Makhnov

The sun must go around the earth, cuz look, it clearly does from simple observation. (right?) Now provide your "verbose" explanation for why that's not right.



You did not follow up with this claim later in your post.




Untestable and useless?

I was not arguing for solipsism. I was merely arguing that those divisions our mind project onto the bulk of atoms are not objectively there. Those divisions come to be there because we are organisms about 1 meter tall who have an imperative to reproduce our genetic material. We all kinda-sorta know, in the backs of our minds, that we are always ever dealing with atoms outside of us. Instead we "play a game" that we are not dealing with atoms only, but these "objects" instead. If you are male, you perceive attractive young females, and unnattractive fat old ladies. Is that distinction objectively outside you, or does this distinction instead derive from your own inner sensibilities? A solipsist would claim that there is no reason to play this game and the dividing-up into "objects" is arbitrary. I do not take that stance. I say the game is played because the distinctions are motivated by the reproduce-your-genes imperative that exists for all animals, and bacteria and any other living organism.

To illuminate the above paragraph I will use the example of the Robot Camera. Say we have a robot, whose size I'm not going to tell you at this time. I will tell you that this robot is equipped with a camera for vision. The camera gives to this robot a grid of colored pixels. Of course there is an infinite way to interpret a grid of distinct, colored pixels. In what way should the robot divide up this grid?

I turns out you cannot begin to answer that question because you lack two essential pieces of information required to form an answer. Inevitably, if I ask you how the Robot's vision system should divide up the grid, you will come back with two questions:

1. How big is the robot?
2. What is it the robot is supposed to accomplish?

If you do not have these two pieces of information, you really do not have any idea how it is supposed to divide up the world. It is easy to believe fallaciously that living organisms on earth are somehow exempt from this logic. They are not. And neither are we. There are birds-of-prey whose eyes see the world far clearer than ours. They see colors we cannot see. They can see tiny details from large distances. Atoms were not discovered by humans until the 19th century. In what way were our eyes/brains/minds not supposed to realize they exist until that time?

Our whole biochemical, mental apparatus divides the outside world up in a way that is very rough, very quick and dirty. It was effective enough to keep our ancestors alive. I can't accept your alternative because I cannot believe that this human-laden version of dividing up the world into these "objects" is somehow objectively there outside me.


This is the second time in your post you have conceded to "not meaningful to me personally as an average human". That is the entire argument in a nutshell! You divide the world up into objects in such a way that those divisions are meaningful to you as a human. You have it right in your hands. We are in agreement.