rationalskepticism.org

BWE wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

BWE wrote: The entire concept of a dishonest act is a matter of map rather than territory. The reason I pointed out that dishonest is not physical is that In a world where what is physical is what is known, there are no honest or dishonest acts. There are only reactions or perhaps actions. By using valuations like that, we obscure the entire content of the reaction behind the lens of value. While the standard argument is along the lines of "well, you could theoretically translate it into purely physical terms", my argument is that wherever we don't, we are literally experiencing the values of our maps rather than those of our sensations. The actual information we parse is literally coming from our own heads. My argument is that we can't use any map to get around this because we are always going to assume the information filled in by the map rather than the environment is the reality.

That seems to be begging the question. How is 'value' constructed? How are 'maps' made? Jamest is at least clear on that. He believes in qualia. Everything is 'mental' and meaning comes first as a given rather than as a relation between things (since there are no things). I'm not clear on your stance on that. It seems to me you that the best you can do on that path is just to assume your conclusion and live with it.

I think our experiences are features on a map and there are things we may yet understand about mapmaking even if we do so by more maps being drawn.

I agree with that to a point. The problem I have with ontologies like idealism/physicalism is they try to account for the model with a model which is a self reference can't escape the trap situation. Modeling is how we navigate experience but the two are so intertwined that we cannot easily distinguish between them. I would say it is impossible but I think that's wrong. Not easy and maybe not more than a few times a millennium, but not, I think, impossible. At any rate, ontologies are self refuting because of that. The typical approach is to fold them into the same background strata and in that case, I prefer some form of idealism not because its more better, but because models simply don't fold into physical backgrounds in any way that allows us to distinguish the map from the territory. At least with idealism, it's the territory that goes. Although that doesn't work any better in terms of logic. Just that we don't have to pretend we're on to something that we can't use models to be onto.