Is that really how most people use the word "physical"? It's certainly not how I use the word. I use it to refer to what you're calling "the mind-external reality".
Physicalists have a tendency to use the word "physical" for both what I have defined it to be AND what you have said you use it for. That is a central part of the mistakes they make. They use "physical" in two entirely different ways and justify it by claiming that "everything is physical so both of them must be physical". It's incoherent.
You can call "the mind-external reality" physical if you like. But if you want to be coherent you then cannot call experiences of chairs "physical". Instead, you'd have to call them "mental" - or "the qualia associated with external physical chairs". In the end, I don't actually care which you call "physical" as long as you don't try to call BOTH of them "physical".
I don't have a word for what you're calling "physical", because I don't think there is any such thing.
There's no mind-external world? That's idealism. That's hammegk's position.
There's just the real external chair and then there's me seeing a chair.
You just said there was no such thing as "a real [mind-independent] external chair". You are identifying the "chair you see" with the "chair out there". You are identifying your experience and the thing which caused the experience is the same - but this makes no sense - as Paul put it "The chair can't both be out there and in my head."
Having the experience of seeing a chair, if you prefer. When you talk about "the objects of our experience", you make it sound like there's something else there besides me and the chair. Is there really? If I close my eyes, where does this object-of-my-experience chair go?
It disappears. It is no more. You no longer experience a chair. The chair is therefore
an intentional object - it is "the object to which my consciousness is directed" - or not.
Does it cease to exist, just like that? Poof?
The chair you experience ceases to exist. The "real external chair" (the noumenal chair, the cause of your experience of a chair) continues to exist.
Does it continue to exist, somehow, somewhere, even though I am no longer seeing a chair?
Something corresponding to the chair exists in the noumenal world, yes.
I think I understand now why you insisted a while back that apples are really red, when I said that the redness was only in my mind. You weren't talking about what I'd call "the physical apple", you were talking about this object-of-my-experience apple. But surely, that exists only in my mind, if it can meaningfully be said to exist at all.
That's right. The
objects of your experience, such as red apples, only exist in your mind. What you want to call "the physical apple" isn't really "physical" and doesn't exist in your mind. It's neutral and exists in the noumenon (in the unsee-able world of "causes"). And it's not red.
Geoff
but I dont see any information here. I see no theory, no revolution, nothing.
