Tarski,
I have two things to say and then I will respond to a few of your points.
First, it would help me greatly to understand what you are trying to get across, if you could say a little bit more about your background in Buddhism and meditation. Especially if there was a particular teacher or meditation practice that you connected with.
Second, I would love to know how you went from taking LSD and practicing meditation to espousing physicalism and calling yourself Tarski on the internet. Not necessarily looking for your life story here, it would be a plus, but I'm mainly interested in the intellectual steps you took. Thanks in advance.
That said,
First, if the particles which you refer to are the fundamental particles of physics then I would say the reality of those are in just as bad a shape as the apple.
And I agree with you. Buddhism has a long and complicated relationship with various forms of atomism. In general, the tendency is to acknowledge that material reality makes no sense without their existence in some manner or another, but that they are not a very good candidate for being "ultimately real." The point I am making here is that, speaking in terms of what is ultimately or truly real, the fundamental particles of physics are in just as bad shape as the apple. I think the crux of our problem is here:
Your idea of what is real is rather rigid and overly metaphysical.
Because you are absolutely right: my idea of what is real, in the preceding discussion, is very much metaphysical. That said, I think there are two more or less equally valid ways to approach the question. One is this metaphysical sense. The other is in terms of causal capacity or the ability to perform a function. When you say "apples are real" because
They have a definite role to play in the biosphere and can be a matter of life or death in some cases. They carry seeds with DNA and have reflective properties that attract animals and people.
what you are saying, or what I understand you to be saying, is that they are real because they have real causal power. That is fine as far as it goes, but it still doesn't deal with the question of why or how it is that apples came by this causal power. And I think it makes intuitive sense that causal power must be in some (as yet undefined) way distributed across the components of a system or entity that has causal power, in much the same way that an ideal gas may have local variances in temperature, but acts uniformly in its thermodynamic system. The point is, it makes no sense to claim that the causal power of an apple does not proceed somehow from the causal power of the parts of the apple, whatever those "parts" are or however you want to define "part" (for example, you distinguished two parts, seeds and DNA).
The point is, if something has parts, its causal power depends on the causal power(s) of its parts. So, ultimately, as long as something has parts or is distributed over spacetime in any way, it is not "real" in the sense that its causal power derives from things that are not it. The question of whether or not electrons (or any fundamental physical particle) has "parts" is fascinating but outside the bounds of this topic. For the record, partless particles in the sense outlined above are most likely entirely theoretical entities, since electrons and all other fermions and bosons always necessarily possess extension > 0. For energy to be bound in an area of 0 would quite thoroughly break our understanding of how the universe works. There are commensurately theoretical problems about how partless particles in the sense outlined above could ever join into agglomerations of matter, since if two partless particles connect, either they occupy the same position (in which case, since they necessarily have 0 extension, they are necessarily the same particle), or they do not, in which case these supposedly "partless" particles each have one part that touches the other and one part that does not. Again, my overall point here is to say that neither apples nor electrons make good candidates for things that are ultimately real. This also serves as another argument for idealism.
This discussion began as epistemology: why should a nonbeliever take a believer's (ostensibly) perceptual judgments as reliable evidence for the existence of God? I have no problem with the issues being pointed out by some of the commentators, to the extent that "he should have asked the flight attendant for salt," because Packer is an idiot and his arguments would be rightly mocked by anyone with any actual education in philosophy or theology. I didn't jump in this thread to defend Packer or stupid arguments for the existence of God. I jumped in this thread because I think there are two ways to proceed in critiquing Packer. You can critique his example for being facile and his argument for being nonsensical (essentially he denies that memory plays any role in human knowledge, which makes sense for a TBM, else how to justify your faith), and conclude that Packer is an idiot who has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to God or anything else. Or, you can assume that only physical evidence "counts" as a means for attaining reliable knowledge, and then use the obvious flaws in Packer's argument about how he "knows" God to support that assumption. It is this latter course that I take issue with, which is why I jumped in with a critique of the idea that knowledge means (propositional) knowledge of a (physical) state of affairs.
Lastly.
That person does not normally make a representation of an apple into an object of knowledge unless you are a very very good cognitive scientists with a cerebrescobe of some kind.
...or a very, very accomplished meditator.
The representation is a content bearing physical structure. It is the means by which we know an object, not the thing we know.
And is "content" strictly and exclusively physical? Is experience?
Aside from my disagreement here I agree 100% about the instrumentality of the representation, i.e. that it is a
means for attaining knowledge and not the object of knowledge itself. This is the huge enormous thing that pretty much everyone who studies Buddhist epistemology misses.
