Now, you apparently want to go beyond this and state “It is objectively true that Barack Obama is President of the United States”, in some way. Not talking about evidence and agreement, but something more than that.

But what can this really mean? What exactly is being designated by the name “Barack Obama” and the descriptor “POTUS”? Tell me without reference to any form  of evidence, because we’ve gone beyond that. We aren’t talking about observation, we’re talking about something absolute that’s independent of observation. I don’t think you can do it.

I’m sure the objection will be that you are not talking about any specific proposition, but rather merely the fact that agreement is possible between observers, that there is such a thing as probability. Obviously that is true, in the same way it’s true Obama is POTUS.

What I’ve been saying is that the phrase “there is an objective world”, as a statement in language, alluding to a “something” that is separate from any observation, is incoherent, meaningless. You can’t talk about a “something” that you can’t say anything about. This is a statement about how language works, about the nature of representation.

You took this to mean that I am a solipsist, but that is false. I’m just a relativist. I recognize limits to language. This is a Wittgensteinian position that’s well in accord with modern science.

I admit I hadn’t heard of Wilson before I started visiting Boing Boing, but I hadn’t realized from the above article, and others over the last couple of weeks, that he was a champion of talking about things as “objectively true”. That was not the impression I got from the essay “Creative Agnosticism” which the author links to.

Now that I realize that I’ve bored you, and you’ve insulted me, I’ll leave this conversation.

And it’s bizarre.  It’s like some mutant hybrid of Berkeleyan idealism and Bertrand Russell-style positivism.  I’d urge you, as would RAW, to consider the notion that you might be wrong.

“You should look into linguistics and especially how previously un-translated languages are deciphered. ”

You’re talking about Quine and indeterminacy of translation? It doesn’t change the argument.

The point is the meaninglessness of the term “objective external world”. That doesn’t mean everything is internal, it just means the concept is useless. “Internal” gets thrown out with it, necessarily.

You should look into linguistics and especially how previously un-translated languages are deciphered.  Every act of human communication is evidence that either:
1) There is an objective external world
or
2) I am a brain in a vat
If you still don’t grok then have fun in your vat.

Edit: What are we talking about? The existence of an objective, external reality (obviously). What’s the counterfactual? Solipsism.

The issue is the way language works, what it’s capable of. “Something there” is a statement expressed in English. The subject is not only undefined but undefinable, so the statement is meaningless.

It could be more a problem of grammatical and lexical coding.

Even a statement like “Well, there must be something there!” is incoherent.

It’s entirely coherent.  You know you can’t fly under your own power, I know I can’t fly under my own power, and we’re both reasonably sure that the reason is the same in both cases.  Two observers can certainly see the world in different ways and come to different conclusions as a result.  This happens all the time but the fact that we’re able to talk about these things and to occasionally even convince one another to shift or change our perspectives indicates that there’s a great deal of common ground — there’s a shared language even if it’s only a subset of each individual’s whole language.

The premise that there’s a shared world informing this shared language is in no way incoherent.  Now, it can’t be objectively demonstrated that there is such a real world — I agree with you there.  And we don’t have direct access to this world, I agree with that as well.  But coherency has nothing to do with the capacity for objective demonstration otherwise nothing at all would be coherent since nothing at all has ever been objectively demonstrated (for all the reasons you point out).

“of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers : having reality independent of the mind”
– Merriam Webster

“not dependent on the mind for existence; actual”
– Oxford

There’s no point saying “I’m objectively right that the Moon isn’t made of green cheese”, because unless you define “objective” in terms of strength of evidence,[...]

sorry, but i thought that was precisely the usual definition of “objective” in this context? as in “an ever changing but optimistically ever improving set of evidence that supports a particular truth claim”?

Truth is a matter of agreement between observers. It’s a property that applies to statements made in a logical system like a language. Agreement comes about by comparing observations by means of logic.

So what if two people agree on something ridiculous, like the moon being made of green cheese? Their evidence is extremely weak and their logic is faulty. What this means is just that you can ignore them. You’re under no obligation to take that view into account, and you’re perfectly justified in saying that it isn’t true. The two people will disagree with you. That’s the end of the matter.

There’s no point saying “I’m objectively right that the Moon isn’t made of green cheese”, because unless you define “objective” in terms of strength of evidence, the concept itself is flawed. You aren’t really understanding what you are doing when you make a truth-claim.

Although it’s all rather unsatisfying, this is the only path to getting philosophy of truth compatible with relativity and quantum physics.

The actual science of consciousness has no more problems than any other branch of science. It can try to explain why your consciousness changes when you take mushrooms, for example. The idea that there is something “inexplicable” about the “subjective experience” of consciousness and that this causes problems for science again is down to not understanding the nature of truth-claims, the nature of “explanation”. Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” is a must read on this topic.

Oh, I hope there’s no need to point out which is which.

Still not grown-up, though. I hope.

I call it “repeatable magic”. It’s much more useful that the unrepeatable magic of the occult crowd.