Characterizing The Nature of Ultimate Reality
It is obvious to me that what we think of as the extra-mental world cannot be interpreted as the product of conscious creative activity by the human mind. As far as ordinary consciousness is concerned, I find myself in a world of objects which affect me in various ways and which I spontaneously think of as existing independently of my thought and will. Hence the idealist philosopher must go behind consciousness, as it were, and retrace the process of the unconscious activity which grounds it.
But we must go further than this and recognize that the production of the world cannot be attributed to the individual self at all, even to its unconscious activity. For if it were attributed to the individual finite self as such, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to avoid solipsism, a position which can hardly be seriously maintained. Idealism is thus compelled to go behind the finite subject to a supra-individual intelligence, an absolute subject.
The word "subject," however, is not really appropriate, except as indicating that the ultimate productive principle lies, so to speak, on the side of thought and not on the side of the sensible thing. For the words "subject" and "object" are correlative. And the ultimate principle is, considered in itself, without object. It grounds the subject-object relationship and, in itself, transcends the relationship. It is subject and object in identity, the infinite activity from which both proceed.
Post-Kantian idealism was thus necessarily a metaphysics. Fichte, starting from the position of Kant and developing it into idealism, not unnaturally began by calling his first principle the ego, turning Kant's transcendental ego into a metaphysical or ontological principle. But he explained that he meant by this the absolute ego, not the individual finite ego. But with the other idealists (and with Fichte himself in his later philosophy) the word "ego" is not used in this context. With Hegel the ultimate principle is infinite reason, infinite spirit. And we can say that for metaphysical idealism in general reality is the process of the self-expression or self-manifestation of infinite thought or reason.
This does not mean, of course, that the world is reduced to a process of thinking in the ordinary sense. Absolute thought or reason is regarded as an activity, as productive reason which posits or expresses itself in the world. And the world retains all the reality which we see it to posses. Metaphysical idealism does not involve the thesis that empirical reality consists of subjective ideas; but it involves the vision of the world and human history as the objective expression of creative reason.
Is Infinite Reason, Infinite Thought, or Infinite Spirit (as per Hegel) simply a biased form of abstract anthropocentric terminology being used to try to humanize a transcendent reality which, in fact, may be better described as being nothing more than a completely non-rational, thoughtless, blind Will-to-Live (as per Schopenhauer)?
But we must go further than this and recognize that the production of the world cannot be attributed to the individual self at all, even to its unconscious activity. For if it were attributed to the individual finite self as such, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to avoid solipsism, a position which can hardly be seriously maintained. Idealism is thus compelled to go behind the finite subject to a supra-individual intelligence, an absolute subject.
The word "subject," however, is not really appropriate, except as indicating that the ultimate productive principle lies, so to speak, on the side of thought and not on the side of the sensible thing. For the words "subject" and "object" are correlative. And the ultimate principle is, considered in itself, without object. It grounds the subject-object relationship and, in itself, transcends the relationship. It is subject and object in identity, the infinite activity from which both proceed.
Post-Kantian idealism was thus necessarily a metaphysics. Fichte, starting from the position of Kant and developing it into idealism, not unnaturally began by calling his first principle the ego, turning Kant's transcendental ego into a metaphysical or ontological principle. But he explained that he meant by this the absolute ego, not the individual finite ego. But with the other idealists (and with Fichte himself in his later philosophy) the word "ego" is not used in this context. With Hegel the ultimate principle is infinite reason, infinite spirit. And we can say that for metaphysical idealism in general reality is the process of the self-expression or self-manifestation of infinite thought or reason.
This does not mean, of course, that the world is reduced to a process of thinking in the ordinary sense. Absolute thought or reason is regarded as an activity, as productive reason which posits or expresses itself in the world. And the world retains all the reality which we see it to posses. Metaphysical idealism does not involve the thesis that empirical reality consists of subjective ideas; but it involves the vision of the world and human history as the objective expression of creative reason.
Is Infinite Reason, Infinite Thought, or Infinite Spirit (as per Hegel) simply a biased form of abstract anthropocentric terminology being used to try to humanize a transcendent reality which, in fact, may be better described as being nothing more than a completely non-rational, thoughtless, blind Will-to-Live (as per Schopenhauer)?
Comments (79)
I think being mindful of this fact of simultaneous uniting and surpassing is indeed key. But is it non-rational, or simply not bound by or limited to rationality? I feel like there is a sense in which our minds, while they may not encompass this reality, nevertheless intersect it.
If by "ultimate reality" you mean the most general property, that is, the property possessed by every something, it is the property called variously identity, logical consistency, or existence. If you mean the smallest concrete object, it is the non-composite object, also called the empty set; other concrete objects are constituted by combinations of empty sets into larger sets, and by combinations of those combinations, and so on. There may also be composite concrete objects that don't have empty sets "at the bottom" but infinitely differentiated parts instead, as long as their definition is logically consistent; however, that consistency, and thus their existence, may be impossible to prove due to Godel's second incompleteness theorem.
No "will" or "thought" is necessary for existence, unless by "will" or "thought" you mean logical consistency, because logical consistency is existence.
I am wondering about the 'ultimate' reality of all realities. There have been a number of threads about understanding reality, including one of my own. If there is one 'reality' which is the 'truth' above all others, it does seem to me that is probably 'hidden'. If it is hidden does that mean that we are back to the idea of some underlying transcent reality, or the noumenon described by Kant. I believe that this has been spoken of already in this thread.
But, it does lead me to wonder if it is a fantasy entirely, and, perhaps, we even ask what is fantasy, and is there any basis for declaring it as any kind of reality, subjective or otherwise. So, what I am saying is that we may be up against the idea of absolutes and the other other possibility of absolute meaningless reality. Personally, I am not sure that one or other of the extremes is 'true', or meaningful, but this in itself does point to the questionable nature of ultimate meaning, especially the idea of 'ultimate reality' as a true ultimate. Of course, this does come down to the meaning of the idea of ultimate, and whether this corresponds to any actual ways of thinking and reality in terms of our known experiences.
But what is 'emptiness' in an exact sense, in terms of our daily lived experiences?
If emptiness is understood as the content of an empty set, then it is nothing. However, the empty set itself is not nothing but an object, a non-composite object, which is a part of composite objects. In this sense, concrete reality is built up from nothing.
:up:
I think we might be creating more confusion than clarity by distinguishing "ultimate reality" from reality. It may cause people to think that subsequent layers of experience aren't real or fundamental, which leads to quite funny ways of talking about the world and our mental properties to boot.
If you have in mind something like the bottom constituents of reality, that is, what everything in the universe is made of, we don't quite know. Most of the universe is dark matter or dark energy and only 5% is the baryonic matter we know and love.
There's also the issue that, mental gymnastics aside, anything we encounter or disclose or relate to in the world is mediated through our mental processes. Once we are gone the (postulated) non-mental features of the world (atoms, quarks, etc.) are quite obscure.
If we want to go beyond that, or rather, underneath representations, the best guess I've seen is a modification of Schopenhauer's will, essentially a blind striving without rhyme or reason, which seeks to continue striving. We feel this in our own bodies as subject of experience.
Transience, or what @litewave said.
In Platonic idealism, this world is a temporary illusory reality. The ultimate reality is then, the reality of Idea, which is timeless and final.
Even now, if one is a devoted Christian and has a strong faith in afterlife, and heaven, then the ultimate reality would be the world where the souls migrate after death. In ancient Greek religion, this type of afterlife as the true final ultimate reality had been dominating belief among the population. Socrates must have opted to take the hemlock under the belief that his soul will migrate to the ultimate reality of another world, when he was given options to go into exile rather than accepting the death penalty in the court.
Therefore the nature of ultimate reality is based on the religious faith, to which the souls of the dead migrate after death, and is believed to be the utmost final timeless true reality contrasted from this world which is believed to be illusory, temporary and transitory.
A more fruitful approach might be to reflect that your analysis must consist in a text; that what you are doing is putting things into words. So it might not be a bad plan to consider the language you are using.
There are a couple of things to note here. First off, the language you are using is not exclusively yours. You share it with us. That's rather the point of having a language.
A consequence of that is that you are already, by using language, embedding yourself in a community of language users. It follows that you can set solipsism aside. It also follows that there are things both you and those with whom you talk agree on. Obvious things such as that I read your post, you are reading this, and that we are doing philosophy. But there are also background items on which we agree, such as that this is all occurring on an online forum, and hence that there are things such as computers and keyboards and screens, and the paraphernalia that produces such things, the various social contexts in which they occur, and the material world in which such things are embedded.
As you note, this "world of objects... affect me in various ways... independently of my thought and will".
Yep, reality for the most part does not care what you believe.
But if you agree with that, then you agree that there is a reality that is in a sense independent of what you believe.
But idealism is the notion that what is "out there" is dependent on mind.
Hence, idealism doesn't set out what is going on. Mind does not build reality, but finds itself embedded therein. While we are we are of course only able to construct our notions of what is going on with our minds, it does not follow that what is going on is constructed by mind. One must change one's mind to fit the facts.
And when they aren't gifted thinkers, they talk a lot about the ineffable. :gasp: Seems like a good way to hide woolly thinking.
But doesn’t the discovery of the BIg Bang give the Cosmos a true starting point and thus justifies an inquiry into “whence it came”?
When materialists could regard the universe - as some structure of laws and matter - as eternal, there wasn’t a lot of room for an apophatic counter. Things just were what they were. Brute fact and no metaphysics.
With the Big Bang as a developmental and even possibly evolutionary process, suddenly reality looks rather more organic. It must share something with life and mind. It must be a matter of self-organised Becoming rather than merely brute Being.
That ought to send materialists in search of a new metaphysics. We don’t need a creating god, as that never solves the riddle. And a creating ground of spirit or mind - the monism of idealism - is just as inadequate.
But since Anaximander first argued for the spontaneous self-organisation of an Apeiron, a metaphysics of sense-making rationalisation - a dissipative structure - has been kicking about in the back room of organicism. We can certainly see it in Hegel and Peirce, as well as others,
Instead of talking of some ultimate property - which is a monistic concept - we can instead switch to seeking some ultimate relation, or form of interaction. And that then becomes a triadic concept (as it irreducibly involves two complementary opposites in a synergistic spiral of development).
But of course we can reify the two sides of the relation. We can see that the most general property of reality is logical consistency (global law) applied to naked possibility (local action). Or Logos and Flux, synechism and tychism, the laws of physics and its material degrees of freedom - the many ways the same story has been told down the years without every really being understood as the meta-metaphysics behind the metaphysics and even physics.
And so we move the conversation from the tradition of metaphysics to the tradition of philosophy of language as an apophatic and anti-metaphysical stratagem. We call it “our” common ground to signal which way the in-group lies.
Same old, same old.
Quoting Banno
Yes, yes. We don’t need to exhume the rotting carcass of idealism and ritually bash it to death all over again.
The OP rightly raises the metaphysics that goes beyond either brute realism or mystery-mongering idealism. It asks about rational structure - the structuralism of a logical relation. An ultimate kind of thing as it runs like a shining thread through every level of human discourse from maths to physics. But also the discussion of rational structure usually stumbles over the “mental” aspect - the place that meaning, purpose and point of view have in a structuralist metaphysics.
So it is a live debate - metaphysics that physics is still cashing out as it learns more about the organismic point of view and so comes to understand the Cosmos as a thermodynamic system.
A primer on the technicalities - https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/layzer/growth_of_order/
Quoting apokrisis
... which risks conflating, or confusing, a map reason favors (i.e. reifies) with the territory encompassing reason.
That depends on your definition of an organism.
Quoting 180 Proof
I agree. But then follows a path from semiosis to pansemiosis. And are you arguing that cosmology’s turn towards quantum information and holographic principles ain’t a metaphysics of pansemiosis?
I’m not saying the work is done and we can all go home. This is the bleeding edge of modern thought. We are seeing big efforts in terms of a Cosmos defined in terms of rational structure. String theory, loop quantum gravity, entropic gravity. So the fundamental relation is certainly far simpler than a living and mindful system. It boils down to the bare thing of a symmetry breaking. And that in turn requires an Apeiron or Peircean vagueness … the GUT field of Big Bang theory or whatever other notion of vanilla potential exists at the Planckscale.
Quoting 180 Proof
It is both where the spatiotemporal metric is at the smallest it will ever be, and the energetic fluctuation is the largest it could ever be.
So it is not just one thing but a dialectic of two complementary things. If you want to discuss cosmogenesis, it starts with this telling duality, or a symmetry breaking that is already asymmetric in terms of how we conventionally view spacetime expanse vs energy density.
How could the start of everything be both the smallest possible in one sense, and yet the largest possible in the other?
For some metaphysics, that is a bug. For a better metaphysics it is a feature - just what is predicted.
A hasty generalization, no? We do not know for a fact that the BB is "the start of everything". No doubt, a speculative shorthand or placeholder (e.g. Apeiron) ...
And if you want to argue a further regress, like Linde’s eternal spawning inflation, that also is past finite due to the same Planck presumptions being built into it. You just chuck out the dimensional constants that particularise our little bubble of that larger Planck multiverse.
So a serious discussion is one that asks about the triadic and reciprocal nature of the three Planck constants and the way they place all known physics on the vertices of Okun’s cube.
It is all suspiciously Peircean when you peer under the covers of the maths that works. :razz:
Is it now? Apparently all science and widely perceived progress is based on weakness. Do you still believe all events that we're not born with the knowledge of (which is all of them) is based on gods and magic?
Perhaps then, it is even weaker to call any criticism of one's beliefs or even a simple reminder that "hey. perhaps you might not know all there is to know" weak and to be tossed to the wind.
Was one correct and the other incorrect? Or were they both just highly sophisticated b.s. artists?
No. But "as we know it" is not remotely the same as the "everything" you stated the BB was "the start of".
Quoting charles ferraro
No. On the contrary, they were philosophers, not sophists.
Great. I’m interested. What is missing from the story? Do you have a list?
Interaction is possible only in worlds that contain a time dimension. Worlds without time seem to be possible (logically consistent) too, and since I don't see an ontological difference between a possible world and a "real" world, reality also contains worlds without time.
Hey, that’s a great word.
Quoting apokrisis
Isn’t that because according to the current scientific consensus, life and mind are a matter of happenstance, the accidental outcome of a non-intentional process. So, without wanting to bring God into the picture, the question is, how is it that this apparently accidental process gave rise to an intelligence that actually reflects the whole cosmic process? How is it that through the apparently random processes that give rise to living species, a living species evolves that can figure out the whole process that gave rise to it? That sounds suspiciously NOT like a coincidence.
[quote= SEP entry on Schopenhauer] It is a perennial philosophical reflection that if one looks deeply enough into oneself, one will discover not only one’s own essence, but also the essence of the universe. For as one is a part of the universe as is everything else, the basic energies of the universe flow through oneself, as they flow through everything else. For that reason it is thought that one can come into contact with the nature of the universe if one comes into substantial contact with one’s ultimate inner being.[/quote]
First of all, "Characterizing The Nature of Ultimate Reality" is a pleonasm, since the word "nature", as it is used here, means the characteristics of something. So, it's as if you are saying "characterizing the characteristics"! :smile:
Then, what do you mean with "Ultimate Reality"? It's certainly not something so commonly discussed so that it's meaning is more or less obvious. You should therefore define or describe it. Otherwise, how can one talk about its nature?
How, then, given your position, was it at all possible for so many philosophers to have tried to describe or explain ultimate reality throughout the ages? Each seemed to think they could do so. It was something, in fact, quite commonly discussed by them.
Quoting charles ferraro
I don't think they were using the term "Ultimate Reality" itself but they talked about what does that represent. In fact, I found a single definition of the term "Ultimate Reality", in Merriam Webster: "something that is the supreme, final, and fundamental power in all reality". Even Wikipedia refers to Merriam Webster and that definition. Then, if you read Wikipedia's article on "Ultimate reality", or similar articles from other sources, you will see how this concept is viewed differently among different religions.
So, I believe my comment about defining "Ultimate Reality" was correct.
But, even if you don't want to give me credit for that comment, you could at least do it for my first comment about the title of the topic. I don't know, something simple, like "Thanks for noticing it!"
Quoting Wayfarer
Thanks (for the applause)! :smile:
More "officially" (from Merriam-Webster), Pleonasm: "The use of more words than those necessary to denote mere sense (as in the man he said): REDUNDANCY"
The problem with this concept of "self-organised Becoming", is that within an organized being the parts all have a specific function in relation to the whole being. This implies logically that the being as a whole, is the organizing agent. Since this organizing agent, the whole, the being, cannot exist prior in time to itself (that would be contradictory), it cannot be assigned the role of the cause of itself, nor can it be responsible for the "Becoming" of itself.
Therefore, when we look to understand the becoming of an organized being, we need to look beyond the Being itself, to understand the cause of it. The proposed concept "self-organised Becoming" is illogical because the becoming of the being is necessarily prior in time to the being, and "self" is a property of the being. So in that time of "becoming", there is no such thing as the self, to be doing the organizing. And "self-organised Becoming" is incoherent.
Because of this problem we must dismiss "self-organised Becoming" as illogical, and investigate elsewhere for the organizing agent. There are two basic possibilities which are not completely incompatible, immanence and transcendence. The former would hold that there is inherent within each part, the intent which is necessary to create the organized whole, and the latter would hold that the intent which creates the whole is external to the parts. They are not incompatible because the intent may come from an external (transcendent) source, and be placed within the parts (therefore also immanent), if the parts are themselves created intentionally.
Heh, heh...analogies for what?
But to speak at all is an anthropomorphic attempt, which is the point. You are close to Wittgenstein, are you not, in suggesting that to speak of foundational matters is nonsense, for such things are not among the facts of the world, states of affairs. Reason as an absolute? Well, that would require something other than reason to determine, but then, this other would require something other to ground it, and so on. Will to live? What can this language be about if it were, well, the way things "really" are? And how would one establish this; what would give, in turn, this new verifying language its validity? No, this would require yet another dimension of determination.
So you can see there is no way out of this impossibility of affirming in language something that is not language. Language, its signifiers, can only be self referencing. UNLESS: Reason really IS grounded in some impossible ultimate language reality, like Hegel's. If this were true, and it is not impossible that it is, then what we say and think could be significant in the Hegelian way. But how to go about this, that is, at least giving this idea the minimal presumption of "truth"?
Only one way I see: Take the Kierkegaardian motion of the eternal present (Witt approved), and consider that even here, standing, if you will, in the light of a phenomenological reduction, and all schools in abeyance (as Walt Whitman put it): this present, I submit, is undeniable, notwithstanding post modern, post hermeneutical objections, yet there we stand, eidetically aware! Question: Is this actually happening? Is it a finite event? Or is it infinite.
I could continue, but only if you are interested in this strain of thought.
Analogies work like metaphors, so if you say my mother is a tiger when she gets angry, there you have my mother and then the borrowed quality of the tiger, hence, a functioning equation. However, when such devices are applied to the metaphysical, there is no object to which the borrowed trait applies.
OK, If it makes you feel better: Thanks for noticing my infamous "pleonasm."
However, I do think you're "splitting hairs" as they say and trying to create an issue where, in my humble opinion, there is none.
In no way was I intending to define ultimate reality, or to imply that I knew what it was, or that knowing what it is is something common, obvious, or self-evident. Quite the contrary.
Nevertheless, I do claim that many philosophers, throughout the ages, (arbitrarily using Hegel and Schopenhauer as examples, of which there are many others) thought otherwise and have, in fact, tried to explain what ultimate reality is and have come up with many different and unique definitions of it.
You mean it would operate non-locally? Like quantum physics? And thus operate retrocausally?
Yes, that is essential to my view. Finality lies in the future and acts as an organising constraint on its own past. It sifts pure possibility as the ultimate destiny.
OK, by "retrocausally", I assume you mean an effect which is prior in time to its cause. That's what I mean I say such a concept is illogical, incoherent due to contradiction. Causation is a temporal concept. To reverse the temporal order of cause and effect is simple contradiction, unless you are no longer talking about causation. But then what are you talking about?
Paul Davies says something along those lines in The Goldilocks Enigma.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What about the final cause? The final cause of a match is fire, in that matches only exist for the purpose of starting a fire. The match exists before the fire, but the fire is the final cause of the match, being the reason for its existence.
The evidence from quantum mechanics tells us already that the nonlocality which is illogical to your way of thought is the reality of how the Cosmos is.
Now you can choose other interpretations - like Many Worlds. But they ought to be even more offensive.
I take this sort of explanation as a slight misunderstanding of "final cause", common to our modern, materialist society. The final cause of the match is actually the intent to produce fire, and the intent is prior in time to the manufacture of the matches. So we say that fire is the final cause, but it is really the idea of fire, within the mind as the motivating factor, being "the end", or "that for the sake of which", that is the actual cause of the manufacture and existence of the match.
In Aristotle's "Physics" you'll find the example of health being the cause of a man walking about.
[quote=Aristotle, Physics 194b]'(Why is he walking about?' we say, 'To be healthy', and having said that, we think we have assigned the cause.) The same is true also of all the intermediate steps which are brought about through the action of something else as means toward the end, e.g. reduction of flesh, purging, drugs, surgical instruments, are means toward health. All these things are 'for the sake of'' the end, though they differ from one another in that some are activities others instruments.[/quote]
As "the end" the final cause is a goal, or objective. That's what "the end" means in Aristotle, so it is in the mind, as an idea. As such, "the end" acts as a cause of intentional human action. So it is not the material existence of the thing itself, the fire in your example, which is the cause, but fire as "the end", the goal, or intention, an idea which acts as a cause in bringing about the activity which is understood as the means to the end. The end is the cause of the activity, or instrument, which is the means, but the end is the idea, the goal, as intention, which exists within the mind. The end is not the material thing brought about by the means, because the means are the efficient causes of that material thing. So the end (mental intention) is the (final) cause of the means, and the means are the (efficient) cause of the physical object produced. This is an important part of understanding final cause, which is derived from reading Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics".
There are other options, such as physicists apply faulty theories. and faulty mathematical axioms. But to many, these options are even more offensive.
I think that's consistent with what I said. It's a teleological process, i.e. working towards an end or outcome. In this case, a plausible step towards the 'end or outcome' is just the emergence of rational sentient beings such as h. sapiens. This also ties in with the cosmic anthropic principle.
[quote=Science hopes to change events that have already occured; https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Science-hopes-to-change-events-that-have-already-2655518.php] Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, suggests another possibility: The universe might actually be able to fine-tune itself. If you assume the laws of physics do not reside outside the physical universe, but rather are part of it, they can only be as precise as can be calculated from the total information content of the universe. The universe's information content is limited by its size, so just after the Big Bang, while the universe was still infinitesimally small, there may have been wiggle room, or imprecision, in the laws of nature.
And room for retrocausality. If it exists, the presence of conscious observers later in history could exert an influence on those first moments, shaping the laws of physics to be favorable for life. This may seem circular: Life exists to make the universe suitable for life. If causality works both forward and backward, however, consistency between the past and the future is all that matters. "It offends our common-sense view of the world, but there's nothing to prevent causal influences from going both ways in time," Davies says. "If the conditions necessary for life are somehow written into the universe at the Big Bang, there must be some sort of two-way link."[/quote]
Just replace good old fashioned Copenhagen mysticism with new model thermal decoherence and you can tell a story that is safe for physicalism.
Will the Universe still be rocketing towards is Heat Death long after our Sun has died, and well after the blip that was humanity fiddling around with reading dials and capturing dots on light sensitive film to impute some story about material existence?
What we already know - from the science - is the “lawful” description of the Universe is destined to keep on evolving until the classicality that developed is then washed away again. The Heat Death will be a state of blackbody photons with a temperature of 0 degrees k being radiated by the Universe’s own holographic horizons. An anti-de Sitter state bereft of all non-quantum action and so wiped clean of any need for our classical baggage of mid-period laws.
Well, there are some hashes to settle first. What is dark energy? Do black holes really radiate all their information in the long run?
But what is for certain is that the existence of the Universe has zero to do with human consciousness, or any kind of idealist schtick. Quantum theory is now wave mechanics glued to statistical mechanics. That is the next level shit that now constrains your metaphysical flights of fancy.
Although retrocausality and many world scenarios are far more challenging in terms of deciding which horse you actually want to back.
That a theory can provide us with a particular convenience, does not demonstrate that the theory is not faulty, unless the judgement of faulty/non-faulty is based solely on the desire for that end. Really, it just demonstrates that the theory suffices as the means to that end. But that is not the end we are concerned with here, we are concerned with characterizing the nature of reality
There is a fundamental incompatibility between the concept stated as "Newton's first law of motion", and the concept stated as "free will". A very similar incompatibility was questioned extensively by St. Augustine, as the question of how it could both be true, that human beings have free will, and God is omniscient. If God can know everything, then everything must be predetermined, and there is no room for free will.
The free will creates motions without the application of force, as it is a first cause, producing an efficient cause with no efficient cause prior to it. Only a final cause is prior in time to this first efficient cause.. This incompatibility between free will, and Newton's first law, has no affect on the marvel of the internet, but it means that physics, in it's acceptance of this law, is incapable of understanding that part of reality which provides us with free will.
Quoting apokrisis
Your denial of idealist principles leaves you incapable of understanding how ideas are causally active in the world. That ideas are causally active is empirically verified by each and every artificial object observed. Instead of recognizing this fundamental fact, and the corresponding idealist principle, that the idea is prior in time to its corresponding material object (which by Plato's cave allegory is a reflection or representation of the idea), you resort to an illogical, incoherent , proposition of "retrocausality". You refuse to be lead out of your cave, in your rejection of the "idealist schtick".
Quoting Wayfarer
The important point, is that the concept of "final cause" is not consistent with the concept of "retrocausality". In final causation the cause is the end, as an idea, or goal existing in the mind as intention, and this goal precedes in time, the action brought about as the means toward the end. The idea, as the goal, or end, is the cause of the action, and the action follows the end, in time, it does not precede it.
The way that modern physicalism turns this around, is to deny the causal reality of the idea, or goal (as apokrisis demonstrates), assigning "the end" to the material object brought about by the action, that action being the means. Then "the end", (incorrectly understood as the material object produced by the means), which is posterior in time to the action which produced it, is assigned the title "final cause", and "final cause" is said to be a cause which is after its affect. As you can see, this is just a misunderstanding of "final cause".
There is no such thing as "retrocausality", this is basic logical incoherency, inconsistency, therefore logically impossible. "Cause" is a temporal concept. In all of its senses the "cause" is always prior in time to its effect this is essential to the concept of cause. To posit a "cause" which is posterior in time to its effect, is to negate the definition of "cause", in the way of contradiction. To proceed with such an incoherent principle would render spatial-temporal existence as unintelligible.
For me, always imagined the "nature" of ultimate reality as a unique form of energy that goes through everything in universe and contains all the universal information too(information coming from all universal facts ever occurred and those which are going to occur).
And that kind of energy might have some kind of ability to change continuously and contain all the progress goes on, everywhere in universe. Like a "living" energy that "learns" from itself. Know sounds like fiction movie. To myself sometimes also.
Don't ask me why I believe that. There is no reason and I don't even support that this is actual right. It's just how my mind tries to wrap around all these existential questions . Can't blame me, others believe in God.
Quoting charles ferraro
"Live" sounds very human-ish to me. And that includes the danger of narrowing our perspectives I think. "Will to Exist" fits better. For me at least.
Quoting charles ferraro
No, it doesn't make me feel better. Because this was not my intention. Neither was my intention to force you to acknowledge it, as it seems you did. Your response shows that you still don't understand what pleonasm is, as this is evident from the quotation marks you put around the word as well as characterizing it ironically as infamous. You have misjudged my corrective remark as a criticism. Sorry about that.
No problem.
Or maybe freewill is just a cultural meme - a faulty characterisation of a human social construct as something metaphysically fundamental?
(Spoiler: That is indeed all it is.)
Or is "ultimate reality" a nonsense phrase?
Concatenating equivocal terms is not an aid to understanding.
That strikes me as a mischaracterisation of Wittgenstein. It is clear that reason takes place within language, yet it is clear Wittgenstein held that language has limits; but further that the really important stuff is unsaid.
The core of this thread is an attempt to say the unsayable.
Or the attempt to explore its limit, don’tcha think? :roll:
What about the 'limit' of there seemingly being a zero-sum balance of opposites, or no absolutes, or as no intrinsic properties such as with relationism?
But language systems can be mathematical. Ordinary language is speech from some social point of view - developed to (re)construct the society that is speaking it. And now - through the practice of metaphysical-strength reasoning - modern humans have constructed a culture of technical speech that is rooted in the habits of logic and arithmetic. We have language that is designed to transcend our social being and so move towards some conception of "ultimate reality" - as the limit of this new displaced and third person point of view. We "see" the world through the "objective" eye of axiom and measurement.
So Hegel got that to the degree he developed a logic of dialectics. This was the intellectual project that got modern rationality and science going back in Ancient Greece. Hegel tried hard to update it in the age of Newtonian mechanics. But he bent his arguments away from the third person and back towards the first person to the degree he placed God, spirit or goodness at the centre of his metaphysical scheme. Too anthropomorphic. Although that was an understandable cultural response in an age where the pendulum had swung too far from the very idea of points of view - Newtonianism being understood as the view from nowhere ... rooted in the nothingness of a void, rather than in a plenum of possibilities.
Peirce then came along - as a scientist, metaphysician, epistemologist and logician - to sort things out.
But anyway, my key point is that ordinary language is concerned with constructing our social reality. That is what constrains its practice pragmatically.
And then mathematical reasoning and scientific method arose out of the development of a new metaphysical language - one that ends up speaking in numbers rather than words, and dialectical logical structure rather than an everyday causal grammar based on a narrative tales of who did what to whom.
There is a proper way to talk about ultimate reality. Or at least the relevant community of inquirers have agreed much about the current state of the art in this regard. Nature is symmetry breaking and thermodynamics. A dialectic of constraints and uncertainty. Or as Peirce said, synechism and tychism.
Quoting Constance
The problem here is that there is no point just swinging the pendulum between the dialectical extremes of the third and first person point of view.
The Peircean advance was to move towards the view which shows the larger semiotic relation that makes these two views the complementary limits of Being.
I am talking about a system of pure self-defining relation in talking about dialectics and semiotics. But that is a positive rather than a negative story. Two complementary limits add up to produce the wholeness of a spectrum of mediating possibiities. It is a division that creates something.
The other way of looking at it is negative in that two opposites must cancel to nothing. That is a division that destroys possibility.
Which one were you thinking of?
I see that you continue in your contradictory ways. Free will is a necessary requirement for the existence of any "human social construct".
This denial, that ideas, goals, and intentions, are the real causes of artificial structures, is the reason why you'll never be able to understand that part of reality. Until you face the reality that immaterial ideas are real active causes in the world, causing the existence of artificial material things, you'll be forever lost in your bungled metaphysics which attempts to explain final cause using the contradictory notion of retrocausation.
You don't seem to have any idea what the concept of free will encompasses. Ever look it up? Or do you just dismiss it as "a cultural meme" every time you see or hear the words, and your eyes glaze over?
:yawn:
For all I know, the alleged "important stuff" may be "unimportant stuff." And it is perhaps for the latter reason, rather than for the former reason, that it is unsaid, or unsayable. By the way, what makes "stuff" important or unimportant anyway? Just being able to be said, rather than not being able to be said?
Either, as the nature of Ultimate Reality.
I'd guess I'd also add that whatever it may be, will be discovered by reason alone. Our sense perceptions have finite capacity. Granted our reason must have some limit too, but it is clearly more powerful in these kinds of questions.
But as others have said, it may well be the case that these kinds of grounds are unsayable.
A provocative set of ideas. First, I should say that the reason I want to give rationalism some presumption of favor is that individual identity insists. The self, even the most basic, reduced self in, say, some deep meditative state in which thought has been suspended altogether, is still constitutively a rational entity, not a blooming and buzzing infant. To sit, and make a dramatic move into the "eternal present" (Kierkegaard, Buddha?) free of what Husserl calls predelineated determination (memory) still requires an implicit language world that is always, already there, making, stabilizing, normalizing all things. This language structure is not something that can be put down, for one would have to put down "the world". Of course, languages are each one arbitrary, but the logic that makes it even possible, this is my interest here.
Metaphysical strength reasoning? What would this be if not the dialectics, about which one has to be very careful, as Kant was pretty good at explaining.
Quoting apokrisis
This rootedness in the plenum of possibilities sounds Heideggerian. I hold that such words as God, spirit or goodness are dialectically unfinished, or better, reach their end in the confrontation with actuality. Clarity is challenging here because philosophy, if allowed to follow its internal course, leads only to one place, and that is the eternal present. Wittgenstein followed Kierkegaard on this strange bit of metaphysics, but it is, by my lights, the coveted brass ring of philosophical endeavor. Our world is structured in time, so called. Of course, one could fill a library just on the way this single idea has been worked out in the past two centuries, but I say, deep meditation does much to undo the world's most familiarizing features, and when familiarity falls away, philosophy becomes revelatory. BUT: revelation is structured revelation, or, requires a structured self to receive it, assimilate it with the rest of the implicit composite self, and this is where Hegel has his place. Experience at all requires native logic.
It is important to remember that all of our vocabulary is hermeneutic, and when we use a term, any term, like 'logic', we are taking up some part of the world AS, as Heidegger put it the intended object; our language's vocabulary does not stand for things in the world, it "stands in for" things (and then, this "standing in" gets diffused in "difference" but never mind this).
This expression "nothingness of a void", I would add, is simply a hermeneutical place holder, a way of abstracting something that is manifestly there, in the world. As to goodness, well, what is this? Ethical/aestheitic goodness or contingent goodness? God? Spirit? These are not terms with no existential underpinning. I claim argument bears this out.
Quoting apokrisis
Perhaps. But there is the inevitable "goodness" question begged here" What if there were discovered some Pythagorean harmony of the spheres (reminds me of an interesting, if creepy, movie named "Pi" in which a mathematical genius was chased down by religious zealots who thought he possessed mystical insight). Any way, if such a thing were determined, then so what? This revelation would have value only if it were attended by a valorizing agency. Hume once wrote that if reason had its way, it could annihilate the world with no regrets (so to speak); facts have no value and logic has no value conceived as such. Reason has to be conceived, not in terms of "pure" reason, logical or arithmetic, which is an abstraction, but in some kind of reason/value matrix of experience.
Speaking in numbers? If so, these numbers would have to be valorized, have meaning beyond the number, just as with plain language.
Quoting apokrisis
I really don't have a complaint abut this in a qualified way, though I do recall that positivist ideal in which all meanings were reduced to their essences, and language simple, what, mirrors to reality. This kind of thinking has grave flaws.
Quoting apokrisis
Right, you don't think there is ever some asymptotic approach to God's self realization, if as recall Hegel. I didn't used to think this either, and I don't now, really. But any intimation of a deeper sense of the world is bound to the logical construction of experience, and, as Wittgenstein told us, it is nonsense to think otherwise. I simply understand that reason is an essential part of the construction of the meaning, and it is possible that its depth is beyond contingency.
And then, what is the nature of the Apeiron? Is this not a "ground"? It just pushes the can back from ground in the mind to ground in the beginning of the universe and time.
The "fun" part of post-Kantian idealism is its antimonies... The first eye that opened was when time began, but empirically time goes further back than that, etc. The ground is the cognition. The infinite monads or the unified Thing-in-Itself(s) are the "behind the scenes" and "actual" reality.
With this sort of realism you propose, triadic form self-organizing is kicked off somehow from a distant past Apeiron. What is "this"? You describe the theoretical and postulated "form" but not whence or what, which is the leap of faith metaphysics part.
We are biological beings before we are we linguistic and socially constructed beings. So we start from that neurological level of world modeling like any animal. Although human babies are engaged in linguistic culture and even mathematical culture from the earliest age. Rationality is being shaped just by being raised in a carpentered environment where chairs, doors, light switches and now iPads are the natural form of the world.
Quoting Constance
I’m not seeing anything to do here with the question of ultimate reality as a claim about the world or the thing itself. Just some hazy, culturally specific notions of selfhood and subjectivity,
So are you simply saying that ultimate reality is phenomenological and you are uninterested in the scientific method and pragmatic reasoning - the hunt for ultimate reality in that sense?
Quoting Constance
Well, language is the semiotic tool that constructs a self-world relation in the first place. It doesn’t get in the way. It is the way. As modern educated folk, we are generic selves, neurological selves, social selves and mechanical selves - the four levels of semiosis, using the codes of genes, neurons, words and numbers.
Quoting Constance
Well at all levels, semiosis is about information being used to regulate the material physics of the world. So it is about harnessing the world in a way that works for the self - the organismic view of things.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs does a fair job of valorising this.
Quoting Constance
Well not if my science-informed view is claiming the asymptotic approach is instead towards the Cosmos’s Heat Death. And that mid-era complexity in the form of life and mind arises as a clean-up squad for lumps of free energy that the universe wants degraded back to background heat as soon as possible - as part of its grand project of eternalised expansion-cooling.
Quoting Constance
Sure. Peircean semiosis warns us that the self is as much part of any modelling as the world that stands as its “other”. So we can’t develop views of either poles of being without understanding them as pragmatic co-constructions.
The difference was Peirce could say this clearly rather than mumble indistinctly. He showed how the mechanics of logic are rooted in organismic being and so how the rational structure of the Cosmos was natural and inevitable.
The ultimate level of reality description for him is pansemiotic. Which is why I highlight the degree to which science has arrived at a pansemiotic model of the physical universe - one involving things like dialectical symmetry breaking, law as universalised habit, quantum potential as a logical vagueness, etc.
Haven’t we been through that loop many times already? But I note you correctly put “ground” in quotes.
Any notion of the Apeiron is one of a limit. A limit on distinctions themselves. Vagueness is defined by the principle of contradiction finally giving out and failing to apply.
So if you are a materialist, you must think in terms of grounds. And then moan forever about the paradox of a world standing on an infinite number of turtles.
But process thinking already makes natural the idea of limits. An equilbrium is a mess that can keep messing about yet not get any messier.
It ain’t my problem if you feel you must employ an inferior brand of metaphysics when better ones are available.
You missed my edit and additions, which I think is what I'm really interested in:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Whence/What the Apeiron? You answered Quoting apokrisis
Vagueness vagueing is pretty vague if that's your answer, but it's just as oddly metaphysical as any other metaphysics.
It is a logical claim about counterfactuality. When no difference can be found, you have reached the limit in terms of differences. Some statement is neither true nor false, just completely vague.
And then most normal stories about the world - regular reality - focus on the vast amount of counterfactuality. The world is a state of affairs, the realist exclaims. It is a world populated by an apparently infinite supply of middle-sized dry goods bumping about in some cosmic scale void.
But if we want to imagine ultimate reality - the ground to this counterfactual mixture of atomic substances acting mechanically within an a-causal spatiotemporal expanse - then we can start inquiring into the point at which this sharp counterfactuality first arose. That is, we can head back to where we encounter the Planckian limit on any form of definite material being.
That there was this limit was the quantum surprise. We found scientifically that the past ain't infinite - turtles as far as any eye could see. It was instead bounded by a horizon - a limit on substantial "thingness", or even physical law, or spatiotemporal voids - itself.
So it ain't oddly metaphysical. It is the cashing out of a dialectical and process based metaphysics in robust science.
You keep wanting to argue the view from Newtonian materialism - the metaphysics of middle-sized dry goods. And that still feels supported by a matching version of logic - the one in which the three laws of thought, the principles of identity, non-contradiction and the excluded middle, are taken for granted as eternalised verities rather than as their own emergent limit states on Being.
In the imagined limit - the limit on uncertainty as the inverse to Vagueness's limit on certainty - these laws of thought might apply. But in practice, we exist in the world that is suspended between these dialectical limitations on Being.
Circling back to Aristotle, substance is informed potential - self-consistent constraint on generalised uncertainty. And the "ground" of Being is thus this dialectics of establishing a world that is strongly dichotomised ... in dialectical opposition with the "world" that was once, by contrast, merely a vagueness or Apeiron. A pre-Planckian condition unmarked by distinctions, as our measuring instruments now tell us.
This is where the post modern turn to language steps in: no, biology is not antecedent to language. Language comes first, for it is in language that biology is conceived. If this idea is new to you, it is very unlikely you will find favor with it here, for it is a very difficult business to get familiar with. This is because it turns conventional science orientation on its head. I am confronting the world, and wish to know it intimately, I have to get into original proximity to what is there, that is, as "originary" as is possible. When I behold objects, wherein lies this generative source? It is within the perceptual presentation: a thing is a perceptual object first, a logical construction first. If I wish to move into regions of apprehending the world, like biology or knitting, then this is fine, but here I am removed from phenomena simpliciter, the "given" of the world prior to be taken up for some other than philosophical purpose. Philosophy is the attempt to maximize proximity by reducing the world to its foundational terms, and biology, for one, is derivative.
Quoting apokrisis
Ultimate reality is first given to us in language. It is not as if the world just reaches into your consciousness and declares its nature. Rather, we receive the world within a body of always already there language and interpretation. Ultimate reality is an idea first received by an active interpretative agency, and it is here meanings step forth and try to made sense of the given intuitions. These intuitions by themselves come to as language possibilities, out of which ideational constructs are made. According to this thinking, there is no pure intuition of anything, for intuitions are composites of thought. Derrida takes this to its logical conclusion, denying even the possibility of a singular affirmation, but then, consider that what this amounts to a a denial that language can speak the world, and this is what Wittgenstein talked about in the Tractatus, and in this work there is the famous, or infamous, reference to the mystical, the transcendental.
The real issue lies with Time, for our understanding is and eventful awareness, not a static "presence" but then, presence is the key to ultimate reality. See the Abhidhamma.
Quoting apokrisis
But note: to conceive of language as a semiotic tool, we need language to do this. The point is, we have the vocabularies first, and these vocabularies construct meaning. It is not that calling it a semiotic tool is wrong at all; rather,, putting language first, we move into a theoretical field called hermeneutics which denies "ultimacy" to anything that can be said because language itself is a constructive feature of the very reality that is the object of questioning. There is no terminal juncture where language ends its inquiry.
I don't really with this to its conclusion. I think there is an end, and ultimate reality makes sense, though the sense that is delivered up, is not discursive, not contingent, not bound to some novel ways to take up the world via an existing vocabulary. I think Michel Henry in taking up Husserl's epoche has it right, though I can't exactly tell you what this is and how I use it here. A rather lengthy affair.
Quoting apokrisis
What I mean is that, if numbers are to somehow hold the key to foundational meaning to, well, life the universe and everything, then numbers would have to be conceived more fully in their conception. A number simpliciter is just an abstraction. Where is the meaning, the affect? What we are trying to explain is not a body of lifeless facts, but a world of meanings, and the meta-question of which is that of metavalue: not quantitative, but qualitative. The first question we encounter when asking about ultimate reality is, what is there in reality that is being called ultimate? Here, in our midst, we find the most salient presence to be qualitative experiences, like falling in love, being tortured, haagen dazs and tonsillitis; you know, joy and suffering. The basis for what is ultimate has to be conceived on these terms, not in abstract structures.
Quoting apokrisis
But again, this talk about science is derivative, resting on something else, which is the phenomenological description of matters prior to being taken up in science.
Quoting apokrisis
Of course. And Peirce had read Kant thoroughly, and understood the Copernican revolution that underlies this. After all, concepts without intuitions are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind; and if the entire affair is pragmatic in nature, then this is a pragmatic phenomenology. I think pragmatism is right up to a point.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't quite understand this "rational structure of the cosmos" at all. It must be the way it is put here, but Peirce was a long run thinker, and he is criticized by some for his view that truth is what emerges in the long run. Don't recall well about this though. But I take issue with this phrase as you state it. After all, the structures revealed to us are inherently pragmatic, and any conception of the cosmos is, as you say, a co construction. Nature does not reveal itself apart from this doubt moving to belief equation.
I read Making Out Ideas Clear and his Fixation of Belief. I'll read them again.
Quoting apokrisis
Oh. I see. Well, a pansemiotic model is not going to be some "ultimate" or absolute description. That would be impossible staying within the bounds of pragmatic truth and epistemology. Truth is made, not discovered.
Well my camp is natural philosophy. So we explain where language comes from as well as how it organises human thought in socially constructed fashion. :lol:
Quoting Constance
Peirce formulated both pragmatism as epistemic method - a theory of truth as the limit of inquiry in a community of rational thinkers using abductive reasoning - and also semiotics as an ontology that, among other things, grounds such an epistemology.
So semiotics operates within epistemic limits while also being an ontology large enough to encompass anything sensible and evidence-backed that PoMo might have to say or raise as a concern.