Simon Blackburn - Realism vs. Anti-realism 

Good audio, lighting, camera work, and subject matter. Thank you.

I have never encountered another human being who shares my same interests to the extent which you appear to....Thank you very much for the creation/production of this show.

I do tend to follow the line of Mackie and cry error theory for all external objects (including moral ones, values, etc.), but I gotta say I have so much respect for Blackburn and his understanding of the subject, as well as his attempts to clarify and defend all sides. He’s just a damn good philosopher

Being unsure, when you don't know, is the best position to have. Because being aware of your ignorance is what motivates you to search for new information and to learn. It's a mistake to choose sides and become sure one or the other, when you don't have enough information and you don't know. Because the truth might be something entirely different from either one of those two sides.

Subjectivism is not necessarily eliminativism. Ethical Subjectivism is a cognitivist position which simply restates the truth-apt aspect of moral propositions.

Great channel 😀

so are these interviews like the "uncut" versions from the larger collections of interviews episodes that this channel does? I noticed sometimes there things that should've been edited out (redoing lines, getting interrupted by background noise, etc.) that are still left in

The problem is certainty freaks, people who are invested in their preferred metaphysic to the extent they're prepared to say we know things that we don't. Most people occupy an ambivalent space regarding ultimate truth, accepting the habits of nature but also realising they only register within consciousness that dominates the interplay between subject and object.

Fascinating insight.

Reality is a collective management of ideas, their control and organization, in relation to objects we perceive, and which is stimulated by the capacity and capability of the brain. The intellectual discourse between Robert and Simon, presented to RU-vid viewers, is real, otherwise we all are unreal, nonexistent. No brain means no idea, so no objective or subjective reality, let alone numbers. Visual, auditory, olfactory and other senses of the humans are way different from those of nonhuman creatures, hence their perceptions. The urge and necessity for survival generate moral values that vary from ages to ages, people to people, and even person to person, and collective management, control and organization of moral ideas give rise to a particular set of values that are temporaneous.

this a good one

Numbers are "adjectives" to describe something. They are a part of "language" we use to describe things. Language is in of itself essentially entirely "adectives". Even if you are talking about a real Noun, the "talking about it" is meta, descriptive, like adjectives are, which are again meta.

Reality is most itself in the absence of language, but can only be communicated through language. -TM

When studying Realism and Anti-realism people often mention Descartes’ Evil Demon and the Matrix-both which assume a brain of some kind. In my opinion, better references would be: 1) the ending of The Mysterious Stranger -Mark Twain (1908-1916); 2) the implications in the movie The Thirteenth Floor (1999).

There is existence independently from us, but this independence only in dependence from us. Physics can never answer such question, yes, but has to ask it! It's like we are feeling along the border between realism and antirealism. We learned most about quantum world through these experiments which want to answer these questions, but we can never answer these questions..

Reality in the face of erroneous judgements is reality out of ignorance. Reality in the face of correct judgement is reality unchanging.

We all carry values, what we’ve done is recognizing them and reward the practices of them. Example: a Bear saves a hurt deer getting off the water, the Bear showed altruism without realizing, but we identified the value of that action.

We’re here to become more conscious of our nature’s, and the older experiences should have renewed by the new conscious , which are more closers to truth!

Kant basically got it right. So called "things in themselves" or the noumena, we can never know with certainty. We are trapped by our mental apparatus that organizes the phenomena and can never escape it. However, Kant did believe there was something "out there" causing the phenomena so he wasn't an idealist. In a way , he saved science from skepticism and religion from science, a nice trick but science can never unveil ultimate truths about existence.

We can be deluded by the material mode of ignorance, which makes us see everything topsyturvied. However, the mode of passion is not the solution, for it makes us see everything foggy. In order to have a clear vision of reality we must develop the mode of goodness. And that takes specific values and practices.

Likely because our classification of things or any that we can conceive and our descriptions and ascribe properties of those things might be wrong at all, not the correct path or insufficient to really understand what is reality. Perhaps the immaterial vs physical classification and their properties are not accurate representations of reality.

Man, Simon Blackburn is such an underestimated beast

Whats people making exponential illusion compensations as soon as some emotional charge traps them about something whatsoever ... imagine consciousness onle exist when your not aware ot intemporal effects happening

How make the difference if nobody knows what means each one????

If there were no life on planet earth nor anywhere else in the universe, would there be any thing in the universe that we could describe as good or evil? Moral or immoral? Brave or chicken? Is a black hole evil ? Is a meteorite brave? Ethics and morals exist in the same way love or fear exist. They're meta phenomena of our electro-chemical brain activity.

If a boy asks hid dad why, is a sin and a premeditated sin just as worse as only one sin, does He tell his son God allows man to exercise free will? Or, does he lie to his own son and say that the two sins' are to be judged by God as only one sin?

I don't see the problem. Every thought requires energy and a physical space to store it if it is to be remembered. There may not be a number 4 floating around outside ourselves, but there is an actual, physical number 4 in our brains that uses energy to exist. The same can be said of any word, idea, concept or fantasy. Thoughts are not energy-free and they're not stored in a non-physical realm.

Nice Interview, from what I'm seeing here I like what Blackburn says in person better than his writings. But maybe that's because he gets into much subtler detail in his books, whereas this interview is a basic introduction to the subject. He comes across a lot like an Anglican minister, minus the God-talk.

Morality/ethics can simply be defined by our relations with other conscious creatures. There doesn't need to be an "absolute". As long as we are trying to cause minimal harm and maximize wellbeing, using both rationality and empathy as our guides, there's no need for either dogmatic commandments or purely mathematical codes of conduct. Why do so many people speak as if the extremely broad scope of "science" can't be ethical? Be rational and empathetic, and these other questions will sort themselves out as we keep using the scientific method to better understand whatever this "reality" stuff really is.

A great interview and amazing topics discussed, but I just have one simple question. I'm not critical of the 2 men, but would like to add. Why are we so sure that it is to be defined by human or only human. We always seem to observe situations in the context of the human observer, the human perspective. And what we know is, there was a time before humans. And so, can it be only defined by human. The rationality escapes me. We always seem to be sold on ourselves for definitely everything.

How similar is Critical Realism to Quasi-Realism?

"I want to know what reality is all about" 'reality' is just a concept - I will allow you to define it for yourself. Have an open mind, tolerance, don't let it drag on you.

Can there be a physical realist and non-physical anti-realist / idealist?

I think using Newtonian physics, reality is anything that stops or Modifies any physical trajectory. And since human beings And all living things for that matter Can have their physical trajectory modified by language and idea-Reality idea and idea is reality. You cannot separate reality from idea

I think Jacob Bronowski hit the nail on its head, and today Deutsch has been a great proponent of realism. You cannot derive an *ought* from an *is* , but you also cannot get an *is* without an *ought* In order to uncover truths about the physical world, a scientist must have certain attitudes and behaviours that are moral. Namely, values like: logical consistency, tolerance, openness to new evidence, explanatory elegance, preservation of reasonable dissent and honesty. Although facts and values operate in two different logical domains, they are fundamentally linked by *explanation* ... Hence why factual scenarios regarding a magic trick being performed has all sorts of implications on one's moral analysis (i.e. if you think the magician actually defied physics, then this will impact how you view the magician amongst other human beings)

Philosophical realism: Philosophical realism is usually not treated as a position of its own but as a stance towards other subject matters. Realism about a certain kind of thing is the thesis that this kind of thing has mind-independent existence, i.e. that it is not just a mere appearance in the eye of the beholder ___ Wikipedia

I'm distracted by the wondering camera.

I suppose everything should start from one belief on the origin of the universe - either accidental or created - and secondly depending on epistemolog - how one come to know because none can claim he/she knows anything before one consciously becoming a human being (prior to that only chemicals or biochemicals and prior to that depends on one's believe). In human common sense perspective "nothing can come from nothing". In this term reality must have been originated from something. Thus in one extreme the believe and the idea that the universe accidentally originated from nothing by nothing is totally unacceptable because they are fundamentally originally nothing too. Epistemically(human is totally depends on testimonial) they (idea and belief about origin) are basically falses and that has yet to take into consideration that human only come to be informed through his/her mental consciousness experience which can be true or only illusions. One needs the first person testimony as proof/evident to ascertain one claimed and belief are truly grounded in certainty and this is true for monism physicalism, monism metaphysicalism/consciousness idealism and dualism too. Obviously this is only possible for case of who believes that the universe has the originator/the creator, that is by comparison study or the consistency study of his linguistics and creative testimonials if available at all.

It's not even about skepticism to a large extent. Anti-realists generally claim that things that are socially constructed constitute more of what we view as "real", a lot of what we value and see in the world has no real reference. You can think of things like bravery, or justice; these are concepts that motivate how we live but you can't find them with a microscope, they're constructs. Similarly, in terms of sexuality- if we accept the premise that gender is socially constructed then this means when you say "I'm attracted to women", you're not actually attracted to anything that has physical reference, you're not actually attracted to something inherent in the person. You're projecting your fantasy and construct of what "woman" is to you, which you've absorbed via enculturation since birth, and placing it onto them. That would be a psychoanalytic antirealist position, that what you desire isn't actually about the object, it's about your projection onto it.

What is the power and capacity of Human sensory perception and the Intellect? What if our sensory perception is 'High Fidelity' to the external world? What if our Intellect is built to understand this reality? What if Humans are 'plugged into nature' in deep and profound ways? What if Human Intellect can reach out and touch the universe? What if the Intellect is transcendent (of the subject)? What if the Subjective is already an element of the Objective? What if we are not trapped in our own subjective immanence? Modernity presupposes too much about Human Nature. In my opinion, this is what happens when you don't have a proper metaphysics to ground the basic concepts, like the Philosophy of Being. Note: Arguing against Platonic universals is strange. Moderate Realism (Aristotle) has had more influence, especially through Thomism and Scholasticism in general.

Adorable. I would agree that reality is of illusion, but not that it is an illusion. Reality in this world is a construct, where creation intersectes with it own arbitrary rules, and morality is as it's fruit. I can respect the rules without any belief in them as reality.

World is like a dream. But, very persistent one. We need to give up desire to realize our true self. Once we realize our true nature, there is no going back to Matrix like world.

I'm not a box! Now I am

Reality hits hard on the anti-realist and realist alike. But the realist keeps it's happiness.

Quasirealism. I like that term. A quasar has to do with stars. And realism has to do with the universe. So I think it’s a very fitting term to describe being in the middle of anti - and not anti- realism

For the humanity, reality is to live in the present time ! and remember the past , and used the past experiences, to creating your possibilities for brighter future !

Realist-AntiRealist debates essentially refer to Science rather than to Philosophy and Theology....

I would like to share some thoughts I had about this topic, I hope you can find it stimulating. First of all, I retain realism to be a quite dogmatic approach. As a matter of fact, by stating that ethical principles, numbers and knowledge more in generale all have an ontological foundation, than we might give birth to a society where the members of the discourse all consider their opinion to be the only one that is ontologically verifiable. Anti-realism on the other hand doesn’t help the creation of a democratic society, since it doesn’t put much worth on ethical values, and therefore it might end up creating a society made up of relativists. I personally think (and this is not a permanent solution to the question) that reality, if it needs to be defined, can be interpreted as the result given by the production of all “linguistic games” and that there really is no reality other than the one that humans define. Ethical values in a democratic society are not arbitrary and shouldn’t be deemed as such, they should be rationally decided by all citizens while partaking a discourse

If it's an allusion I got a bad deal I'm poor why didn't I get programmed as a rich man

At its core it is always a sense (intuition) of what realism is. So a realist uses subjective irrational tools to get to what realism is.

Realism with respect to ethics is logically incoherent. How can you have moral facts that are independent of the human mind? If the human mind has no implications in what the moral theory ought to be, then it seems like you would be extraordinarily fortunate if those moral facts tended to conform to what our human minds prefer. In principle it could be anything. For all we know the moral thing to do is to make as many paperclips as possible, or to expand the universe as much as possible. It may have nothing to do with human affairs whatsoever. And a second issue is, how on Earth would you ever determine what the "true" moral facts were if they are meant to be stance independent? It no longer matters how you feel about something, because by definition of stance independent, your feelings can't tell you anything about whether your moral perspective is true or not. If there is no other way of knowing what these ethereal moral values are, then the theory is basically positing the existence of a magical, invisible dragon - a moral reality that we can never have access to or knowledge of, but which realists somehow "know" exists. Not only is this scientifically nonsensical - a theory that can never be tested, but philosophically illogical as well. There is no need to invent any such fantasy, especially since the basis appears to be nothing but emotionalism and wanting to "feel" that "things are really right or wrong". But we aren't children, and we shouldn't determine whether something is true or false merely because we want it to be. The fact that trained philosophers seriously entertain positions based on nothing but "it makes me feel bad" is appalling. They are reasoning like children. We can only claim something is real if we have GOOD REASON to think it is real. And for that matter, we have no way of knowing whether the reality we see is real. It COULD all be an illusion. But no one can say for certain, so we simply assume the simplest model - that reality exists and it is static, and until we know better we operate under this and other axiomatic beliefs about how we can trust our observations, our memories, that logic is a valid way to reason, and so on. You have to start somewhere, but assuming that your axioms are objectively valid is completely unnecessary and wishful thinking that we do not need to entertain to live meaningful lives. Just say "you don't know many things for certain". Its not that hard. Its not that self-destructive. Science has been doing it for centuries

Ethical moral values are real and are required for our real existence. But, they are also subjective and relative. Ethical moral values are subjective because they are an agreements based on subjective opinions upon to what degree social behaviors are good and/or bad. Ethical moral values are relative because depending upon the relative specific circumstances the opinions of those agreeing upon what an ethical moral values is can change. For example, the ethical moral value "Thou Shall Not Kill". If we go to the social tribal group who first began following the Old Testament, if someone blasphemed their God that it was then good and righteous to kill them, because that was their God's commandment. Today we would consider that an evil act, but to those people in that time it was a good act. One more important thing to understand about ethical moral values is that within a social group, what is agreed upon may not be agreed upon by free willed choice. It can be coerced through fear, influenced by self-interests, simply enforced through shear literal force, etc. All one has to do is to pick any significant social group and analyze it carefully to see this, including the fact that within that group there will be considerable disagreement by individuals within the group over some ethical moral values that the group agrees upon. Ethical moral values are real by understanding where, why, and how they come into being. Part of this is understanding that intelligence has evolved in complexity from virus swarm intelligence to prokaryotic microbial swarm intelligence to eukaryotic multicellular intelligence with no neurological systems to eukaryotic multicellular intelligence with neurological systems to humans to human civilization as a super form of distributed swarm intelligence which includes not only all humans but the extensions of our intelligence outside of ourselves, including the developing process of artificial general super intelligence with personality. The point in looking at the evolution of complexity of intelligence is not only to allow us the ability to engineer intelligence equal to and surpassing of our intelligence, but to have a fuller understanding of how we think. The evolution of intelligence has happened over a relatively smooth curve from extraordinarily simple levels to the complex levels of our intelligence. This evolution has been of a swarm intelligence nature, where there are many layers of less complex intelligence which work together in a social manner in order to create a larger more complex level of intelligence. At the very core of even the simplest swarm intelligence is that the individuals subsets of intelligence that work together to create a larger more complex intelligence must come to some form of agreement about to what degree behaviors are better and/or worse for the social grouping of that swarm intelligence. This is a requirement of swarm intelligence. Ethical moral values are required for swarm intelligence to work and human individual intelligence is a swarm intelligence. You might think you are an individual singular mind, but in truth your are the pilot of the collective swarm intelligence that makes up your physical body, and yes, individual cells in your body are intelligent. Of course individual cells in our bodies are vastly less intelligent than our whole individual swarm intelligence and they have vastly less free will, because, among other things, they work as a tightly formed social structure following a very rigid set of ethical moral values. When you understand how intelligence, and social ethical moral values within intelligent systems, has evolved from extraordinarily simplest systems along a relatively smooth curve of progress to our level of complex intelligence, and social ethical moral values, it can help to not only understand our ethical moral values better, but to understand that other less intelligent beings have ethical moral values too, particularly higher order animals with emotional intelligence relatively close to our own. For example, a pack of wolves have social ethical moral values that the pack agrees upon in a similar manner as a small hunter gatherer tribe of humans do, though the intelligence of the wolves and thus ethical moral values of the wolves is not as complex as that of the hunter gatherer humans.

Moral autentical low open The true reality, othewise human stack în his own ilussion.

You want to do it, so you make a fictional category. It's the same kind of shifting as compatibilism for free will, or ethical subjectivism; it's a category mistake made out of desire to have their cake and eat it too.

So Basically...This Channel should be called.... "We Don't Know..."

The clever coyote (greed) is always trying to catch the roadrunner (love). But never does. Because something that is not real (absence of love) can never catch that which is real (love). That coyote (greed) is a crazy clown... The roadrunner is the state bird of the "Land of Enchantment". The land of magic (love).

Everyone is an anti realist or simulation-simp until they are punched on their face or thrown out of the plane without a parachute.

Physics can never answer this question! The different reformulations of quantum formalism, from antirealistic to realistic, from deterministic to indeterministic interpretations, they all generate same empirical results!

We are GOD dreaming he's no longer GOD. Thats the ultimate truth, thats truth,not close to truth but TRUTH

take the number 4. 10 billion years ago .. it has the quality of 4 10 billion years later teh number for haas not changed or has suffered any of the effects of entropy.. there for it is outside of physics.. the physics of the universe are real .. the umbers we use to describe them are not

very good , interesting Longitude 127 Seoul Okinawa Soul Axis -- Bahai Faith Rael Jesus Huh kyung young Great aletheia .

NFS: ok:/60/use

Moral facts? Sounds suspiciously like "objective morality" with all the apologistic implications.

One more fly to help out of the bottle.

Quasi-realism is a bad label because it isn't actually any kind of realism, even "quasi". Acting like something is real doesn't necessarily change the ontological status of that thing. And if it is acknowledged that you're just pretending, then the ontological status isn't even assumed to be changed. Of course, the meaningfulness is all that is essential in moral concepts.

Ayn Rand will set you free

Both opposites are true. It's as real as it gets game

This is a weak interview with weak questions. Mr Simon Blackburn replies as someone who is interpreting these two states: of realism v anti-realism in a very condescending manner. He argues these matters teleologically. Establishing that numbers are abstract but then arguing they assert a demonstrable reality is about as subjective as suggesting that if there are "people saved by the blood of Christ" numbering in the thousands we then argue that the numbers do not assert the claim? Naturally the claim is called a "testimony" which is to say that the "experience" maybe subjective but the testimony when multiplied is what? No more than one unique anecdote? Well salvation has and always will be a faith claim and a faith argument. This does not confer upon the "faith claimant" the artefacts of our physical reality, being something which invalidates the faith claim?. It is simply an acknowledgement of our consciousness. In fact the biblical basis of a faith claim or testimony still determines many court proceedings. Despite this, the faith claim which is made, is bounded by the reality that "from dust you were made and to dust you shall return", a reality boundary. So denying or not denying a faith claim is no different than someone who claims no faith, and subsequently assumes that logically there must be life elsewhere in the universe thereby concluding that SETI for example is a logical necessity for our pursuit of education etc etc.

You want to get real about numbers, a man leaves his mother and father, to be joined to his wife, two shall be one flesh, one and one make two ,two make, one, real numbers baby, praise God the father in the name of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! There's a lot of other math and numbers in the Bible also. You got scores in the Bible you got 69 weeks and then a week set aside and the book of Daniel a thousand years is but a day is the day is a thousand years. Whew! How much realer can you get!

Dear Robert, being supercilious doesn't help you at all. Try a little respect and humility. You may even be pleasantly surprised.

There's no evidence for realism.

Simon wrong. Reality numbers was proof are tautology ,means nothing. He obscure philosophy science failed discernir between sense comum anď etich. Ant scientif discussion, cynisn rethoric .

I’ve listened to (and watched) all the ‘Closer to Truth” episodes. I’ve come to the conclusion that you really have no desire to get closer to truth. Just like those who make a living from finding racism under every rock (Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, et al) , if racism vanished they would be out of a job and if you discovered the truth you’d be out of topics for your show, or not.

Realism is the existence of God and His Spiritual World which many believe as HEAVEN..... while Anti-realism is the absence of this Spiritual World which is a state of cold dark emptiness that many believe as Hell - a state that many angels fell into for losing faith in God's love.