like I do, those are definitely things that are external to my mind, but those are also not to be met with in space.

15:14 Wes: I think shadows are among the things to be met with in space. The shadow doesn't fall into the same category as hallucination and stuff like that. Something that's presented in space, but not to be met with in space. Because he's a little confused about how you'd categorize that part of physical reality. But it's not like an afterimage, right? Shadows really are there, and they're public. So you see your shadow, I see the shadow. It's a public object.

15:43 Seth: Is that the same section where he talks about the sky? He says, we can look at the sky and the sky is presented in space, but you can't. He says, it's unclear to me that you could. It would actually be met with in space. I don't know.

15:53 Mark: I just found the quote about shadows. It's on 150. For instance, shadows are sometimes to be met with in space, although they could hardly be called physical objects, material things or bodies. And although in one usage of the term thing, it would not be proper to call a shadow a thing, yet the phrase things which are to be met with in space can naturally be understood as synonymous with whatever can be met with in space. And this is an expression which can quite properly be understood to include shadows. So just to give a flavor of

16:20 Wes: the kind of this is the thicket that we are wading through.

16:23 Seth: Right. So it's an edge case. Right. It's not a thing, but it's still the entity.

16:27 Dylan: It's not a material thing.

16:28 Wes: Not a material thing is best. Yeah, it is a thing in the broad sense.

16:31 Mark: It is the entity.

16:33 Seth: I guess he's drawing that out to try to make a point about Noumena and the idea that when we think about things external to ourselves, we're thinking about material things. But there are other things that may be relevant here. Light is something that I guess is to be met with in space, but is not a material thing as well.

16:50 Wes: It depends on the way you think about photons.

16:51 Dylan: But is it anything wrong with My just thinking of things to be met with in space is that I can effectively point to them as being somewhere. And maybe I'd have to throw in their public, the way Wes was earlier, that someone else can point to them being somewhere. And therefore that's a condition that describes things that can be met in space.

17:14 Mark: Mirage is presented in space, but is not, as you were describing, a thing

17:18 Wes: to be met with in space. Yeah, I mean, explicitly at a certain stage in the paper, he's like, okay, what's the criterion for distinguishing things to be met with in space from things that are merely presented in space but not met with in space? And that's the public. Later on we're going to get more about that. But in the beginning, the public, private distinction, Right?

17:37 Seth: So then things that can be presented in space, if it can be met with in space, then it is possible that it can be presented in space. But it's only possible because there's many things that could be met with in space that are not presented in space, are never seen, never heard, never experienced by anyone to make the public point. And then, of course, you raised earlier the issue of hallucinations and after images and things like that which are presented in space for an individual but are not to be met with in space. So then he moves on to the notion of being in the mind.

What does it mean to be in the mind? And he talks about pain, right. That pain is something that's in the mind, but it's presented as if it's in space because I don't feel the pain, or at least the pain in my hand, feels like it's in my hand and not in my mind. So he's trying to bring in yet another distinction here about. If we're talking about things external to us, do we mean things external to our minds? And he's trying to bring in that distinction. And this is where I struggled just a little bit. But it kind of is like. So he thinks, if I can prove the existence of something that can be met with in space, that is presented in space and has done so publicly and is clearly external to my mind, that I will clearly prove in the existence of something, quote, unquote, external to us.

Is that a fair characterization?

19:02 Mark: Yeah. So it just seems like the tricky step there is just because it's to be met with in space, where we've clarified that that does not include hallucinations and things. And in fact, as you were saying, it doesn't mean that we actually have met with it in space. So that every little chunk of matter, you could divide it more and more and more and there'd be sort of more things that one could potentially look at that nobody's ever going to see. Nobody is going to see the inside of my working hand unless somebody were to slice it open right now.

And he doesn't want to say that like, well, then the inside of my hand just is the disposition to show the potential qualia if I slice it open. No, there really is a skeleton and, you know, the other blood vessels and all the stuff working together in my hand right now. And so those are to be met with even though they are in no way presented. So the question is, is that enough then, just by giving all those qualifications that nobody actually has to perceive it? I would go further that everything that can be met with in space can theoretically be presented in space, but in no practical sense could everything be presented in space.

So, like, there's a deep division between what exists and what is perceivable in any realistic sense. Again, maybe God could perceive it.

20:18 Wes: Physical reality is not currently being perceived. And then. And then maybe at the subatomic level. Right. It can only indirectly be detected.

20:27 Mark: Yeah. So is that enough then, to give us the external world, physical object?

20:31 Wes: At a certain point, he says the things, the overall arc is, you know, things that exist outside of our minds. It's not synonymous with the things to be met with in space. But we can prove that if it's a thing to be met with in space, then it must exist outside of our minds. And he does that by saying, well, what does it mean to exist outside of our minds? Mark's already gone into this. But it means to be logically independent of our experience. Things exist regardless of whether I'm perceiving them. And then you could say, well, if I can say a physical object Exists, it's to be met with in space. And therefore it is existing outside of the mind. So that's the arc that we're working through. The last step is just to say, hey, here's my hand. So therefore a physical object exists.

21:10 Seth: I was just going to ask if any of you have hands.

21:13 Dylan: I just wanted to comment on a characteristic of his analysis, which. We talked about this a little bit earlier. But one of the strategies he's having is trying to really tackle what it means to be outside of us without worrying about being sure of what it is that's outside of us.

21:32 Wes: We don't want to beg the question.

21:34 Dylan: Yes. I think that he interprets the history of philosophy as having made a fundamental error often in tackling this question, where, well, there's a chair in the corner. What do you mean by a chair? How do you know it's a chair? And really focusing on the certainty of the identification. And he's significantly less worried about that, at least in this paper, and really focusing on just establishing that I can be speaking of something that's like something outside of myself, regardless of whether, effectively that I'm calling it a chair. That would be just an example for any number of other things that I would be saying. I'm interacting with an external world. He's trying to drive a wedge away from idealism and skepticism with this kind of argument.

22:22 Seth: Yeah, no doubt. And what I think is interesting about it is that it gets bookended in the certainty essay. So he says, if I hold up my hand and I say, I have a hand. There is a hand here. This is my hand. I don't remember the exact terminology.

22:37 Dylan: This is a hand.

22:38 Seth: This is a hand. This is my other hand.

22:41 Wes: There are two hands.

22:42 Seth: I'm absolutely certain about it. You're in the room with me. I know it. Let's start with no, because we don't want to get to the certainty piece yet. I know I have a hand. I know I have two hands. You know I have a hand. You know I have two hands.

22:55 Wes: The hands are like an episode of Sesame Street. One hand, two hands.

22:59 Seth: I'm trying to imagine him being in the conference room with his students.

23:03 Mark: It's like a really dumb episode of Sesame Street. It's like instead of the near and far, it's just near and near.

23:12 Seth: You know? He says, I know this is. I have a hand. I know it's to be met with in space. I know it's external to my mind. I know it's presented to me in space. You're in the room with me, you see it, you know that it's external to you, you know that it's presented to you, you know it's external to your mind, it's to be met with in space and all that. That's as good a reason as any to say that, you know that and that there's proof that there's something external to both of us that exist. Hence external things exist. And this is like the second or third time I've read this essay.

And it's only now that I'm kind of actually getting the power of that, because it sets the stage for then him to go into the certainty essay. He ends the essay with the hand thing. And it's still kind of. It's not satisfying because as long as you believe in the radical skeptical move of, well, you could be dreaming, your senses might be lying to you, you might be asleep, the proof ultimately doesn't work. And he acknowledges that, right? He says, if I actually am asleep, and if I can't say that I know anything about my experience, then yes. But as far as it goes, if it's true that I'm awake, then I know this.

24:20 Wes: I'm inclined to say he successfully jailbreaks, right. This phenomenal bubble. What Dylan was saying is important. Like when he says a physical object exists, he's trying not to prejudice it, and he's trying to leave the idealism dream thing open, I think. But even if we grant, you know, even if we say it's just a phenomena, just a representation, it's to be met with in space, right? Which means those things are logically independent of experience. We know that this is kind of like an analysis of the coherence of our experience. I don't. The table doesn't disappear when I look away.

We can in a very Cartesian way, right? It's not just the I that I know. It's. I understand, like I'm immediately and firmly aware of this coherence that's going on, which implicates or implies this logical independence of just what my mind is doing. And therefore you say, things do exist outside of my mind. And then the next step is just to say, all right, I'm going to look at a physical object, not prejudiced about whether it is a phenomenon just in my mind or not. And then go back to that logical independence of experience point. And then suddenly the bubble shatters, or you reach escape velocity.

You escape from the mere private and interior.

25:41 Mark: Is there a particular quote? I'm looking around, like 164 to 165. But like it's one paragraph goes from the middle of 163 to the middle of 165. I don't want to read two full pages on what?

25:54 Wes: What are you looking for?

25:55 Mark: Just the essential part of the proof that gets from it's merely logically independent. It is external to my mind. So, like164, he's been talking about a soap bubble.

26:07 Seth: Yeah.

26:07 Mark: Soap bubbles are an example of the kind of physical object and thing to be met with in space. In the case which is notorious that particular specimens of the kind often do exist only so long as they're perceived by a particular person. But a thing which I perceive would not be a soap bubble unless its existence at any given time were logically independent of my perception of it at the time. Unless, that is to say, from the proposition with regard to a particular time that it existed at that time, it never follows that I perceived it at that time.

But if it is true that it would not be a soap bubble unless it could have existed at any given time without being perceived by me at the time, it is certainly also true that it would not be a soap bubble unless it could have existed at any given time without its being true that I was having any experience of any kind at the time in question. It would not be a soap bubble unless whatever time you take from the proposition it existed at the time. It does not follow that I was having any experience at the time.

27:01 Wes: This is the whole table doesn't disappear thing that I was doing when you look away from it. And it's pretty similar to what Kant does. Right? Kant is doing is he's saying, look, there wouldn't be any experience at all if it weren't for the categories and if it weren't for us doing our mental work on reality. And someone like, I think Hegel did it too, and the other idealists. But Moore is here doing it in the analytic way, which is saying, actually, if you can observe that our experience is coherent in this way, that some things continue to exist regardless of whether we're looking at them, and they consistently do that, it's not enough to just talk about these formal categories which say things are causal, things are spatial, or talk about the intuitions as well, there's a tighter organization, call it phenomenal reality.

But once you observe how tight the organization is, you have to say, well, the data that's coming in supposedly from the noumena giving us the manifold, the data that comes in has to actually be structured. And that's enough. If structured is leaking in from the outside such a way that it's the only thing that it can account for experience, then you've proved a mind independent reality. It's not up for question that there's a mind independent reality and that that mind independence in a way displays itself in the phenomena. You know, Hegel will just say like the categories are the things in themselves.

That's part of what I think he's saying, right?

28:15 Mark: Well, yeah, and Fichte, sort of the link between those, at least in our discussion about it, I was interpreting him as saying that you don't need the order to leak in from the things in themselves. It is just ordered data. It is presented as ordered. There you go. And that is not in itself for Moore, that would not be enough to prove the existence of it outside our mind. The contents of our mind are structured and there's no explanation for that, it's just a brute fact.

28:40 Wes: My argument would be that the structure is. You could point and say like that was my point about the random thing. Hey, you just throw a bunch of phenomena on everyone's ever representation they've ever had and it's like spilling the marbles out of the bag and it creates a picture of the Mona Lisa accidentally, right? And you say, all right, let's throw all these internal representations out and accidentally they create a coherent world. And then you say, well, actually there's a picture there and it's structured and that is the mind independent reality. The internal structure amounts to mind independence. I know that's not a knockdown proof, but that's the way it's appealing to me and that's the way I think about it.

29:15 Dylan: The thing that was on my mind was Descartes, because part of this makes me think a lot of I think, therefore I am.

29:24 Wes: It's transcendental proof in a way.

29:26 Dylan: Yeah. And one thing that Descartes brings up and worries a fair bit about is a purposeful deceiver, a deceiving God. But I think that what you just said about randomness, the same thing would hold true, right? Because if you say, well, everything that I'm experiencing and perceiving is being made that way for me by deceiving God. Which I guess is sort of like the Matrix kind of problem too. But that by itself just shows that there's a mind independent reality, that mere fact it might be in that case God's reality, the deceiving God's reality.

29:59 Wes: Why call it deceiving? Right? Because the work he's doing, it's awfully kind of him to make everything coherent. He could have just make it all sound and fear. I'm agreeing with you. Like why not? If he's a deceiving devil, he's a bad God, wants to make it all sound and fury, signifying nothing. It's awfully self defeating of him to make everything work. Right?

30:19 Dylan: Yeah. If it ends up being coherent. Right. But I always took part of that deceiver God is to opening the possibility for things that weren't necessarily coherent with each other. Right. I mean, so miracles would happen in this way. Miracles would be a case or other kinds of actual randomness. Right. You gave the example of randomness that then was coherent in such a way that we would be able to do predictions, have law like behavior and recognize it as other things and say, oh well that happened, but it was randomly caused. Right. It's a slightly different thing to actually have there be the randomness in it. Right. The sort of things that don't have a coherent connection to other things.

30:55 Wes: Yeah. To the extent that he's doing that, he's succeeding at his devil job, but otherwise big time failure looks like a lot like he's giving us our mind independent reality. It's very much like I think, therefore I am. But you cut out the God thing where he has to do Anselm's ontological argument to say, well if you have an idea of God, we get God. God guarantees external reality. You don't need that. That's really part of what Moore is doing is saying we can cut out the middleman.

31:22 Dylan: You just made me think that there is this aspect that what is the sign of among the things that are signs of external world or mind independent reality has to do with this coherence. And so maybe there's a skeptical argument against it, but that seems to be one of the biggest levers that we have to just grabbing a hold of anything is literally just the consistency of it being around that consistency is our lever towards holding on to the external world.

31:50 Mark: I feel like I should read the rest of that paragraph. That is to say from the proposition with regard to anything which I am perceiving that is a soap bubble, there follows the proposition that it is external to my mind. But if when I say that anything which I perceive is a soap bubble, I am implying that is external to my mind, I am, I think certainly also implying that it is also external to all other minds. I am implying that it is not a thing of a sort such that things of the sort can only exist at a time when somebody is having an experience.

I think, therefore, that from any proposition of the form there is a soap bubble, there does really follow the proposition there is an external object. There is an object external to all our minds. And if this is true of this kind soap bubble, it is certainly true of any other kind, including the kind unicorn, which is such that if there are any things of the kind, it follows that there are some things to be met with in space. Is that enough? By saying, I'm implying mind independence to say, okay, that means external to all of our minds. I keep hearing, well, this is compatible with Kantianism.

But having steeped myself in more for this last week, he's very much not Kantian. He very much thinks that reasons you might have for thinking that we only perceive what we do because the mind conditions everything and makes it appear this way to us are much, much weaker than just saying because that's the way reality is. At the same time that he is not a direct realist, as we were saying last time, and in fact is very insistent that there are lots of problems with imagining that what I'm perceiving right now, the sense data of the soap bubble is identical with any part of the soap bubble.

Like it really does have to be transcendent in the way that we're talking about, you know, that Kant says it's that it is just that somehow. And he doesn't tell us in this paper, you know, it's not merely that I only directly apprehend the image of the soap bubble, these sense data, and thereby conclude from that Hume is right. It wouldn't be sufficient for us to then just from these sense data to conclude there must be a thing that is causing the sense data. Right. Even if we see that the sense data are ordered. Right. Hume doesn't want to make that jump.

Or at least Moore's characterization of Kant is that, well, something is causing it, but we can't know anything about that thing. It probably doesn't have anything like the structure. At least we have no justification for saying that the external object is anything like our sense data.

34:13 Wes: But he says we can't even prove it exists. Right. He's like, it's helpful to think it exists, but we can't really prove that. And Moore is saying we can. Yeah, I don't think he's Kantian. If I implied that I'm misrepresenting it. He goes well beyond Kant.

34:25 Mark: Yeah, we have warrant to believe and it has to be something external to merely being beset with Some sense data. It's just some reasons that as we'll get into with the certainty paper that we already have for saying that this sense data is a manifestation of something that resembles it in a very strong way, it can't resemble it too much. For instance, if you want to say, you know, if we all see a slightly different color when we're looking at the same physical object. Right. Because just the angle of the lighting is different for each of us, the makeup of our eyes is slightly different, it would be problematic to say all those colors actually exist in the physical object.

That's one of the problems with saying that a sense data is identical to part of the object. But still, he wants to say colors are real. They're not merely in the mind, they're in the universe. And the way that we would figure that out is scientifically that we can explain why all of us might perceive slightly different colors by talking about how the laws of how light bounces off things and how that can affect the brightness and give all this dispositional account. But it's not, again, that just the thing in itself that is causing the perception is a set of dispositions to cause in us certain sensations.

It really just is colored in the way it is. It has a shape, et cetera. So radical realist. Not a direct realist, but still a realist nonetheless.

35:45 Wes: Yeah.

35:46 Mark: Is there any warrant in what we've read to justify that strong claim? I don't think so.

35:51 Wes: Yeah. I don't fully understand it, I have to admit. So I have trouble wrapping my head around that. So it seems wrong.

35:58 Dylan: Radical realism seems wrong.

36:00 Wes: The thing really has the color in it. The color red is really in the thing, as opposed to these are wavelengths of light bouncing off it and entering, you know, interacting with our eye and creating a subjective qualia.

36:13 Dylan: But color's an interesting case here.

36:15 Wes: Right.

36:16 Dylan: I wasn't completely following why Moore would be implying that the color is in the thing. He doesn't have to claim that either to have an external world.

36:25 Wes: It's not really in this paper. Mark is drawing on the other sense data stuff. Well, but you're saying he doesn't need that.

36:31 Dylan: No. I mean, even on a physical account. Right, where you say that red is the name that I prescribe to the effect that a certain wavelength of light has on my sensory organs. Right. It seems like pretty much a single straight line there to get to the material properties of the surface of the object and the ambient light in the

36:53 Wes: room, what Locke calls powers.

36:55 Dylan: Yeah. So what I say, the red exists in the object. I mean, sort of. I don't get red without having that object interacting with things external to that object.

37:07 Wes: That's just what Locke would say too, though, right? It's a power. It's not an occult power. It's our modern scientific version of that power. But it's primary qualities that are the real qualities giving us the secondary qualities that are just in the mind.

37:21 Mark: Like, this is the kind of thing that Moore wants to say. Of course it's red.

37:24 Wes: It depends on what the meaning of is red is.

37:28 Dylan: Well, I sort of am, but I guess I don't see Moore's argument crashing on the mechanism of perceiving the ball being red is because there's light in the room that's bouncing off the object and reflected off that object and coming to me because. Well, I don't see why that messes up him saying that the ball is red.

37:46 Wes: Well, if you're willing to say that it's a dispositional thing or a power, then yeah. But if you're saying the qualia, this objective experience of red can be in itself, when no one's looking at it, it becomes to me more complicated. But Dylan, I think you're right that this argument doesn't stand or fall based on how we resolve that.

38:06 Mark: So red is something presented in space. Certainly. Right. I perceive that this particular thing at this point in space is red. Is red something to be met with in space?

38:16 Wes: Yeah, but I don't think you need to be a radical realist to say that is met with in space, though you could still be a representationalist and say it's to be met with in space.

38:24 Mark: It's just according to his logic. Once you prove that it's something to be met with in space, then you have proven that it is external to the mind. That's the chain of the argument.

38:33 Wes: Yeah, but just that means it's logically independent of my particular experience.

38:38 Dylan: Yeah. It doesn't mean that in your interaction with the world doesn't involve your mind. I think that's part of why he's so exhaustive is he wants to freely admit that the way in which we interact with the world involves our minds interacting with the world. He just wants to make it clear that just because we interact with the world all the time by the mechanism of our minds doesn't mean that everything is in our minds.

39:04 Wes: Yeah, logically independent of my experience is different than logically independent of experience. Although unfortunately, that's the way Moore phrases it. In the latter way, that's exactly what

39:15 Mark: the quote that I just read says it follows that if it's independently of my experience, I'm also implying that it's independent of any particular person's experience. It is independent of experience.

39:25 Wes: No, that's true. But I mean, it doesn't mean that there is red as we experience it independent of anyone looking at it. I don't think it implies that.

39:37 Seth: Right.

39:37 Mark: He is more insistent in explaining what a physical object is, that it has to have a position in space. So maybe there is room for something like the primary secondary quality distinction. But for sure, shapes, then even though, you know, you have the same problem, that when each of us perceive a shape, we have different shape qualia. So actually none of us are perceiving the real shape of the thing. In fact, even if we're looking at it in the best possible way. Well, if you got a microscope, you would see the shape more. Exactly. And there's always room for the real shape of the object is never something that we actually see.

But our belief that he is going to say is a certain belief is that there's a systematic relationship between the shape of the real object and the shape that we are perceiving. It's not a big step to say that there's something like that going on with color, even if you want to then give the explanation of that in terms of just wavelengths of light bouncing off things. You know, it always just seems a little arbitrary to say this is textured such that light will bounce it off in a certain way. That's what it means to say it's red. You know, I understand why.

No, red is that. That's just a thing in our minds. Like it just seems a little.

40:41 Wes: It's not what it means. I mean, it is at a theoretical level, but before anyone had heard about light bouncing off stuff.

40:47 Dylan: Well, Aristotle talks about it this way.

40:49 Wes: It wasn't what it mean. It wasn't what it meant to say red, though. But for the average person, right when I learned my colors as a kid, it's not what it means to say red. Red is just. I have these distinguishable experiences, the colors

41:01 Mark: that strawberries and whatever tend to have. It's entirely authentic.

41:05 Wes: Yes, but we know what it' experience. Red versus green and how those are different. It's not simply behavioral.

41:13 Dylan: It's not confusing in the same way that the stick being bent in the water isn't confusing. I mean, there's a way in which whenever the bent stick example comes up, it's sort of like we all know it's not A bent stick, people.

41:26 Wes: Yeah, but the skeptic just wants to say there are strong implications to that, about the indirectness of our relationship to reality.

41:33 Seth: The strong implication of the skeptic is, well, that means there is a possibility that you could be mistaken about your perception. That's ultimately what the skeptic is saying is that if you have even one experience where you believe you are experiencing one thing and it turns out not to be true, then you have to doubt your experience of all things. I think part of what Moore is doing is just saying that's completely. He doesn't say it's completely ridiculous, but he says it's incumbent upon the skeptic to make a valid case for that. Just simply saying that because I was mistaken once, that means I have the possibility of being mistaken always. And so I can't say that I know anything about the external world. He says, you can't just say that. You got to make a case for it.

42:18 Wes: Well, you can't go from local to global in my terminology, because we know even if it's global, we can continue to make those local distinctions between error and not error.

42:27 Dylan: Yeah. And I think focusing on the error and not error is a good one in that your characterization about skepticism sounds right. That in the face of confirming that I have made a mistake, how do I know that I'm not making a mistake all the time? And Moore is sort of saying, look, you identified the fact that you made a mistake, so therefore, let's not focus on the fact that you make mistakes. Let's talk about the fact that you're sometimes right.

42:54 Wes: And the fact that you're sometimes right has huge implications. Yeah, yeah.

42:57 Dylan: Has huge implications. And so he's saying, stop pissing and moaning about how you can be wrong and you're not certain about being right. How about talking about the fact of the matter that you spend most of the time making the right conclusion and confirming that you're right about it, then you, in fact detect a mistake and you recognize that a mistake and you correct it.

43:17 Wes: The empirical glass is half full, not half empty, even if there's a stick in it.

43:22 Seth: Right. And I think this is subject to the same criticism of, well, if you know that you're wrong, then you must have known at some point you're right, because otherwise you wouldn't know what wrong looks like.

43:32 Dylan: Exactly. Exactly.

43:33 Seth: And you knew that when you were right, you knew that you were right.

43:36 Dylan: And that is a. That's a good way to summarize Moore's argument, I think. All right.

43:40 Mark: Well, let's make that to be the last word of part one. I still think there's enough juice in this lemon for us to get through one more hour. And look at that certainty paper, which is I enjoyed more than this one. So come back. If you're a partially examined life supporter, that'll just be the next thing in your feed. If you are not, go to partiallyexaminedlife.com support. There are several different ways you can become a supporter, but they'll all get you access to the same thing within the next week or so. Thanks.

44:08 Dylan: Thank you.

44:09 Wes: Thanks.