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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I have a suspicion that future generations of philosophers will be taught Nagel's is like-be problem in the fashion that Hume's is-ought problem [1] is now taught. Although they concern completely different subjects, the similarities between the two are striking:

1. On what grounds can we make statements about what ought to be based on what is?

2. On what grounds can we make statements about what it is to be something based on what it is like to think about the experiences of that thing?

Edit: In case there's any confusion, I called it the is like-be problem to draw a similarity to Hume, not because anybody else calls it that.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

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Yeah, I think this is probably true. Hume was trying to argue that normative statements can't be reduced to or derived from natural statements about how the world is; Nagel's fighting the reduction of consciousness to positive, objective statements about consciousness, because of the existence of phenomenal character. There's a certain way to be a bat that's wrapped up in the very fact of its being a conscious being with a specific biology and neurology, but which is still irreducible to those features.

If you wanna link this up to an older philosopher, this is basically what Kant's on about in his Critique of Pure Reason. Our special human brain stuff is responsible for providing us with the faculties (e.g. understanding of things like causation) we have for understanding the world. We are always trapped in our experience of the world, and though that shouldn't preclude us from experiencing the world, you can't separate how we experience objective reality from the fact that we experience it as humans, with human brains and faculties.

Absolutely, and you've said it better than I did.

As a nit, wasn't Kant's Critique of Pure Reason written in part as a response to Hume?

ooooh totally was. He was deeply affected by Hume's attack on causation, so tried to come up with a coherent response. Ended up positing a whole bunch of wacky and (I think) true things about our embedded cognition, so I think it's probably fair to say that Critique of Pure Reason is the result of his beef with Hume.

In the CPR, Kant proposes a synthesis of both rationalism and empiricism: although some knowledge comes from sensory experience, there are some things that we just know -- e.g., pure mathematics. So I'd say it's the result of his beef with everyone!

Doesn't this all go back to Plato, where Plato thought knowledge depended on the forms, because the flux of particulars cannot provide knowledge?

In CPR here is what Kant says about Hume:

"David Hume, who among all philosophers came closest to this problem, still did not conceive of it anywhere near determinately enough and in its universality ... believing himself to have brought out that such an a priori proposition is entirely impossible, and according to his inferences everything that we call metaphysics would come down to a mere delusion of an alleged insight of reason into that which has in fact merely been borrowed from experience and from habit has taken on the appearance of necessity."

The "problem" Kant is referring to is how metaphysics can be possible in spite of what Hume proved. Kant says in the same breath, that this is the central problem of the critique - so i guess you can nearly say that it's written almost entirely as a response to Hume.

That's a great point about the similarity of the two problems. If we didn't already know from intimate personal experience that there is such a thing as consciousness, no amount of physical observation could ever be sufficient to prove to us that it exists. Similarly, if we weren't well prepared (on other grounds entirely) to assert that certain things ought or ought not to be done, no amount of observing the actual state of things could be sufficient to show that there is actually good or evil in the world.

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