Being, Reality and Existence
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I have long believed that there is a meaningful difference between the terms ‘reality’, ‘being’ and ‘existence’ which is often overlooked in current philosophical discourse. This is because distinguishing 'reality', 'being', and 'existence' is practically impossible in the current English philosophical lexicon, as they are usually considered synonyms. But there are fundamental differences between these terms. So I have developed an heuristic - it’s not by any means a comprehensive analysis, but a way of thinking about the terms such that they can be meaningfully distinguished. It owes some elements to Platonist philosophy, some to Kant, and other elements to (Eastern) non-dualism.
'Exist' is derived as follows: 'ex-' to be apart, apart from, outside (as in external, exile), and '-ist', to stand or to be. So to 'exist' is to be 'this as distinct from that', to have an identity. In my heuristic, the 'domain of existents' is basically the realm of phenomena. 'What exists' are all the billions of compound objects that are composed of parts and have a beginning and end in time. Also, ‘existence’ refers to the human life considered longitudinally through time, 'our life', and the phenomena that we encounter within that context.
What is 'real' is another matter. I understand this to denote real numbers, logical, scientific and natural laws and principles, and so on. So in this heuristic, numbers are real, because they're the same for anyone who can count, but they're not existent, because they don't come into and go out of existence. (And prime numbers, in particular, are not composed of parts - see Augustine on Intelligible Objects. Imaginary objects could also be discussed but I will leave that for now. The same can be said for logical laws such as the law of the excluded middle - this is something that only exists in the sense of it being an intellectual principle, so it does not exist qua phenomena. But it is nevertheless real, in that it is a law of logic and necessary to the application of thought in all possible worlds. Hence, transcendental, in the Kantian sense.)
The meaning of 'Being' is another matter again. Note that in ordinary speech the term 'Being' usually denotes 'human being' - and this is for good reason. This is because for a being, the domain of phenomenal existents and the domain of real but intellectual laws and principles, is synthesised into the 'meaning-world' which we inhabit. When human beings speak of ‘the world’, it means the totality of both things and out understanding of them. (c.f. Wittgenstein ‘I am my world’.)
But another crucial point about Being is that being is never an object of consciousness, because we're never apart from or outside of it. Being is 'that which knows', never 'the object of knowledge' (a fundamental insight of Advaita. And this is why it can be said that we 'forget what being is' even though it's always 'nearer' than anything else. In an existential sense, we’re ‘alienated from being’, due to ‘avidya’ which amounts to false identification with the objects of consciousness.)
The 'be' of 'be-ing' is of a completely different nature to the existence of objects. This is the distinction basic to ontology. This is why the nature of inanimate objects is such that they are unreal ‘in their own right’ or ‘from their own side’ (which is similar to Berkeley’s principle of esse est percipe. However, unlike Berkeley, I don’t say that existents persist due to their being perceived by Deity; my analysis is nearer to the Buddhist ??nyat?.)
Typically, in our extroverted and objectively-oriented culture, we accept that ‘what is real’ is what is 'out there'; compare Sagan 'cosmos is all there is'. But Being is prior to knowing, in the sense that if we were not beings, the cosmos would be nothing to us, we would simply react to stimuli, as animals do. Our grasp of rational principles, logic, and scientific and natural laws mediates our knowledge of the Cosmos, that comprise the basis of ‘scientia’. However what has become very confused in current culture, is that the mind, which in some sense must precede science, is now believed to be a mere consequence or output of fundamentally physical processes - even though what is ‘fundamentally physical’ is still such an open question.
Anyway, I am not intending to make this a rhetorical thread about materialism v idealism, but to draw out and discuss those points about the distinction between being, reality and existence.
"Real", "existent" and "is" are metaphysically undefined.
I have long believed that there is a meaningful difference between the terms ‘reality’, ‘being’ and ‘existence’ which is often overlooked in current philosophical discourse. This is because distinguishing 'reality', 'being', and 'existence' is practically impossible in the current English philosophical lexicon, as they are usually considered synonyms. But there are fundamental differences between these terms. So I have developed an heuristic - it’s not by any means a comprehensive analysis, but a way of thinking about the terms such that they can be meaningfully distinguished. It owes some elements to Platonist philosophy, some to Kant, and other elements to (Eastern) non-dualism.
'Exist' is derived as follows: 'ex-' to be apart, apart from, outside (as in external, exile), and '-ist', to stand or to be. So to 'exist' is to be 'this as distinct from that', to have an identity. In my heuristic, the 'domain of existents' is basically the realm of phenomena. 'What exists' are all the billions of compound objects that are composed of parts and have a beginning and end in time. Also, ‘existence’ refers to the human life considered longitudinally through time, 'our life', and the phenomena that we encounter within that context.
What is 'real' is another matter. I understand this to denote real numbers, logical, scientific and natural laws and principles, and so on. So in this heuristic, numbers are real, because they're the same for anyone who can count, but they're not existent, because they don't come into and go out of existence. (And prime numbers, in particular, are not composed of parts - see Augustine on Intelligible Objects. Imaginary objects could also be discussed but I will leave that for now. The same can be said for logical laws such as the law of the excluded middle - this is something that only exists in the sense of it being an intellectual principle, so it does not exist qua phenomena. But it is nevertheless real, in that it is a law of logic and necessary to the application of thought in all possible worlds. Hence, transcendental, in the Kantian sense.)
The meaning of 'Being' is another matter again. Note that in ordinary speech the term 'Being' usually denotes 'human being' - and this is for good reason. This is because for a being, the domain of phenomenal existents and the domain of real but intellectual laws and principles, is synthesised into the 'meaning-world' which we inhabit. When human beings speak of ‘the world’, it means the totality of both things and out understanding of them. (c.f. Wittgenstein ‘I am my world’.)
But another crucial point about Being is that being is never an object of consciousness, because we're never apart from or outside of it. Being is 'that which knows', never 'the object of knowledge' (a fundamental insight of Advaita. And this is why it can be said that we 'forget what being is' even though it's always 'nearer' than anything else. In an existential sense, we’re ‘alienated from being’, due to ‘avidya’ which amounts to false identification with the objects of consciousness.)
The 'be' of 'be-ing' is of a completely different nature to the existence of objects. This is the distinction basic to ontology. This is why the nature of inanimate objects is such that they are unreal ‘in their own right’ or ‘from their own side’ (which is similar to Berkeley’s principle of esse est percipe. However, unlike Berkeley, I don’t say that existents persist due to their being perceived by Deity; my analysis is nearer to the Buddhist ??nyat?.)
Typically, in our extroverted and objectively-oriented culture, we accept that ‘what is real’ is what is 'out there'; compare Sagan 'cosmos is all there is'. But Being is prior to knowing, in the sense that if we were not beings, the cosmos would be nothing to us, we would simply react to stimuli, as animals do. Our grasp of rational principles, logic, and scientific and natural laws mediates our knowledge of the Cosmos, that comprise the basis of ‘scientia’. However what has become very confused in current culture, is that the mind, which in some sense must precede science, is now believed to be a mere consequence or output of fundamentally physical processes - even though what is ‘fundamentally physical’ is still such an open question.
Anyway, I am not intending to make this a rhetorical thread about materialism v idealism, but to draw out and discuss those points about the distinction between being, reality and existence.
Comments (338)
Yep. So to exist is to be substantial. Yet to be substantial is to be individuated. And so the question become how does individuation come to be. And then what would its "other" - the unindividuated - look like.
This leads you from an ontology of things to a metaphysics of processes. Being is a state of individuation which has a reason to persist.
The question is then whether this reason for individuation to persist is immanent or transcendent. Does it emerge as the limit of a process, or is it in some sense imposed from outside?
Mathematical form comes into view as the answer that seems to serve both camps there. :)
I'm rather ambivalent (or maybe just confused) about the philosophical notion of substantia. As I've noted previously, the philosophical meaning of 'substance' is nothing like the everyday meaning - substantia is 'that in which attributes inhere'. So substance is what a being truly is, what 'stands under' the changing appearances; that of which the attributes are accidents.
But recall that the Latin 'substantia' was used to translate the Greek 'ousia', which is nearer in meaning to 'being' than to what we think of as 'substance'. So I think that a 'substance' in the sense intended by metaphysics (as 'ouisia') cannot be something that objectively exists. I mean, you will never find evidence of it by assaying a particular object, as it were. I think it's meaningful within the Aristotelean domain of discourse, but I do wonder whether its something that is real. (Buddhists certainly don't agree with the 'substance/accident' distinction. I keep meaning to enroll in an Oxford University external course with almost the same title as the thread but the next one isn't till September :-( )
Quoting apokrisis
Well I couldn't begin to guess, although one phrase that often comes back to me was from my lectures in Vedanta - a Hindu aphorism that was frequently mentioned that through the process of cosmic evolution, 'what is latent becomes patent'. Likewise, Vivekananda (also a Vedantin) used to talk of 'involution', whereby the final form of a thing is implicit in the germinal form, as an oak is present in, or 'involved in' an acorn. So the universe has 'involved' into that which is now 'evolving', and evolution itself is a form of the universe becoming self-aware. But I expect that the way I'm thinking about the issue is rather different to your own.
Quoting Moliere
The traditional hierarchy I dimly recall is the 'causal-formal-phenomenal'. The 'causal realm' is the domain of the 'one'; the formal domain is the 'domain of law and number'; the phenomenal realm is the domain of existents. I think that modern naturalism tends towards the view that only the phenomenal domain is real, whereas in the traditional metaphysics, its reality is derivative.
Well, they are defined entirely by their value. 7=VII=Seven - all of which are different expressions denoting exactly the same value.
Quoting ?????????????
General observation of animal behavior.
Which observations in particular?
To be honest I was with you up until here
Quoting Wayfarer
Why must you spoil what was otherwise an elegant description of how you feel with the arrogant assumption that everyone who doesn't agree with you is "confused"?
If I say the earth is round and you think it isn't, you are confused, because the earth is objectively demonstrably round.
If I say that conscious awareness is a property of neural activity and you think it isn't, I am not "confused" I have a different but equally defensible belief about the world.
To the degree that there is confusion around these terms, its generally down to both a lack of farmiliarity, and the fact that language is what we make of it, at the end of the day. Your motivation and agenda, as always, is theistic, but its useful to be irreverent to language every now and then as well.
Materialism is confused, because logic, math and so on, without which there would be no science, are based on the relationship of ideas, and ideas are not physical. Of course nowadays it is assumed that ideas are ‘what the brain does’, and that the brain is a material substance, but I don’t accept that.
[quote=StreetlightX] I would suggest that there is no serious philosophy that has ever not taken seriously the distinction between these terms[/quote]
I am interested in references to philosophers that distinguish what is real from what exists. I haven’t been able to find that many. Pierce does talk about it a little. My belief is that in current philosophical discourse, the two categories are generally regarded as synonymous.
You've just redescribed your position. I asked what observations have lead you to this conclusion.
Quoting Wayfarer
But you didn't say Materialism was confused, you said that those people who think conciousnes/the mind is a property of matter were confused. The existence of mathematics and logic (if they exist at all) simply mean that not all of existence is material. They don't then automatically mean that whichever other parts of existence you care to decide are also immaterial are proven to be so.
Both terms have their own ranges of meaning in various contexts in English and more or less exact equivalents in other languages. Those ranges of meaning both within English and across different languages overlap in some places and not in others. What makes you think the terms have any essential univocal meanings?
I would only be slightly callous if I said literally every philosopher from Heidegger onward (or at least, every philosopher familiar with, and conversant in, the Heideggerian philosophy), would make use of, or at least engage with, any such distinction. In fact even before him Husserl famously made all sorts of distinctions between the real, the irreal, and the unreal, all to be put to use to their own specific technical uses. Again, these distinctions are not categorical, and there's no reason they should be, unless motivated by a specific philosophical problematic.
Don’t worry, I have callouses. Husserl, I like, I frequently refer to his critique of natualism. Heidegger, not so much, although I’ve been reading a bit more on him. But you’re just offering generalities. In fact not that much is written on this distinction in current philosophy.
Quoting Pseudonym
I said ‘what has become very confused in current culture’. I didn’t single anyone out. Have a read of The Core of Mind and Cosmos if you haven’t encountered it before, it expands on the idea.
Quoting Janus
What interests me is whether there are different modes or levels of reality - whether some things are more or less real than others. And I think this is a way of exploring it.
Yes but it's not "confusion" it's disagreement, logical, sane disagreement. Nagel takes exactly the same line as you seem to be doing - "Since then the book has attracted a good deal of critical attention, which is not surprising given the entrenchment of the world view that it attacks"
I would forward the possibility that it's received a good deal of critical attention because there's a lot in it worthy of criticism.
Nagel fails to make a single argument in the whole piece. All he does is presume various, highly contended issues to be self-evidently true just because they seem so to him, and then build an entire castle in the air on the back of those weak presumptions.
As I said about your opening piece, this is all genuinely interesting as an insight into the way others see the world, but it doesn't show anyone else to be wrong, confused or any other negative term you care to throw in to push your agenda.
'However what has become very contentious, in current culture, is the view that that the mind, which in some sense must precede science, is believed to be a mere consequence or output of fundamentally physical processes - even though what is ‘fundamentally physical’ is still such an open question.'
As regards Nagel - of course he received scorching criticism for challenging the consensus view, the popular orthodoxy of 'neo-Darwinian materialism'. As one (friendly) reviewer said, imagine if your local pastor started quoting Nietzsche; the congregation would wonder what had gotten into him. That is pretty well how the academic world reacted.
Quoting Pseudonym
I prefer to characterise it as 'advocating a philosophical attitude'.
But distinctions only matter to the degree that something is at stake in them: that they constitute a difference that makes a difference. Your particular favoured distinction is one with theological import: but absent that context, it is not clear that it has any significance whatsoever. But of course, everywhere you might care to look, distinctions of the kind are made: ontic and ontological (Heidegger), virtual, actual, possible (Bergson, Deleuze), real, symbolic, imaginary (Lacanian psychoanalysis), ens reale, ens rationis, esse objectivum (Deely, Bains), formal, numerical, real distinctions (Descartes, Alliez), and so on and so on. Each responds to a particular problem, aims to clarify and help think through a certain issue.
Your particular issue is how much you can desubstantialize and delegitimate this world in favour of the neverneverland of ideality and divinity, which is fine if you're into that kind of thing, but not everyone is. That said, I find the being/existence distinction useful to the extent that we can talk about the being of all sorts of things that don't exist just fine. Existence is a largely trivial affair anyway, which is something that Quine quite nicely pointed out all those years ago.
You really ought to read Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics. If you can put aside your weird nouopormorphic take on Being, you might find much to agree with: "For the Greeks “Being” says constancy in a twofold sense: (1) standing-in-itself as arising and standing forth (phusis); (2) but, as such, “constantly,” that is, enduringly, abiding (ousia). Not-to-be accordingly means to step out of such constancy that has stood-forth in itself: existasthai—“existence,” “to exist” means, for the Greeks, precisely not-to-be. The thoughtlessness and vapidity with which one uses the words “existence” and “to exist” as designations for Being offer fresh evidence of our alienation from Being and from an originally powerful and definite interpretation of it." (Introduction, p. 70).
Based on @Michael's poll here, only 35% of respondents at this forum were non-skeptical realists, and only 30% were physicalists, so I think Nagel is barking up the wrong tree if he thinks those are consensus positions.
I think there is much more richness and diversity in modern thinking about Life, the Universe and Everything than Nagel is prepared to admit.
E&OE - the percentages may change with new votes since I posted this.
This is probably the better survey to use. 81.6% non-skeptical realists and 56.5% physicalists. Ours is a small (and probably unrepresentative) sample.
It's interesting you mention this. It's something that I've noticed here two. There's only two real consensus issues among philosophers according to the Phil Papers survey, David Chalmers even highlighted them in his lecture about the results.
One is non-skeptical Realism 81.6%, the other is Atheism 72.8%.
Ive not analysed this statistically, but I'd say more than half of the metaphysical discussions on this site end up either about Realism (in some sense), or Theism. The only two topics about which academic philosophy feel there is less than average to discuss.
I suggest that you consider "substance" in Aristotle's usage as that which substantiates. He introduces it in his logic, to ground logic in the individual, the particular, so that the particular individual objects, which he calls "primary substance" are what give substance to logic. This is like empirical evidence. Empirical evidence is what substantiates a theory.
So in his Physics, substance is expressed as matter. Existing forms are described by logical expressions, propositions and such. But forms which are continually changing, and the forms are substantiated, grounded, by material existence, matter providing the potential for change. You can see this principle at play even in modern quantum physics, in wave-particle duality. The wave-function is the formula, the form, which must be substantiated by the empirical observation of the photoelectric effect, in material existence, the particle.
In Aristotle's biology, substance is given to form. The soul, being a principle of actuality, a form, is seen as prior to, and a necessary condition for the material existence a the living body.
So in his Metaphysics, he looks to substantiate (ground) the existence of matter itself. He sees a need to substantiate material existence with forms, claiming that a material thing can only exists as what it is, and nothing else. So the actuality, that a thing is what it is, its form, is necessarily prior to its potential to be something else. He has already described a "secondary substance" in his logic which is formal, and his biology also describes a formal substance. This is the principle which Neo-Platonists adopt, claiming that Forms are prior to material existence.
So of all the terms you've introduced, "substance" is the most comprehensive because it allows for a clear distinction between the two different ways of using it, with "primary" and "secondary" substance. None of the other terms provide such a system for distinguishing these two fundamentally different usages, and they tend to mix up these categories in ambiguity.
Quoting WayfarerThe definition would seem to include numbers: they have identity, being distinct from each other. The example seems to include only temporal objects, of which the definition makes no mention. I think the definition needs rework since you seem to group numbers as real, but not existent.
And wouldn't it be noumena, not phenomena? Do stars on the far side of the galaxy not exist because we can't experience them? That would be an idealistic notion that doesn't seem represented in the definition.
My own investigation keeps pushing me more to idealism when pressed about the nature of an existent thing-in-itself, as opposed to the identity that I give it as a phenomenon. So I'm actually quite open to the example as phenomena, and not as a noumena.
Your example would accept the existence of the universe only if time is put outside the universe, since only then can the universe be a temporal object with a time before which it was not in existence.
Real: I'm fine with your 'real' definition. My own view is that given that the universe is the manifestation of what are 'real' laws, the universe is real. That's just me though. Your definitions of 'exist' and 'real' both seem to lack an ontological statement, with which I can again relate. You seem possibly to reserve that distinction for 'being':
OK, a possible ontological statement, but it seems to go in a personal direction from there:
So we're different than animals, despite the lack of evidence for this? I don't find it offensive to include my species among them. Anyway, it seems to have stopped being an ontological statement, and again been reduced to a relation: Things exist only as phenomena a specific 'being', and are real only as understood by said special 'being'. I'm probably making a strawman of this, but that's how it came across to me.
Why is that stance 'confused'?
Anyway, my primary point was about the 'exists' definition seemingly not matching the examples following it.
Where is the he ontology of life, matter, and perception? If there was one that was agreed upon then the words become incidental. In my ontology, all of this becomes a matter of perception of memory by the mind.
I’d said:
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You replied:
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That’s part of the problem, but even when they’re distinguished from eachother, it can sometimes still be problematic they mean metaphysically.
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That’s what I’ve read too. I often say that “exist” is about elements of metaphysics. But you’re saying, maybe with good justification, that the meaning of “exist” is meaning is more limited, and doesn’t include timeless abstract if-then facts. That’s fair and reasonable. So not all elements of metaphysics “exist”.
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That’s fine with me, because I’ve never said that the timeless abstract if-then facts, or complex systems of inter-referring timeless abstract if-then facts, that I refer to “exist”. …even if there’s no reason to believe that your experience is other than such a system.
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Yes, it makes sense to not call those things “existent”.
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I just use “Reality” or “All of Reality” to mean “All”, in its broadest sense. I don’t think anyone can establish or demonstrate that that isn’t more than those discussable and describable metaphysical things that you listed. I don’t think all of Reality is subject to demonstration, argument, description or discussion. I don’t think it would even make sense to speak of a demonstration otherwise.
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I don’t think it’s necessary to argue which metaphysical things are “real”, and which aren’t, in some metaphysical sense for comparing metaphysical things, whatever comparison that would be, whatever that would mean. It seems like an arbitrary label and an unnecessary, unmeaningful distinction.
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But I’d say that, among the timeless abstract objects, there’s something special about timeless abstract facts, such as timeless abstract if-then facts, because, whether or not someone wants to call them “real”, they have positive truth-value, and, real or not, in an inter-referring system of them, they have relation to eachother. …relation that couldn’t care less if they’re designated “real”.
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Possibility-stories and possibility-worlds must be self-consistent, because they consist of abstract facts, and there’s no such thing as mutually-inconsistent facts.
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…an inconsistent story would be an impossibility-story, and an inconsistent world would be an impossibility-world.
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Prime numbers other than 1 can be said to be composed of parts, because they can be gotten by adding smaller numbers. In fact, isn’t addition closer than multiplication to what we usually mean by combining parts?
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Surely you don’t mean that the other animals aren’t beings too.
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Come again?
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At first it seemed that you meant, by “a being”, a conscious, experiencing entity such as a human or other animals.
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But, below, you’re referring to an attribute or basis of such beings.
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That doesn’t sound inconsistent with my definition of Consciousness as the property of being a purposefully-responsive device.
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…except that it seems to make or posit something confusing, complicated or difficult to explain—and not necessary for an explanation or description of us.
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Of course the property of being a purposefully-responsive device is something that all of us animals have in common, and so it’s sometimes argued that we’re all the same at center. Sure, that can be said, but it doesn’t mean that we’re all the same, just because we have that in common. We could be called different kinds of the same thing, but that doesn’t make all of us the same.
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During life, we’re each obviously a separate different individual. At the end of lives, during shutdown, we’re increasingly similar, as sleep deepens, and there’s no longer such a thing as individuality, or (eventually) even an awareness that there ever was or could be such a thing as individuality, identity, worldly life, time or events.
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Of course arguably, and I don’t deny it, this temporary (over one or many finite temporary lives) existence as an individual being doesn’t match the significance, at the end-of-lives, of the eventual and timeless absence of identity, in the final deep sleep.
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So it could be said that, eventually and timelessly, where it counts the most, we aren’t individuals with identity.
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And so I’ve argued that, though we’ve been in life for so long that it’s what we’re used to, that final and timeless part of our lives, at the end-of-lives, is the more usual and normal state, because timeless beats temporary; and final rest beats intermediate striving.
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One definition of “natural” is “usual and normal”, and so I suggest that the timeless rest at the end of lives is our natural state.
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But don’t be too sure that it will be at the end of this life. Probably not, in my opinion.
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Anyway, at the end-of-lives we approach the Nothing that’s the quiescent background behind the timeless abstract if-thens that constitute our experience-stories. That Nothing is arguably what’s most natural and fundamental.
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Yes, although, for each of us, we and our surroundings are the two halves of the complementary pair that is our life-experience possibility-story--In that story we’re what’s essential, central and primary. It’s from our point of view, and obviously that makes us special. …as the experiencer in whose point-of-view the story is.
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The possibility-world in which we live is just the setting for our experience, which is primary.
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That’s why I say that you and your predispositions, making you the protagonist of a life-experience possibility-story, are the reason why you’re in a life. Briefly, you’re in a life, a particular one, because of who you are.
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Sometimes it’s tempting to say, “I didn’t ask to be born!”, but I don’t think that holds up under examination. Our own role in why we were born is something to own-up to.
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But why in a societal-world like this one? Probably explainable if we were sufficiently awful in the previous life (though I say that previous lives are indeterminate, not just unknowable).
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Sure, Science-Worship.
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There’s no such thing as “if we were not beings”, because then there wouldn’t be any “We”.
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1. We’re animals.
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2. All animals, including us, react to stimuli--as purposefully-responsive devices.
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3. But I don’t deny that human-ness has a special unique potential.
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Yes.
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Michael Ossipoff
Of course, in the physical story, all animals, including humans, are physical. The self-consistent-ness of your life-experience possibility-story requires a physical origin and body for humans.
But where you're confused is if you think that the physical world is metaphysically fundamental and primary.
(...but I don't claim that you're alone in that position)
This notion that all metaphysical positions are "equally defensible" beliefs just isn't correct. Materialism isn't defensible.
Michael Ossipoff
Right, so the 75% of philosophers who accept scientific Realism are not just mistaken, they're actually writing jibberish because such a view is not even defensible? That's quite a claim.
Yes.
What, jibberish from professional academic philosophers? The emperor is unclothed?
Well, maybe it results from the "Publish or Perish" imperative.
Sure.
I'm always willing to support my claims. I've been supporting that one in various posts. i'll do so again here in this thread, as one of my next postings.
Michael Ossipoff
That's pretty much it. There is lots of economic incentive for academia to publish what is acceptable. It's actually pretty easy to accomplish as opposed to furthering knowledge with original insights. One only needs to learn how to footnote some acceptable academic and one is home free. Academia pretty much defines itself by footnotes. It is what is stressed most in all courses.
Being is a part of reality which has specific properties, like intelligence. Reality is what we experience. Existence is affirmative which shows that reality is objectively there or not, an illusion.
These are examples, not a definition.
Quoting Wayfarer
The characters in a novel stand apart from one another, so under your definition they exist. Same goes for numbers. So, we can say that anything that stands out, that is distinct for us, exists. Obviously there may be different categories of existence; things exists in different ways and contexts. On the other hand, you could define what it means to be existent more narrowly in reference only to those entities which can be apprehended by the senses.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think this is right. 'Being' is most commonly used to denote living, self-regulating or organic entities, and not exclusively human beings. It is sometimes used in an even wider context. It is not incoherent to speak of the being of a rock, for example.The very term 'human being' where 'being' is qualified by 'human' shows that we are restricting the normal use of the term in this particular usage.
I also think your category of what is to be termed 'real' is artificially narrow, and certainly does not reflect common usage.
I can appreciate the value of attempting to achieve an account of these terms, an acount which is as clear, comprehensive, coherent and systematic as possible. Is that what you are trying to do?
As a tentative starting point, which could be further refined:
'Existence' refers to anything that is distinct: fundamental particles exist, numbers exist, emotions exist, the economy exists, fictional characters exist, God exists, and so on. In other words everything you can name exists. Anything we can name must be distinct insofar as we can name it; however there are obviously degrees of distinctness, which means that things can have a more or less distinct existence.
'Being' refers to real, as opposed to imaginary, entities. So, fictional characters have no being. God, if he is real, has being and if he is imaginary does not have being. Also those things which are the mere qualities or relations of things do not have being. So, for example, emotions, considered as generalities, have no being, and nor do numbers or the economy. In general, maybe it could be said that what is conceptual is that which has no being and what is actual is that which has being.
Specific thoughts and emotions have being, insofar as we are affected by them. So, maybe we could say that being is actuality; it is what really acts on us and affects us. For example, the economy does not affect us; it is the actual exigencies of labour, money and goods that affects us; but the thought of the economy can affect us; make us more or less confident and consequently more or less motivated to earn, save or spend money, and so on.
'Real' refers to those things which are not imaginary. So, there can be real numbers and imaginary numbers, real love and imaginary love, real causes and imaginary causes, and so on.
This is only a start, it can be refined and may even need correcting. I will be well pleased to see refinements and corrections, because that is how we learn.
So are possible beings then beings that exist? Or simply beings that could exist?
Does the possible itself exist? And is it real if it doesn't? In what sense does the possible have being?
And does the impossible exist if it is the concrete limit to what could in fact exist? Do the limits on existence count as part of existence?
I think it is obvious that all these are questions that relate to "existence" as an ontological qualifier. It is not wrong to want to systematise our use of these terms in a way that can make our ontological commitments clear.
I will. That passage you quoted certainly resonates. I have read bits and pieces of Heidegger, but I've been put off by his political affiliations, and also the reputed difficulty of understanding Being and Time. But I will make the effort with that book.
Quoting andrewk
But I don’t think this Forum is representative. I think it is widely assumed that the de facto philosophy of secular culture is some form of materialism or at least scientific naturalism functioning as normative view. One of the reactions to Nagel's book was by Jerry Coyne, who said 'The view that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics must be true unless you’re religious”. That was certainly the view of most of Nagel's critics.
Quoting noAxioms
Well, as I said previously, numbers are in some sense only identity. It's not that they have an identity - '7' can't be anything other than '7'. And '7' says all there is to know about it - you can carve the symbol in stone, draw it, or represent it in binary code, but at the end of all that, 7=7. So perhaps what I meant by 'having an identity' is 'being an individual existent'. But I admit, it's blurry.
As regards the existence of unperceived things - I don't think that transcendental idealism says that the phenomenal existence of individual things is causally dependent on them being perceived. It's a more subtle point than that; something like: whatever we understand 'existence' to mean, there is a foundational aspect of that which is provided by the mind. So if we imagine the non-existence of non-perceived stars, you're actually contemplating them not existing - you're trying to imagine them not being there. But that still takes place within the horizon of the imagination and perception. It's their 'imagined non-existence' that you're considering when doing that.
'Noumenal' really means something like 'an ideal object' - something like a geometric or arithmetical truth which the mind knows by becoming united with, in a way that it cannot for knowledge of objects, which is mediated by the senses. (The Wiki article on Noumenon is quite informative.)
Quoting noAxioms
I already got taken to task on that, and re-wrote the paragraph further down. I will take it up elsewhere as I actually believe it to be true, but it's a separate argument.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is a good way of putting it. I will take that on board.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Animals are ‘beings’ or ‘sentient beings’. Humans are rational sentient beings. Accordingly, humans are distinguished by their ability to understand abstract truths, to use language and imagination, and to understand different levels of reality; we have estimated the size and age of the Universe, for example. Animals can't do anything like that. (I'm rather disappointed by the way in which humans are assumed to be merely or simply animals in current culture - not that this disparages animals, but it does disparage humans.)
Quoting Thorongil
As I said my approach is heuristic, not systematic. I'm trying to sketch out some of the ways in which the terms have different dimensions of meaning.
Quoting Janus
Well, I did mention in the OP that I wasn't considering imaginative characters, but sure - Hamlet is real, in that we all know what the term means - but did Hamlet exist? Well, no, he exists as a dramatic character. The entire world of fiction and drama is inhabited by such characters (as Popper recognised in his 'Three Worlds' model.)
As regards whether things exist 'in different ways' - this is just the point at issue. You see, I think that the current consensus is that things either exist, or they don't and that the term is univocal - which is the very reason why 'what exists' and 'what is real' are commonly thought to be identical.
So in common discourse, the number 7 exists, as does the Moon. The square root of 2 doesn't exist, neither do unicorns. But I'm trying to develop the argument that numbers (etc) are real in a different sense or mode to the phenomenal - real but not existent. The domain of natural numbers is real - but where does it exist? Only 'in the mind'? You see, I think there's something the matter with that - we're trying to locate the idea spatially, asking 'where it is', but the manner in which number is real, is in some sense prior to space and time itself.
For a non-rational animal, numbers and rational inference are simply not discernable. Whereas the human intelligence automatically incorporates numerical and rational and linguistic elements and understands the world through them. I don't think that is sufficiently acknowledged in a lot of current philosophy, as it assumes that what is real is 'out there', that it must 'objectively exist'. But a large part of what we know is 'out there' is grounded in those very linguistic and arithmetical abilities which are inherent in the mind itself.
I think it is assumed that such things as number (etc) are the product of the evolved intelligence. So in this scenario, maths is a convenient and powerful mental technique that produces results, but it doesn't correspond to anything real, as the idea of there being any kind of innate rational order in the Universe is well and truly out of fashion, to the point of being politically incorrect. I mean, about the only current philosophers who take it seriously are the neo-Thomists.
Quoting Janus
I think that's technically incorrect - whether you believe in God or not. In the classical theistic tradition, God doesn't 'have' being, but is Being. Individuals are only real because they're instantiations of being - their being is bestowed by, or borrowed from, the sole source of being.
Anyway, my point about 'being' - humans are called 'beings' for a reason. And that reason is that what I think humans ultimately are, is the Universe understanding itself. We nowadays have the conceit that humans are simply a blip in the immense cosmos - what was Hawkings' charming phrase, 'chemical scum'? - which from the viewpoint of understanding 'deep time' and 'deep space' might be true. But who knows 'deep time' and 'deep space'? What supplies the perspective within which all of those measures are taken? When Neils Bohr said 'a physicist is only an atom's way of looking at itself' he wasn't entirely joking.
I think you and I agree that Coyne's view, and that of many others like him, is simplistic, dogmatic and unimaginative. It is the view of adherents of Scientism, a type of adherent for which I have yet to find a satisfactory individual noun, since Scientist is already taken and denotes something good. I've toyed with Scientismist, but lately I am more drawn to Science Worshipper. My view as a science enthusiast (but definitely not worshipper) is that Science Worshippers are the worst enemies science has, as they provide validation to idiots like global warming denialists that want to reject science entirely.
Where we differ is in our assessment of how dominant the malaise of Science Worship is. I am less pessimistic than you or Nagel. While there are plenty of SWs around, and they do tend to congregate in certain places, and it may well be the most commonly held worldview in educated, secular society, I think it is a long way short of being a consensus. I seem to constantly encounter educated, science-literate people with all sorts of different approaches to mysticism, spirituality and the ineffable.
What concerns me about Nagel's writing is that he directs his criticism at secular culture, rather than at the prevalence of Scientism within that culture. Hence he implies that Scientism is an irrevocable consequence of secular culture. That creates a great risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Unless we want to turn the ship back towards theocracy and religious intolerance, what is needed is to combat the influence and popularity of Scientism within secular culture, rather than anathematise secularism itself.
If the non-Australians will forgive me for a very parochial diversion, it's a bit like the Liberal party. While my philosophy leans more towards the equality and compassion values that drive the Labor party than the freedom value that drives Liberal, I believe the two-party system is very valuable and wish to see the Liberal party survive, even though I despise the politics of most of its current members, who are really either heartless, reactionary conservatives or heartless, Randian neo-liberals. What I would like to see is the pushback of those influences in the Liberal party - a return to something more like what Malcolm Fraser, Andrew Peacock and John Hewson stood for, rather than the demise of the Liberal party itself. IMHO to seek the demise of the Liberal party is, arguably to threaten democracy while to seek to reduce the influence of the above noxious groups is to strengthen democracy. Substitute secularism for the Liberal Party and Science Worshippers for the conservatives and Randians, and you have my view on scientism in secular culture.
I didn't say Hamlet is real, though; under the scheme I proposed Hamlet exists, but is imaginary; that is, not real. Hamlet exists because he satisfies the condition of "standing apart" of being distinct. You appear to contradict yourself here: you ask, 'Did Hamlet exist'? and you answer 'No, he exists as a dramatic character'. My answer would be that he did exist after Shakespeare created him.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, and you, puzzlingly, appear to be disagreeing with me at the very point I am making this distinction. See above.
Quoting Wayfarer
I disagree with this, because 'being' can be used as either a noun or a verb, and it makes sense to say that any entity is being, when using 'being' as a verb. When used as a noun being is an attribute, and in that context it makes perfect sense to say that God (if God is conceived of as an entity), or any other entity, has being. To say that God is being; in the sense of substance would be to objectify God in a kind of pantheistic way. I think of God as spirit, and I think of spirit as the life immanent to being, a life which manifests more or less in different types of being.
I have proposed before in relation to this terminological problem that those we now call 'scientists' should be called sciencers, and the term 'scientist' should be reserved for those ideologues who militate against all other forms of human discourse and understanding and/ or claim that they can all be subsumed by science.
Alright.
It seems like one result of your distinction would be that something could be real and not exist or could be and not exist, which is surely absurd. Am I wrong? I want to say that the statement "the chair is" is equivalent to saying that "the chair exists."
I would call them positivists.
Scientistic claims are more comprehensive than those made by mere positivism. So all scientists (in my preferred sense of the word) are positivists, but not all positivist are scientists.
LOL, reminds me of Peirce's 'pragmaticists'; although to be accurate that would be 'scienticists'. The simple solution would be the one I proposed first, but the difficulty would be getting everybody to stop using 'scientist' as the general term, and start using 'sciencer' instead. I don't think most people see scientism as being that big of a problem.
I quite like the idea of science practitioners being called Natural Philosophers again, like Newton was. Do you think philosophers would object? Would we have a demarcation dispute? Possible strikes? [Hoary old joke looms in memory about the world's philosophers going on strike and nobody noticing. Was that in H2G2?]
Or scientisticisticians
They might ask what the alternative term for philosophers would then be. Unnatural Philosophers? Supernatural Philosophers? Subnatural Philosophers?
The meaning of 'secular' is strictly speaking, simply a system of governance that provides a framework without making any judgement about matters spiritual. But in practice it has often come to mean a belief-system in its own right - that 'secular values' are those which are ostensibly NOT grounded in anything beyond the scope of naturalism. So on the one hand, secularism pretends to be 'value free', to present a picture of the world shorn of superstitious beliefs and religious ideas: but then it becomes a de facto religious view in it's own right, namely, one that is based on physicalism, evolutionary biology, and so on, as if these are sufficient sources for normative beliefs. (Sam Harris is the most 'positive' advocate of such views, in that he wishes to create a scientifically-grounded ethics, although really it is basically a modernised utilitarianism. But there are other such efforts, 'Good without God', atheist associations, and so on.)
So - I don't think Nagel is criticizing liberalism per se, but he's criticizing the (often implicit) philosophy which he describes as 'evolutionary materialism', which is assumed by many secular philosophers to underwrite modern liberal culture. And after all, evolutionary biology wears 'the white lab coat of authority'. So I have nothing but respect for Nagel, and thank heavens he's a tenured philosopher who wasn't brought down by the Darwinist mob.
Quoting Thorongil
I am talking more in Platonist terms - that numbers, universals, and so on, are real, but that they're not existent as phenomena. Whenever you look at a number, what you're looking at is a symbol. But the number itself is a value which can only be 'seen' by a mind; it's an 'intelligible object', in traditional parlance. (That is why I keep harking back to the passage on Augustine and Intelligible Objects. )
And that Platonistic understanding was the consequence of a very long critical tradition of philosophical analysis, which has been mostly abandoned since the Middle Ages. That is because nominalists were practically victorious over the scholastic realists, and this has had many consequences. It affects the way that culture itself understands the nature of reality; it tends to make us instinctive scientific realists, even if not consciously.
This is because scientific (as distinct from scholastic) realism is founded on the basis of 'mind-independent entities' - that what is real, exists independently of anything humans do or believe. Scientific realism presents a picture of the 'vast universe in space and time' within which humans are a recent, emergent phenomenon - the so-called 'mere blip'. But I'm arguing that even those tropes are grounded in judgements and perspectives which are ultimately intellectual in nature, which are products of the mind. Then we 'forget' where those judgements originate - we see from inside that perspective, without seeing that it is a perspective. I don't want to go down the rabbit-hole of Nietzschean 'perspectivism' - that everything is simply a matter of perspective; I agree that there are more and less objectively true statements and genuine scientific discovery. But I also can't accept the 'already-out-there' attitude of scientific realism, because the world is in some vital sense a construct - Schopenhauer's 'vorstellung', Buddhism's 'vikalpa'. 'Scientism' proceeds by pretending that this 'constructed world' exists entirely independently of the mind that constructs it. That is where the problem lies.
But are possibilities real? Do possibilities exist? How do you answer there?
They seem real in that they are there, just not yet substantially expressed. They don't exist as being, but do we need to stretch "exist" to include the post-hoc fact of a potential to become?
And was a possibility is substantially expressed, it no longer exists. Being is the end of becoming. (Or is it the birth of fresh becomings and so no more than all part of the real flow?)
I think the point is that people jump to familiar positions on what is a far more complex issue. The terminology speaks for a metaphysical point of view. So you can't actually examine the definitions to find the proper answers. The terminology is instead attempting to stabilise some particular metaphysical view ... which itself ought to be the thing in play.
Scientists who work at the systems science end of things - who take an Aristotelean and holistic view - do self-consciously call themselves natural philosophers.
For example, Stan Salthe:
So this is a holist vs a reductionist distinction, from the working scientist point of view.
I would say 7 exists, but not in an ontological Platonic sort of way, but rather more like existential quantification. You are using the word differently, that's all.
Quoting WayfarerThe domain of this universe is also real, but similarly has no 'where' to its existence. North of the next universe on God's shelf? (the natural numbers are kept in his box of playing cards)
People currently called philosophers would then need a prefix or suffix to indicate the type of philosopher they are, eg 'ethical philosopher, 'philosopher of language', etc. In a sense it would be philosophy re-absorbing the activity that is currently labelled science.
I'm interested that you think metaphysics is at an end. Why do you think that? There's certainly a lot of metaphysical discussion and debate goes on here.
I take your use of the word "as" here to indicate that they do still exist, but in a manner different from other things. That seems obvious to me. My concern was that you might say that such things, because they are not what you take to be "phenomena," do not exist at all.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, this is one bit of reverse Whig history that you and I agree on. The nominalists haven't won the argument, however, merely the battle for adherents among professional philosophers. I might make a point about this, though, which is that it's strange to see a Buddhist in opposition to nominalism. One of the reasons that holds me back from Buddhism is its hyper-nominalism. Perhaps you have another take, but I've never encountered a Buddhist who isn't a nominalist, either in the primary literature or in person, besides apparently yourself. I think idealism is compatible with Buddhism, and in fact regard the Yogacara school as idealist, but idealism, in itself, is not necessarily opposed to nominalism.
The point I am grappling with is that there are ‘degrees of reality’, which I don’t think is recognised in modern philosophy. The only place I see it explicitly acknowledged is in the Thomists, for example, Maritain’s Degrees of Knowledge (which is a daunting read.) There’s also a mention of the idea still persisting in 17th C philosophy in this article.
Quoting Thorongil
I know! I’ve become acutely aware of that. I actually created a thread on Dharma Wheel on this very topic.
One point I made in that thread is the rather mischievous suggestion that Buddhists must accept the reality of Universals - because that’s exactly what ‘the Buddha’ is! After all, the historical person of Gotama is in some respects only a vehicle or precursor for ‘the Tathagatha’, which (or who) periodically manifests ‘for the benefit of all sentient beings’ - which is why Mah?y?na Buddhism always talks in terms of ‘the Buddhas’. So if the Buddha is not ‘a supreme archetype’, then I’m not sure what is. But I didn’t want to push that line of argument.
After some debate the conclusion I came to was:
Still a lot ‘up in the air’, though.
Buddha, apparently suggested that this should not be, which is possibly why he wrote nothing down. But, people being people need someone to worship and went ahead and did it any way. With that said, the basic philosophy of Buddha (for what it's worth since he's didn't write anything down) are the Four Noble Truths and the Eight Fold Path, which is just a plain good insight and advice. Beyond this, you just get your normal every day groups of people seeking Enlightenment and pretty much ignoring the sound advice of Buddha. Go figure. BTW, universalism and nominalism its just one of those add-ons which one can gets for free for joining one of the Buddhist sects.
There may be degrees of reality, yes. I'm inclined to think so. But each of those degrees will exist in some manner or another. That's my point. A real but non-existent thing is a contradiction in terms, for a real thing is that which actually exists, as opposed to what is only imagined or potential.
Quoting Wayfarer
Interesting take. I suspected you would go down something like this route. I read this as an inconsistency within Buddhist thought. The classic way to resolve it, I gather, is the notion of the Two Truths, whereby the ultimate truth that the Buddha has access to and represents may contradict the truth of ordinary perceptual reality, but I'm wary of this idea. In the medieval West, it was Siger Brabant who introduced (or was accused of introducing) the notion of "double truth," which is to say that there could be truths of reason and truths of faith that mutually contradict. But as Aquinas says, "only the false is opposed to the true, as is clearly evident from an examination of their definitions, it is impossible that the truth of faith should be opposed to those principles that the human reason knows naturally." Truth cannot contradict truth definitionally, in other words.
This idea of "degrees of reality" is probably best formulated by the Neo-Platonists. Plotinus describes an "emanation", and Proclus a "procession". Simply stated it is a philosophy of how the One is related to the Many. It's very interesting stuff if you can get beyond the appearance of mysticism. I agree that this is a metaphysics which has totally slipped the grasp of modern philosophy. Nevertheless, it is perhaps the most important metaphysics because its subject is the validation of intelligible objects (such as mathematical principles), (as Forms), in relation to the eternal. In modern, western society, we tend to simply assume that if it's mathematical then it's valid and therefore an eternal truth.
I don't think they are real by definition, but they certainly exist, just as impossible things don't and can't exist.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't think that what becomes doesn't exist. The contrast between being and becoming is between the kind of existence under consideration. To say of a thing that it becomes is to say that it changes over and within time, while to say of a thing that it is is to say that it exists immutably either eternally or outside of time. To use my example, the chair as concept is, while the chair as percept becomes. A concept doesn't exist in time, but physical objects like chairs do.
What occurs to me right away is the context dependence of these words. Any of them standing alone is utterly worthless, it seems to me. Yet any of them could be put use by a skillful writer in a way that brings them to life.
I must say that I think they are synonyms. It also seems to me that any fundamental differences would be the result of a text imposing such differences (as yours does here). Of course you are free to build a system of distinctions from ordinary language (other philosophers have), but I wonder if it's worth the trouble.
Quoting Wayfarer
What comes to my mind is a child learning the word 'real.' As I remember and project it, the real is 'out there' in the sense of being shared by others. The child learns that no one else can experience her dream first hand. She has to use words to paint a picture. The people in her dream (her parents perhaps) weren't really there. If they were really there, they would remember it.
I still think that's the best way to think of 'reality' or objectivity. It is shared.
As far as 'mind' goes, that seems to be a synonym of experience. At the same time, because perhaps we see 'through' the lens of a particular brain and body, it is understood also as the condition for the possibility of experience. It is a vessel 'in' which or 'through' which experience pours and is shaped. It is the dancer and the dance, but in a way that's confusing. Nevertheless, we successfully use 'mind' when we're not trying to find a context/purpose independent definition of mind and its implied other. Sometimes metaphysics seems be exactly this thrust against particular context and purpose. This is sometimes great, since the result is less context and purpose dependent. [But the dove that flies faster in thin air doesn't fly at all in a vacuum.]
:ok:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
:groan:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Because modern science insists that only what is sensible (sense-able) is real, whereas for the ancients, mathematical intuition was a means to discern the supra-sensible.
Quoting Thorongil
To cite a text from pre-medieval theology. It’s from the SEP entry on John Scotus Eirugena. This is from the section of the article on a chapter from his main philosophical work, The Four Divisions of Nature.
This understanding of there being different levels of being was what, I think, became collapsed by the later Duns Scotus with the assertion of the ‘univocity of being’. (While it’s obviously an arcane argument, something in Eirugena’s insight rings true as far as I’m concerned. It’s also very much related to what I’m trying to understand. )
Quoting Thorongil
I do understand your hesitation. The European version of ‘two truths’ was different to the Buddhist - I believe it was actually adapted from Avicenna, who used it to differentiate the religious beliefs of the common people from the insight of the philosopher/sage - the former was a kind of ‘necessary illusion’.
I’m still trying to reconcile the apparent conflict between Buddhist ‘nominalism’ and Platonic philosophy. I think the fundamental issue is that they belong to vastly different domains of discourse. But these are all deep questions.
Quoting foo
As I mentioned before, I am intending to enroll in an external course given by Oxford, on metaphysics, which is called ‘Being, reality and existence’. The fact of that title is one of the reasons I’m interested in it. I think there’s a genuine distinction between the terms, and the reason the distinction has been lost is indeed metaphysical. That is why we can only understand things on a horizontal plane, so to speak.
Quoting foo
There’s more to mind than experience - which is after all textbook empiricism. But as Kant showed, the mind makes use of the categories of the understanding, the primary intuitions, and so on, in order to understand. So there’s more to that than just ‘experience’, there’s also intellectual capacity.
And the point I am pressing, is that rationality itself - the ability to compare, to say ‘this means that’, to discern similarities and differences - precedes the particular sciences, such as physics, biology, and so on. So nowadays it seems assumed that these faculties can be explained as adaptations, as if this is a theory that accounts for the nature of reason. That is what I’m saying is ass-about. A Darwin doesn’t explain an Einstein. :smile:
Show me a single scientist who doesn't think mathematics is real. They use it every day. You're just trying to set up scientists as some kind of cultists just so you can better justify your own brand of mysticism.
I don't know a single published scientist who denies the existence of non-material things like mathematics. I don't know a single published scientist who thinks that only what we can currently sense exists.
Either quote the people who's opinions you're arguing against or stop making strawman to knock down.
The ontological status of mathematics is not something that has been resolved; this is the age-old question of whether maths is invented or discovered and it's still a vexed question. There are always mathematical Platonists, who accept that mathematics is real in the sense of not simply being the creation of the mind. But there are many more who believe that mathematics is invented rather than being discovered.
A recent, influential Platonist was Kurt Godel - see the Godel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth, Rebecca Goldstein:
But there are many mathematicians and scientists who are not mathematical Platonists. Their explanations are grounded in evolutionary and cognitive science. In fact one of the avowed aims of Lakoff and Johnson's book, 'Where Mathematics Come From', is to deflate 'the romance of maths', that:
There's a rather arcane argument, called 'the indispensability argument for mathematics', that is felt to be required by the existence of mathematical objects. The article says 'standard readings of mathematical claims entail the existence of mathematical objects. But, our best epistemic theories seem to debar any knowledge of mathematical objects.' And why do 'our best epistemic theories' seem to debar such knowledge? The argument goes as follows:
My bolds. So the Platonist claim regarding the ontological status of numbers - that number is real but non-sensory - is the target of this argument, on the grounds that 'our best' (i.e. 'empiricist') theories of knowledge don't allow for the existence of real but non-empirical entities, such as number. (I love that 'rationalists' is put in scare quotes, like they're a throwback to another age.)
Quoting Pseudonym
I'm simply referring to the principle of empiricism whereby hypotheses are subject to falsification with respect to measurable data. Of course, the range of human sense has been, and will continue to be, enhanced by technologies, such as the LHC and the Hubble Telescope. But whatever can be detected by such devices, is to be validated with respect to data that is observable by the five sense. Consider the way that paranormal scientific claims are treated - they're subjected to much higher standards of evidence than many other types of claims, because such claims are categorised as 'extraordinary', and so said to require 'extraordinary evidence'.
So all I'm saying is that modern science rules out appeals to anything like 'spiritual intuition' or 'gnosis' or 'noesis' which were the general pre-occupation of ancient philosophies. This is not a controversial claim, it is simply an historical observation.
I'm using 'real' in the sense that you propose. In that sense scientists are about the most faithful group to the idea that maths is real and you're far more likely to get dissent from philosophers. I'm well aware of the history of philosophical thought with regards to mathematics. What I was questioning was your opposing modern science with ancient views on mathematics. I'm asking you to justify your assumption that modern science takes an opposing view of mathematics. You've still failed to quote a single modern scientist who believes that mathematics is not real.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again these wildly inaccurate claims to try and justify your anti-science agenda. What paranormal claims have been subjected to "much higher" standards of evidence? Last time I checked any scientific journals, the standard of evidence expected of any new theory was pretty high. I've studied statistics to quite a high academic level and even then I can't always understand the high level of statistical rigour to which new theories are expected to rise. If you're suggesting that they get special treatment over some farmer who 'reckons' he's seen Jesus, then your either insane or disingenuous.
Personally I agree that there are different levels of reality, and this is the reason of much confusion. For example if we interpret Plato as saying that "math" exists like a "material thing", then of course it is quite naive. On the other hand in "this world" we have a lot of examples of "layers of reality". For example chairs and tables "exist" even though the standard model does not mention them! The problem is when we conflate two types of "reality".
If we give to "existence" its etymological meaning, then what "exists" is "what" arises or what is "created". Whereas "reality" is a much more general concepts, for example even "dreams" are a "reality", in some sense. The "Absolute" of many philosophies instead simply "is", since it does not "arise". The same in some sense can be said to "truths" IMO, like mathematical ones (albeit there is also an element of contingency in mathematics: the language used etc).
So In my opinion the problem that our language is insufficient to express what we mean correctly and therefore confusion arises in philosophy. For example a chair does not "exist" in the same way of a "muon" but we normally use the word "exists" for both.
What is the difference between being metaphysically defined and just being defined?
I see real, existent, and is, as synonyms.
I know you have no problem with mysticism, but some people presuppose that if something looks like mysticism it's not real philosophy. So "metaphysics" gets divided in two by these people, stuff which is intelligible from the perspective of their metaphysics, which is valid philosophy, and other metaphysics which is mysticism. Thus, when Plotinus says that Intelligence emanates from the One, and the Soul emanates from Intelligence, and the multiplicity of beings follows from the Soul, this appears to be completely backward and unintelligible to a perspective of emergence, so it's just designated as mysticism, and ignored.
Agreed. It is all real. It all exists. It all persists. The difference is how or whom can perceive it. Is it within a personal domain or a shared domain? Who knows how much is out there that cannot be perceived because we are not tuned into it, though possibly others or other life forms are? Everything is forms in the fabric of the universe, but as with a hologragram, the right reconstructive wave must be there to illuminate it. Creating distinctions where there are none merely creates confusion where there is none.
I find the distinction to be incoherent, for it amounts to saying that God is (otherwise, we couldn't attribute transcendence to him) but does not exist. Eriugena can't affirm both without contradiction. I suspect, however, that either Eriugena or Dermot Moran, the author of the SEP article, is being loose in their language, for later on in the article, Moran attributes to Eriugena the claim that "God knows that He is, but not what He is." So here God does apparently exist, while his nature is inscrutable. This means that the original quote above ought to read: "God, because of his transcendence, is said not to exist in the manner of a phenomenon or creature."
Quoting Wayfarer
Scotus didn't deny the analogy of being by asserting the univocity of being. He also wasn't a nominalist. I suspect you're getting this from Brad Gregory, but as I've said before, he's just wrong and misinformed about Scotus. If you want a villain, his name is William of Ockham, who really was a nominalist.
Modern science does not "rule out" such things; it simply does not concern itself with them on account of the fact that the whole methodology of science is founded on the principle of inter-subjective corroboration. "Spiritual intuition", "gnosis" and "noesis" cannot be subject to rigorous inter-subjective corroboration. Don't you ever get tired of this disingenuous railing against science?
No, it vigorously opposes them and invents its own mythology as place holders, the so-called Laws of Physics being the most obvious. Survival of the fittest being another. And then the totally fabricated Invisible Dark Energy and Dark Matter Universe. The latest I've run across is The Thermodynamic Imperative. The what?
I think the analogy between an an economy and a species is workable, at least to a degree. On a genetic level, though, species are hermetic; whereas as economies are not. There is a global economy, of which local economies may be considered to be parts.
I like the idea of concrete universals. This idea is to be found in Whitehead, also, who I am more familiar with than Deleuze. It is a dualistic conceit, a mere prejudice, that says that if a universal is not a sense object that it must therefore be a transcendent intelligible object. I see this as a failure of the imagination.
An interesting question about concrete universals concerns their causal status; is it only individuals that are causally efficacious? How would this question relate to the question of the relation between formal or final causation and efficient causation? I am still thinking about this question, and I am not clear enough to say much at this stage.
Some scientists may oppose and others may not. But your simplistic claim does not surprise me, since you have proven yourself to be the master purveyor of simpleminded generalizations.
Disingenuous: 'not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does'.
Why do you think my posts are disingenuous? Don't you think that might amount to ad hominem argument?
I know I am making a contentious and unpopular case, but I endeavour to do so in good faith, and on the basis of arguments.
It is quite usual to believe, nowadays, that 'science knows' or 'science proves' many things that science neither knows nor proves. I am engaged in trying to draw that out, and will continue to do so.
I guess to my ear the term "exists" means to be actualised. To be present and individuated in terms of matter, time and place. Existence is the concrete fact of being. So my interest is in how you can understand that normal definition in terms of a holistic or process metaphysics where any such actuality or individuation is a passing feature in a more general flow.
In this view, existence becomes emergent or a kind of illusion - a state of persistence due to some context of constraints. And possibility is the fundamental wellspring of being. Existence becomes not the conversion of a possibility into an actuality, but a constraint on the generality or vagueness of a potential such as to leave behind something highly individuated. A wealth of possibilities gets suppressed to produce actuality, rather than some concrete possibility getting converted into a state of substantial being.
Quoting Thorongil
Yep. That would be where we differ in that you take a theist and Platonist route here?
So I would take the Peircean position where to exist is to be actual and individuated. But to be real includes all three things of the contingent, the actual, and the necessary. So pure potential is real in that it is causal - it represents spontaneity. And then constraints are also real even if emergent in their regulative presence. Ultimately constraints express the necessity of mathematical-strength form. The laws are a necessary generality - which is why they seem timeless and Platonic, even though they can only be real via a process of material emergence.
Having said that, the emergent habits of nature would be both real and seen to exist if we could see the Cosmos unfolding in time and space as itself an individuated object. So "to exist" is tied to a point of view.
This is made explicit in natural philosophy approaches like Stan Salthe's hierarchy theory. For us, sitting at a particular scale of cosmic being, we can look down towards the very small and it eventually moves so fast that it merges into a constant (quantum) blur. Likewise we can look up to the very largest scales and things start to change so slowly that they apparently cease to change - much like a mountain range.
Anyway, the point so far as the thread is concerned is that terms shift their meanings to try to express their motivating metaphysics. And there are at least three metaphysics in play here.
The standard reductionist one which circles around nominalist and monistic views - brute existence. The Platonic one that leads to a hard dualism or frank idealism. And then a process metaphysics which is triadic or hierarchical in terms of what it considers real, and therefore which treats existence as being an issue of what causes localised habits of persistence within a backdrop of a generalised flow.
Right, and I think you do know, or should know, on account of it having been pointed out to you so often; that you are attacking a strawdog version of science. So, I don't think it's an ad hominem, because it's what you are saying in regard to science that is disingenuous; no one has claimed you are disingenuous in general, which would be ad hominous.
If you want to make a case you need solid argument. That is what seems to be lacking; you just keep repeating the same unsupported subjective opinions and references over and over. Just because it is contentious and unpopular doesn't make it a good case, you know.
Also, it seems to me that when I respond to your contentions with critical questions you make no attempt to address those questions, but instead take it personally and become offended, which makes it seems that you are personally invested in your standpoint. Now, the great thing about science is that a good scientist will do everything she can to dis-confirm her theories; yet it seems to me that you don't even want to consider the possibility that you might be mistaken. So, there is one point where you could learn from the methodology of the discipline you seem to have so little respect for.
Quoting apokrisis
This is where the 'perspectival' nature of Eirugena's argument is significant: things that exist on one level, do not exist on another.
There is a Zen koan (which once was a popular song), 'first there is a mountain'. The whole koan is: 'First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.' It's sounds like a nonsense verse, but it actually expresses the perspectival understanding of Buddhism. 'First, there is a mountain' is naive realism - oh look, a mountain. Then the Zen student, after arduous meditation, has the initial 'realisation of emptiness' - everything is seen to be devoid of 'own-being', so not truly existent. No mountain! But then, as the student's realisation matures, the real nature of the mountain is understood as if for the very first time. A mountain!
Buddhism is particularly adept at this kind of dialectical understanding. But it's also present in traditional Western philosophy, where it goes back to the Parmenides. That lead to the whole development of trying to understand what the object truly is. That unfolded over many centuries in the ancient world. Then that in turn became incorporated into Christian philosophical theology in the Medieval period. And Eriugena translated the seminal works of the mysterious 'pseudo-Dionysius' into Latin. This is where he developed his dialectic of being and non-being as per the quotation I gave above.
So it is very challenging to consider that in these forms of philosophical theology, 'being' or 'existence' is viewed from different perspectives. And I think that is because, for a long period, up until recently, the idea of there being 'different perspectives' was rejected. Nominalism and scientific realism tends towards the view that something either exists, or it doesn't; there isn't a scale along which things can exist 'in a different manner', whereas there was in pre-modern philosophy. But the idea of a 'dialectical' understanding has been revived through process philosophy, Peirce's semiotics, and the like. (Peirce described himself as a scholastic realist, i.e. accepted the reality of universal, and also explicitly wrote of the ways in which 'existence' and 'reality' can be distinguished.)
Also - I never did finish Brad Gregory. It was the kind of book that is really only of interest if you're doing post-grad studies in that specific topic. The convergence of 'the univocity of being' with Nominalism, and the abandonment of classical metaphysics, is a much bigger topic than that. That is the subject of Richard Weaver, Michael Allen Gillespie, and also the 'radical orthodoxy' movement, of which there is quite a good review here (starts from the bottom of the page.)
I do get that. Mysticism is usually shorthand for 'not being able to really understand anything', and that is often true. But in the case of Plotinus, we're considering one of the definitive sources of the mystical tradition, so he belongs to a different category.
That is the inescapable problem of "unity". Consider the existence of an object. We are inclined to say that the object is composed of parts. With our analytical minds, we want to treat the parts as if they are themselves objects. But the parts do not have independent existence as individual objects, unless the original object is dismantled, annihilated. This requires that the original object ceases to exist as an object in order for its parts to be objects. Therefore it is logically impossible that an object, and its parts coexist, at the same time, as objects.
Hmm. But I am then concerned to make the further distinction that is only now coming through in the past century of science and physics.
So it is not just that there are different points of view on the same thing - that figure/ground shift you describe where the mountain, or whatever, is first seen as an existent object, then appreciated as a contextual feature (a wave in the earth's crust generated by plate tectonics), and then finally seen as the wholeness of these two opposing views.
The even larger story is that any possible view is going to see the same general thing simply by virtue of it being "a view". So this is the fractal or scale-free story. Anything viewed on any scale will resolve into a view where at the same scale as the observer, there are a bunch of individuated entities. And then in one direction, those entities shrink in size until they effectively become a continuous blur. And in the other direction, the entification gets so large that it completely fills our entire view and becomes again a constant backdrop as we can no longer see the edges of the thing.
So there is a flip-flopping dichotomy where we can - in Gestalt fashion - switch views to see the individuated in terms of an object that exists and a context that is doing the individuating. And then there is the hierarchical development of that duality so that it is an asymmetry expressed over all possible scales of being. That dichotomy of the individuated vs the contextual is being spread over all scales, from the smallest to the largest, in such a way that it is always present for an observer.
But while it can be clearly seen at scales sufficiently close to the observer, at scales much smaller or larger than the observer, it again changes apparent character. The dichotomy fuzzes into a steady blur as it becomes something very small to us, and then expands to fill our entire view to create a generality or constancy as it becomes something very large to us.
So yes, it is pretty complicated. :)
The dialectical is the step that leads towards the hierarchical. The dialectical is the fact of a symmetry-breaking - the emergence of a figure~ground distinction or individuation. The hierarchical is then that symmetry-breaking becoming fully expressed over all possible scales of being. It accounts for the limits that then emerge to "ground" that being for an observer.
Eventually, things become either too small or too large to be part of the "world of process". Just purely due to the distances involved, they become a constancy of sub-microscopic fluctuations or the constancy of macroscopic changes too large to be encompassed by our experience. The macroscopic - as in the laws of nature as they impinge on us - may as well be fixed, God-given and eternal.
It is this shift - from same-scale dialectics to scale-free hierarchical organisation - which is the key for a pan-semiotic understanding of nature, I would say.
You seek to do the logically impossible, to apprehend the object, and its parts, coexisting as objects, at the same time.
So why is it logically impossible?
You might want to argue that based on some particular metaphysical premise. But then you know that I have my own view about the lack of holistic coherence in your usual metaphysical approach.
If you reject holism, you reject holism. But can you give a good reason for rejecting holism yet?
I, in reply, agree with reductionism - but only as far as is sensible. And a Peircean approach says that holism can only be reduced to a triadic or hierarchical relation. Dualism is too simple. Monadism is even worse.
I'll repost my prior post
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But you adhere to process metaphysics, so you do not even recognize that any objects have real existence. Boundaries are vague to you. There is no such thing as unity in your metaphysics. Your claims to holism are the hollow claims of pragmatism, which renders the object completely subjective.
Can you explain why you think objects cannot be recognized by process metaphysics?
"Real" and "Existent" have various different dictionary meanings, and they're widely used in non-metaphysical usages.
"Is that dollar-bill real?"
"My essay is only about existent authors, and not fictitious ones."
Quoting Harry Hindu
I used to say that too.
Exist:
But now I agree with others who say that "exist" only applies to objects of metaphysics--discussable, describable things. In fact, it's been argued here that "existent" only refers to timebound things that come into and out of existence. ...maybe only physical things, in fact.
Real:
There seems to be some consensus that "Real" is much broader in applicability than "Existent". For example, abstract objects are often called "Real", but not "Existent".
I use the word "Reality" to mean "All" (as the all-inclusive noun). That's my only use of "Real" or "Reality"
(...with the exception noted below.)
Is:
I use "is" all-inclusively too. So, in my usage, "what is" means the same thing as "All".
...and "All that Is" is just a (maybe clearer) way of saying the same thing.
-----------------------------
I often use "is" as described above. That's what I mean when I use "is" at the end of a clause, without a predicate-nominative, speaking of one thing, rather than equating two things.
I avoid using "Real" or "Exist", "Exists" or "Existent".
I might sometimes speak of "physical reality" or "metaphysical reality" (uncapitalized) to refer to the set of things and relations described in those subjects.
But I avoid any debates about what's "real" or "existent" in metaphysics.
Nor do I debate (at least not anymore) the limits of discusability or describability.
Michael Ossipoff
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yep.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's more complex. Simple physical "objects" like rivers, stars and mountains are highly contextual. As individuated objects, they do depend on a context that individuates them. But complex objects, like a cat or a chair, can be organismic. A cat is formed by the genetic information it contains and so reflects the constraints or a particular evolutionary history. A chair is formed by cultural information - shaped by a human purpose, and furthermore is designed to be resistant to natural erosive or entropic forces. A chair is as context-independent as we humans can make it. We choose materials we know are going to last.
Thus a wave on the ocean exists in a highly contextual sense. A chair is at the other end of the spectrum in being the least wedded to a natural context. People who want to endorse an object oriented ontology will naturally think of chairs rather than waves when wanting to argue their case for the existence of objects.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well I said the opposite really. Boundaries are the definite limits that emerge to regulate vagueness or indeterminacy.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, that is the opposite of what I always say. The unity may have an irreducible triadic structure. But then that triadic structure is thus a single unity by definition. It is the relation the three aspects have which allows us to speak of their holism as being a thing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
My pragmatism would instead say that the holism of a sign relation approach - ie: a triadic semiotic - is about the whole of that relation. So it shows how our notion of "an object" would arise as the best way to mediate between the subjective and objective aspects of being - if here you are meaning to talk of the duality of mind and world.
It goes without saying that the events of Gone With the Wind really happened in that story, and that the characters really had certain experiences in that story.
But imagine that you're Rett Butler. Your experience would necessarily be much more detailed than his is related in the novel or the movie. So then it's obvious that neither the novel nor the movie is a complete possibility-world or experience-possibility-story.
So the novel and screenplay are just very incomplete and sketchy stories, nothing like a possibility-world or a life-experience possibility-story.
If they were incomparably more detailed, and self-consistent, (like some hypothetical computer-simulation of our universe) then they could only be said to be mimicing or duplicating a genuine possibility-world or life-experience possibility-story, but not "creating" it. But of course there's never been such a movie, nor could there be, without some very futuristic computers and programming (the kind hypothesized by the "simulated-univere hypothesis (...which I've debunked)) Of course even if there were such a "movie" or simulation, no one would have time to watch all of it..
(And of course there's no requirement for a novel or movie to be self-consistent. For example, consider the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, a movie about a city's district called " 'Toon Town".)
...though there no doubt are many possibility-stories whose events and persons are very similar to those of a novel and screenplay such as Gone With the Wind. But that's irrelevant to the matter of the status of the novel and screenplay.
Michael Ossipoff
"You must whip it.....
........Whip it good......"
Quoting apokrisis
How would a context act to individuate an object?
Quoting apokrisis
So an object, as a unity, is defined into existence?
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not talking about "our notion of 'an object'", I'm talking about the very existence of an object. Does your metaphysics allow that an object, as an individual unity, has any real existence?
This is as far from an issue of logic as it comes. It is a matter of whether one can conceive of a unity of forms which in themselves contain forms. The answer is obviously yes. We have waves within an ocean, mountains arising from the beach, a sky arising from the mountains, etc. It is all a unity as is our body yet we can still perceive forms within these forms.
How does the mind create all if this. Just try doing contour drawing where forms are created by continuous waving lines without ever picking the pen off a sheet of paper. The critical concept is that there is no emptiness anywhere in the universe. Everything is connected. Duality sinks into unity as does everything else. However. unity does have fundamental characteristics or else it could not get things rolling along.
I'm not talking about forms, I'm talking about objects. A form cannot be said to be an object unless it has substantial existence. Take your waves and ocean for example. We'd commonly say that the ocean has substantial existence, and the waves are a property of the ocean. The ocean is the logical subject, and the waves are the predicate. So long as the ocean is the object of your attention (the logical subject), the waves will always be the property of the ocean and not objects themselves. If you shift your attention to the wave, then it becomes the object of your attention (the logical subject) and the ocean is no longer the object of your attention. You predicate properties of the waves. If you insist that your object (logical subject) is both the ocean and the waves, the you have contradiction.
Only because that is the way you view it. I see them all as objects as real forms.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, just a different way of viewing things. A good example is this:
Here is how a single unitary line creates forms:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/535295105679649688/
Because I view it logically, and you view it illogically?
Quoting Rich
That's an adequate example. It's either a duck or a rabbit. To say that it's a duck and a rabbit is contradictory, illogical. We can take one as the object, or the other, but there is incompatibility which prevents us from saying that the two things coexist as the object. It's not two objects, its one.
And that's the point with wayfarer's statement Quoting Wayfarer
We could say that on one level it's a duck, and on another level it's a rabbit, but we cannot say that on the same level it is a rabbit and a duck, because that is to make one object into two objects, and that's contradictory.
All the numbers are like that. Consider the numeral "4". On one level, this signifies four distinct units. But on another level, it signifies one unit, the number four which is a unified group, as a unit. It cannot signify four distinct unities, and one unity, at the same time, because this would be contradictory.
Your logic has become an obstruction that limits you. I don't have such an obstruction. I'm only interested in understanding by whatever means available.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's actually both at the same time and the same place.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Clearly they are both at the same level. What changes is the perception of mind as it superimposes the form on memory.
The Pinterest continuous line drawing in my post's link illustrates how a never-ending number of forms are created out of unity.
There's a reason why we make rules of logic, and adhere to them. That's so we don't get confused by simple issues, as you have.
Quoting Rich
I find it extremely doubtful that throwing away the fundamental rules of logic because they don't support what you happen to believe, is conducive to understanding.
Rules of logic were designed so someone can rule. I feel no such constraint. I use every faculty and tool available to me.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sometimes it is time to move on.
That is an insightful comment. What you’re touching on here is the relationship between ‘the uncreated’ and the phenomenal domain - the domain of sensory experience. Nowadays any mention of ‘the uncreated’ is categorised as a religious idea - which I suppose it is in some ways. But in the Western philosophical tradition the main source of philosophy about ‘the uncreated’ is the neoPlatonic tradition (as Metaphysician Undiscovered mentioned). And according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, such philosophers are still categorised as ‘pagan’.
Overall, ‘the uncreated’ is a very difficult idea to grasp. Originally, the intuition was that ‘the uncreated, unconditioned, unborn’ was understood as ‘the source of Being’. In the early days of Christian theology such ideas, originally from the Greek philosophical tradition, were assimilated into Biblical prophecy, although the combination has always been characterised by some tension; the wisdom of Jesus being described as ‘folly to the Greeks’. Nevertheless Greek-speaking Christianity thoroughly absorbed the neo-Platonic philosophy. The Greek reverence for rationality and mathematical reasoning was based on the intuition that mathematical reasoning was inherently more reliable than the testimony of the senses, because the objects of dianoia we’re inherently knowable and constant in a way that sense-objects were not. So they were nearer to the uncreated, in that they likewise weren’t as subject to change and decay as were sense-objects. They were lower than the Ideas, but higher than knowledge concerning particulars.
I was trying to explain above, originally the intuitions of mathematics and rationalism were regarded in ancient philosophy as morally edifying, not simply for their instrumental value or technical power. But it was the association of mathematical and rational insight with mystical insight, typical of the Pythagoreanism, that differentiated Greek from Indian philosophy and was one of the major sources of the Western tradition of natural science. However, science has now basically abandoned the notion of the ‘uncreated’, perhaps because of its religious connotations.
What is it exactly that people believe science 'knows' or 'proves' that it doesn't? Who are these people and what evidence do you have that they believe this?
If you want to argue that modern science is deeply flawed I'm all with you, our system of funding and publication is appallingly biased and allows some shockingly inaccurate theories to appear valid.
But if you want to argue that most people believe science as a method claims to be able to prove things that it actually cannot, then you'll need to provide some evidence, because I can't think of a single example from the published philosophical literature.
If you want to go further and suggest you have a better method to prove (or even argue meaningfully about) these things that science cannot, then you'll have to do a lot better in demonstrating how you arrived at that conclusion because its far from obvious as you have laid it out so far.
The philosophical issue I see is not to do with scientific method so much as with ‘the scientific worldview’. I would never disparage scientific method when applied to the countless things for which it’s useful. The problem I have is more like science as the arbiter of what ought to be considered meaningful and important. And that naturally issues from the role that science occupies in modern culture, in the sense that it has displaced religion as kind of guide to what the educated person ought to believe. Even then, there are many things I don’t disagree with, or take issue with, except for when it is used to argue against classical philosophical and religious ideas, or to show that such ideas really can be better understood in terms of evolutionary or cognitive science - what is generally called ‘scientific reductionism’.
One of the frequent imputations of the scientific attitude is taken to be that the world is fundamentally meaningless, the product of interactions which can be ultimately understood in terms of physics, and that life itself is essentially a kind of accidental by-product of an essentially meaningless process (which is brilliantly articulated in Bertrand Russell’s classic essay A Free Man’s Worship.) This is not an academic argument - I’ve been posting on forums for ten years and there’s a regular stream of contributors who ask existential questions which are often rationalised in terms of evolutionary psychology, or what I calll ‘Darwinian rationalism’. And they’re often quite despairing, or even pleading, for some reason that life might be considered meaningful.
So, in respect of this thread, the question of whether there is a meaningful distinction between what is real and what exists, is not a scientific question but a philosophical one. And while I certainly agree with you that scientists generally take maths very seriously and understand how powerful it is, the question of the ontological status of number - of what number actually is - is also not a scientific question. (Actually the Wikipedia entry on ‘philosophy of mathematics’ is quite good. One thing that is clear from it, is the enormous range of views on the question.)
This is where I think you're going wrong. I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that science is the arbiter of what is meaningful and important. What those who espouse a scientific worldview are saying is that the scientific method is the only way of claiming any objective knowledge about what is meaningful or important. This is very important distinction.
If you feel like there's a god, for example, then no one of a scientific worldview is seriously claiming that you may not have that belief, but if you claim, in the public domain, that there is a God, based on the fact that you think there is, there are people who will, quite fairly, argue that this is not a useful way to further public knowledge.
The strawman I think you're making is to conflate this view about the practicality of methods for arriving at public knowledge, with assumptions about the axioms that are required by any epistemological approach.
The claim that is being made by the scientific world view is that it is successful, that it makes useful prediction which could not be accounted for by chance. No-one to my knowledge, is claiming that such a system is not founded on axioms that must simply be taken as brute fact. They are claiming that such axioms are useful ones to adhere to because of the empirically proven utility of the system they allow.
We might all be brains in a vat, we might all be figment of my imagination, logic might not be justified, causality might be wrong, but presuming these things to be true has yielded no demonstrably useful epistemology. Assuming they are not has given us physics, sociology, psychology, biology and a whole host of useful information about ourselves and the world.
Of course if the axioms it is all based on turn out to be wrong, the whole thing comes crashing down, but what use is that knowledge if there's nothing more useful to replace it with?
My view actually is that while we can say that even dreams are real, we have to make some "distinctions" between "the levels of reality". For example there is clearly a distincion between a "table" and an electron. And between an electron and a dream.
Edited because the response was incomplete. Sorry, Rich !
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah, actually what we call "Catholicism" comes largely from St Thomas Aquinas. And IMO in Aquinas there are a lot of ideas that come directly from Platonism (both "old" and "neo"). These "pagan" philosophies ironically over the centuries helped to "define" the "orthodoxy".
Quoting Wayfarer
Agreed! At first the "uncreated" was thought in a lot very ancient philosophies (see the "Apeiron" of Anaximander, "Brahman" of the Hindus, the "Dao"...) as the "Source". It was seen as a sort of "ineffably simple", so to speak, ground of being that "is" (rather than ex-ist). Interestingly in the Greek World, especially in Platonic philosophies the idea of "simplicity" reamined and in fact in neo-Platonism "the First" was seen "beyond being", simple etc. At the same time however Plato introduced the idea of a plurality of "uncreated" objects, the Forms. This appealed to those who believed in a "Personal God", since it was very simplet to identify them with the "ideas in the Divine Mind". For example human beings were seen as "particular" of the idea of "Human Being" in God's MInd.
But the relationship between the "pagan" thought and Christian orthodoxy was always a complex one. For example the view that "the pious is loved by the gods beceause he is pious" comes directly from Plato and IMO it is the reason behind the "primacy of conscience" of Catholic theology. At the same time however Catholicism aaccepts the "salvation from grace". Or the view that we can know God by His creation (an idea found already in the Pauline Epistles) but at the same time we cannot really know Him without the Revelation. So there are a lot of "paradoxes" raised by this issue.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah, the Greek emphasis on mathematics and quantitative reasoning is IMO the greatest break between Western and Indian (and Daoist) philosophy, according to which the only "reality" that was important to study was the experiential one (again Buddhism IMO is the most radical form of this type of "view"). At the same time however the notion of "uncreated" seems to be central to most of the major philosophical and religious system both of the East and the West. And also the reason behind the rise of science in the West rather than in the East.
Being myself interested in both "studies" I have a hard time in reconciling the opposing tendencies of the two types of philosophy.
Regarding the "uncreated", in contemporary science this notion is seen as "unnecessary". In fact to the scientific study the "uncreated" has no "quantitative" role. The problem is that to many scientists this means that it is either an "useless" or even a "superstitious" concept.
I think that this is a misrepresentation. Meaningful things, such as God and the supernatural, are asserted by most of those who hold the scientific worldview, to be non-existent. Therefore it is more than just the case that this worldview decides "objective knowledge about what is meaningful or important", it actually decides what "is" meaningful and important, and denies the existence of that which it deems as not meaningful and important.
Theoretically it should come crashing down, in practice scientists just make up new universes or make our current universe 95% invisible. What ever happened to the Mind? Now it is neurons located in the brain that do the thinking? Or is it the neurons in the gut? Sometimes it is genes and often it is that ubiquitous Evolution and Laws of physics that forces our actions. Which is it? And what is it that has feelings? Or is it the frequently used scientific phrase Illusion (as opposed to Dark Matter/Energy).
When there is lots at stake, science just fabricates new stories, and like all professions there is a code of silence and anyone who breaks that code is quickly labeled a mystic, eccentric, or aberration if the carefully codified system of acceptable and unacceptable words.
To be actualized from what? You presuppose the existence of what is being actualized here. I think to be actual is to exist in one manner, namely, in reality, whereas to be potential is to exist in another manner, namely, in the mind or nature of a thing. Language, for example, doesn't actually exists in infants, but it exists potentially. No tree actually exists in my backyard, but it potentially exists. The only category of thing that doesn't exist are impossible things, like square circles. Otherwise, things exist potentially or actually.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't know. Maybe? Why do you think I am?
This way of couching it corresponds to my correction and confirms my suspicion about Moran's description, which was misleading.
Quoting Wayfarer
My point is that the Radical Orthodoxy people, from whom Brad Gregory imbibes, get Scotus totally wrong, especially on the univocity of being. I agree that Ockham was responsible for some deleterious metaphysical turns in the West, which trickled down into culture. But it is wrong to unambiguously link Scotus with him and thereby to all the bad stuff Gregory speaks of, the foremost of which being the Protestant Reformation.
Do you know what this is an image of? It's an early modern painting of Duns Scotus trampling Lucifer and the heads of various Lutheran reformers underfoot. One wonders what Gregory and his ilk would make of it....
Well, we could say they exist in different manners or that they are real in different manners. That still leaves us with the issue of how they are both the same in some sense, but also sharply different. It is the metaphysical distinctions we are trying to draw out which matter.
I think it is just less confusing to talk about potential being and actual being. And I would call both real in that they are ontically distinct yet related - nicely opposed in a mutual dialectical fashion. You really need both to make sense of being.
But then to exist seems to relate to actuality - to being that is definite, concrete, part of the here and now. Potentiality is about what does not yet exist right here and now in concrete fashion, but which might exist at some future place and time. To the degree a potential exists in the here and now, it is a vagueness, an indeterminancy, an Apeiron. It is the opposite of the concrete when it comes to existing.
So there are problems in saying that the potential simply does not exist, and that it is thus not real. That is going too far. It leads to a metaphysics where something must come from nothing - the familiar problem of a metaphysics of being.
But a potential whose existence is vague, unmaterialised, unformed, can be the proper opposite of the kind of existence which is concrete and here and now - a substantial existence. A vague potential is effectively a "nothingness" right at this moment. Or better yet, an "everythingness", as no possibilities have yet been concretely eliminated. And so it can be both real - present as unformed and unmaterialised - and yet completely lack the concrete actuality which denotes "existence".
The same way of thinking can apply to that other standard metaphysical distinction - this time between the concrete and the abstract. An advantage of a triadic Peircean metaphysics is of course that it includes this as well.
So universals or generalities can be considered to be real even when they are abstract objects. Or more accurately for a Peircean process metaphysics, when they are mathematical-strength finalities or necessities. They too "exist" - just not in the concrete here and now fashion of the actual. They exist as ultimate or ideal limits on form.
Again, the terminology gets pushed and pulled about by the underlying metaphysical positions being taken. But Aristotle did do a good job at establishing the basic jargon - missing out only the one crucial dichotomy really, that of the vague~crisp.
So a Peircean metaphysics makes a triad of the potential, the actual, and the necessary.
You have actual concrete substantial existence arising in the middle as the emergently definite and individuated in terms of a time and place.
Then there is the vague potential which is unexpressed possibility. And indeed, unsuppressed possibility. Nothing has yet happened to limit it.
Then there is formal necessity waiting to limit it. The possible becomes the actual by becoming substantially formed in terms of latent regularities. Possibility contains everything, but not everything can be actualised as many of those possibilities would conflict and cancel. You can be a circle, or a square, but not a square circle.
So the term "real" would span all three fundamental categories of being. But "exist" would be reserved for what seems obviously the most developed state of being - the concrete actuality of substantial being where a free potential has been most fully constrained or determined.
As far as I can tell, you are making a metaphysical point against other metaphysicians. Reading some of your other posts in this thread, it seems to me that your opponent or the target of your complain is not really the scientific worldview but rather a small group of metaphysicians who build their metaphysics around science rather than the philosophical or religious tradition.
As I understand, science doesn't need more than a certain minimum of metaphysics. Similarly, math doesn't need a metaphysical position on numbers. What really matters are the tangible criteria for progress in the discipline. Metaphysical or religious preferences fall on the other side of the public-private split.
I don't see how we "can only understand things on a horizontal plane." It may be that certain scientistic metaphysicians intentionally pursue this project self-consciously with or without a sense of its limitations. But I think you'd have to make a case for this 'we' at large seeing things horizontally.
Consider also that anti-metaphysical positions are possibly motivated by the desire not to be trapped in systems. Metaphysical systems can themselves be read as attempts to flatten experience with 'magic' words.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I know Kant and Hume. But I wasn't using 'experience' in some fancy way that alludes to books that were long ago state of the art. Reading the traditional books liberated me from the authority of traditional books. Allowing for some exceptions, I think the flight from ordinary usage tends to involve a mystification.
I don't want to be a jerk here, but you are telling me above that there is also 'intellectual capacity' in or 'to' the mind. That is to say that you are telling me nothing. The way you interpreted me to mean the word 'experience' suggests to me that (without realizing it perhaps), you can only see other metaphysicians 'out there.' Those who think science is a trustworthy source of objective knowledge must have some metaphysical as opposed to epistemological position. But we don't have to have some position on what things 'ultimately' are.
We need rather a way of separating fact from opinion. This is a matter of life and death for both the individual and the species. We have a tendency to deceive ourselves or be deceived. We have a tendency to exaggerate the importance of our own discoveries and to mistake our opinions for facts. In my view, this is what grounds our need for science. In this context, it makes perfect sense that science would be built around the measurement of public and non-controversial entities.
'Just the facts, mam.'
Quoting foo
Hah. This level of commonsense is going to kill the thread. Kudos. :)
Hi. Thanks.
Are you saying this is theoretical or do you believe that this is what science is actually doing?
Yes, and magic flying unicorns are asserted by the scientific worldview to be non-existent too. That's what the scientific worldview does and one of the reasons why it has been so successful for the last few hundred years.
A theory is developed which is as simple as possible, inventing a few new concepts as it can and which is falsifiable. That theory is tested and whilst it remains unfalsified, it is held to be a currently good approximation to the truth.
The theory that there is no God is a simple theory - it avoids having to create a new concept not already demonstrated to be 'true' (by the standards set out above). Every event, with the exception of the creation of the universe, can currently be explained without God.
The theory that there is no God (in the Abrahamic sense) is falsifiable - the Bible, the Torah and the Koran are all littered with examples of their God making manifest appearances and affecting the world in way which are obviously divine, so the theory that there isn't a God is perfectly falsifiable, any time "I Am Real" appears in the night sky by rearranging the stars, that would pretty soundly falsify the theory.
So it's entirely within the realms of science to posit a theory that there isn't a God (in the Abrahamic sense), and so far as that theory has not been falsified (nothing has happened that can't be explained by some other valid theory we already have), then it is entirely reasonable for scientists to say that God probably doesn't exists, which is all they've ever said.
Even the Arch atheist himself Richard Dawkins only ever said that God "probably" didn't' exist.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So this is also a misrepresentation. No-one is denying the existence of anything which is outside of a falsifiable theory. The creation of the universe for example is an "all bets are on" scenario. What science does is simply say that we have no way conducting objective knowledge-seeking discourse about things which are entirely subjective.
Right. That is what I mean by ‘the scientific worldview’. Because science isn’t ‘a worldview’ - it’s a methodology, a way of doing things, and also a body of knowledge, large and ever-growing. But one can pursue science along any number of axes without making any judgements on ‘the nature of the world’. Saying that ‘the nature of the world’ is such that it can only be understood by science, is going beyond scientific method and in effect putting science in the place formerly occupied by religion. And you can’t say that doesn’t happen on a large scale in today’s culture.
Quoting foo
In the video in the thread on the Einstein-Bergson debate, Jimena Carneles quotes one of her colleagues who says that ‘facts are like ships in bottles - they’re carefully constructed to seem as if no-one was there to build them’.
Quoting foo
Perfectly true. But how to do this in respect of what is good, or whether there is anything that is truly good - as distinct from useful, or instrumentally powerful - that is NOT simply a matter of doxai or pistis. And science doesn’t offer that, because its sole concern is with ‘the measurable’.
Interesting fact: in Buddhism there is a list - Buddhists love lists - of the four immeasurables. I won’t list them here, but the fact that they have canonical significance is what is germane. Philosophy, as distinct from science, has to accomodate immeasurables, and at least recognise unknowables.
As far as evolutionary biology is concerned, there can only one measure of success, which is propagation. But there’s not point asking ‘why’ - the only ‘why’ is to survive (which seems very Schopenhauerian to me.)
Quoting Pseudonym
Many serious people claim it regularly.
[quote=Steve Pinker]the worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of an educated person today is the worldview given to us by science.[/quote]
In Science is not the Enemy of the Humanities which is a long and much-discussed essay on this very topic.
Quoting Pseudonym
Now, the ‘standards set out above’, namely, those of falsifiability and simplicity, pertain specifically to the empirical sciences. That is, you make a prediction, then you observe and/or experiment and test the hypothesis against the results.
But I don’t think any serious theistic philosophy claims that ‘God’ is this kind of ‘hypothesis’ in the first place. IN fact the very reason that Popper devised ‘falsifiability’ was to differentiate the empirical sciences from such things as metaphysics and theology. So to say that falsifiability is an argument against a metaphysical postulate, is to precisely misunderstand the significance of the criterion of falsifiability.
And the claim that God is ‘a concept’ can only be a kind of category mistake. Concepts have considerable range and scope, but they have to have some way of either representing or saying something meaningful about what it is that they are attempting to depict. But the basic nature of Deity, in the classical tradition, is ‘beyond conceptual thought’. So if it is reduced to a concept, what that ‘concept’ likely is, is a set of words used or arguments deployed in situations such as this - which mean nothing, and which have no relationship to what ‘God’ means to anyone who engages with a theistic tradition. So there’s one less god you have to bother about; I can confidently state that the God you don’t believe in truly doesn’t exist.
Quoting Thorongil
Spot the archetype
Not that I wouldn't rather cut my own arm off than agree with anything Steven Pinker says, but he specifically says here that science guides moral and spiritual values, not 'all that there is'. He's claiming that science can provide us with a method of obtaining morals and of determining what have traditionally been called 'spiritual' values. That is a far cry from your claim that it tries to be "the arbiter of what ought to be considered meaningful and important."
Nothing in what Pinker says tells you what you 'ought' to find meaningful or important. You might find opera to be meaningful and important, science makes no judgement on that. You might find that the intricacies of particle physics mean nothing to you and are totally unimportant. The scientific worldview (such as there is one) makes no comment on that.
You're trying to conflate 'meaningful and important' with 'true'. The scientific worldview has a massive amount to say on how we can talk about things being 'true' or likely, and with a huge amount of evidence to support it's right to do so. That's completely different to making claims about what's 'important, or meaningful' in a subjective sense, about which it makes little comment.
The only place science could intervene on what is meaningful is in evolutionary biology, psychology, or neuroscience. For example, It is a good hypothesis that we all evolved by a process of natural selection, it is a good simple hypothesis that all our features are therefore determined by this process, it is a good hypothesis that features which appear to serve no purpose in this regard might be better explained some other way.
Like most mystics, you're trying to subtly make the jump from "science is based on axioms which science itself cannot prove" to "we might as well consult Buddha as Churchland on the problem of conciousness. You cannot make that leap. Churchland 'knows' an vast amount more about conciousness than Buddha did, by any common meaning of the term 'knows'.
It’s not a ‘ far cry’ - it’s the same thing. The rest of the post builds on this false premise.
Quoting Pseudonym
The point at issue, is the extent to which science does or doesn’t say anything meaningful about questions of quality. So here, you’re basically saying that everything that is not measurable, not quantitative, is subjective. So ‘it’s your business what you believe, but don’t think for a minute it’s scientifically true’.
That is the very point at issue. What I’m concerned with, in this debate, indeed on this forum, is a metaphysic of value - something which can be considered the basis for qualitative judgement, not what is simply measurable or quantifiable. All the bluff and bluster apart, that is what is at issue as far as I’m concerned.
Except for what matters about it.
Thereby subjugating every human attribute to adaptive necessity.
Yes, that's pretty much the definition of 'objective' and 'subjective'
Quoting Wayfarer
There already is something which can be considered the basis for qualitative judgement, it is the sum total of all our biological and cultural influences which lead us to be of a certain opinion about a topic that is entirely subjective. You haven't explained what it is you find unsatisfactory about that such that some other basis is required.
Quoting Wayfarer
Your posts read as entirely 'bluff and bluster' you haven't said anything concrete yet on the matter.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is what I'm sure you'd like the point at issue to be, but science does not have any comment on matters of quality, other than to say that no other approach can say anything meaningful on the matter either. That's what you really take issue with. You're never advocating a Wittgensteinian “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” approach to metaphysics, but always beneath the surface is the idea, not just that science cannot say anything meaningful about quality, but that theology can.
Science can talk meaningfully about an increasingly wide range of subjects because it can demonstrate the remarkable predictive power of its theories, and thereby show a remarkable justification for it's metaphysical presumptions in terms of utility.
Theology can say nothing meaningful about anything because its purview is entirely subjective. Nothing objectively verified in the world we share supports a theological view. That's not to say that no-one can believe in God, or fairies or solipsism, insofar as they come up with some theory as to how such beliefs fit with the sense-experiences we all share, but it is to say that such theories have no authority, they are qualitative, like artwork, no right, no wrong, just opinion.
In what way does Buddha say anything about what matters. Who are you to be the arbiter of what matters?
Yes, we don't make the world into what we want it to be, we accept the world as it transpires to be.
Really? It seems to be quite the opposite in the case of science. Tell me, can science predict what I am going to do today? That's the only thing meaningful to me - my life. Can science predict what I am going to experience today, besides the sun I mean? Not to trivialize science, but for all its bluster, it really ignores everything meaningful in order to give itself enormous self-importance. At the end of the day (literally) science really explains and understands almost nothing yet pretends that it does.
So the things in concepts are non-existent? What about numbers and circles?
Quoting Pseudonym
But what about the concepts themselves? How would one make a falsifiable theory concerning the existence of concepts? Or is it the case that some of us just take it for granted that they are real, and some take it for granted that they are not real?
Quoting Pseudonym
Are all concepts either entirely subjective or entirely oblective though? I think the issue is a lot more complex than a simple division between objective and subjective.
You're going to breathe, your heart will pump blood round your body, your feels will continue to divide and grow, Microbiology can tell you a huge amount of what's going on in every single cell in your body.
Beyond the firm predictions, science can make some really tight predictions about the scope of your actions. You will not fly, you won't suddenly speak Japanese if you don't already know it.
Then we can get into some good estimates of liklihood from social sciences. You will more likely than not engage socially, you'll more likely than not be repulsed by a list of things and attracted to a list of thing common to most humans.
I could go on.
Now, how well does theology do at the same task?
You think one needs science to know we are breathing and we have a heart that is pumping, and that we are growing and dying?
Quoting Pseudonym
Science cannot make any predictions on any of this (in fact there are people who start speaking in foreign dialects out it no where). What they can do is guess like the rest of us do. I'll guess that I'll eat breakfast this morning - but maybe not.
Science barely figures into the untold number of events that one experiences in life. Yesterday I played three hours of pool. Do you know how people learn to play pool? By feel.
I've been through this in my previous posts. I've not personally heard any scientist make claims about the non-existence of concepts, nor that science can prove its own axioms. I've asked for examples of scientists making these claims but have yet to hear any. Science does, quite justifiably claim that unicorns do not have any effect on the world. It makes the same claim about God, that it probably doesn't exist in such a way as to actually effect the world we collectively experience.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It depends what you mean by 'concept'. If you mean an idea of something that might exist (or might be the case) in someone's mind, then I don't see any other conclusion than that all concepts which have ever been conceived of self-evidently exist. How could a concept possibly not exist?
The scientific method could be considered an attempt to determine what concepts (by which I mean things which might exist or be the case) actually do exist or are the case in the world as we collectively experience it.
So concepts are neither wholly objective nor subjective. The job of science is to determine which are which. On end of the tasks of philosophy might be to prepare concepts for such a test by clarifying them and resolving semantic issues from physical ones.
Well, I thought I'd try at least one reply, but you've descended into nonsense already so we'll leave it there.
So, on what basis then would a person with a science based worldview claim that things like flying unicorns, and gods don't exist?
If whether or not one believes in God affects the way that they behave, then the claim about God, which you say that science makes, that God doesn't actually effect the world that we experience, is blatantly false. That's the thing about beliefs, they clearly have effect on the way that we behave. So the thing believed has obvious effect on the world we experience. Just look at the principles of geometry. So if you assume to validate whether a concept exists or not based on whether it effects the world we experience, then it is necessary to conclude that they exist. And since the belief in God affects the way people behave, just like the belief in geometrical principles affects the way they behave, thus affecting the world we experience, then we ought to conclude that God definitely exists "in such a way as to actually effect the world we collectively experience".
Quoting Pseudonym
This is where you have things mixed up. Philosophy determines the difference between objective and subjective. So philosophy distinguishes between which concepts are objective and which concepts are subjective, not science. Science produces concepts, philosophy determines the objectivity of these concepts.
Fair enough. That sounds an entirely reasonable way to define the existence of a concept and I agree that under that definition a concept can have a effect on the world through the way in which it steers a person's thinking. So every single God exists in all varieties that humans ever thought of. Unicorns, fairies, dragons all exist insofar as they affect people's behaviour (the concept certainly motivated fantasy authors who would behave differently without the concept). Aliens exist, the illuminati exist, lizard men in the centre of the earth exist. I'm quite happy with your definition, I think it eliminates a lot of semantic issues, but I think it's a far cry from the claim theologians are apt to make.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I could agree with you here only to the extent that scientists do philosophy. Scientists certainly do not consult philosophers to check whether their results are objective. They already know whether their results are objective by the confirmation of others.
At some point in the next couple of weeks I will do a thread on this, but the idea that 'we are all evolved by a process of natural selection' = 'every human attribute is an adaptive necessity' is bogus science and that fact that you keep repeating this line is a testament less to the poverty of evolutionary thought than an ignorance regarding how evolution works. NS lays down limits, constraints on the possible, it does not imply that 'every human attribute is an adaptive necessity'. NS is a 'baggy' principle such that there is plenty of trait variation which NS is simply blind too. And as is usually the case, this line completely forgets that sexual selection is an entirely different selection mechanism whose influence on phylogenesis is both massive and overlooked. Please please please stop perpetuating this vicious lie.
Some basic reading on this:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13615-evolution-myths-everything-is-an-adaptation/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/education/2015/05/biggest-evolution-misconceptions-part-1/ [see 'Misconception #2']
This is why we have different terms, like "real", "exist", and "being". Different philosophers would set out different semantic rules for distinguishing one from the other. But if you mix up one philosopher's meaning with another, or pay attention to no formal semantic rules, simply referring to layman's vernacular, then we're lost in ambiguity this matter.
Quoting Pseudonym
I agree that scientists do philosophy because I think that science is a form of philosophy. However, I am not convinced that scientists are qualified to determine whether or not their results are "objective". That is because "objective" is another one of those ambiguous words, such that "objective" according to one philosophy is not the same as "objective" according to another.
Fundamentally, "objective" means of the object. There are two principle senses of "object" such that one is physical and the other non-physical. So we have "objective" in the sense of "of the physical object", and in the sense of "of the non-physical object" (implying a goal, or an aim). The latter form of "objective" is proper to the subject.
To make matters worse, there is another sense of "objective" which seems to cross the boundary between these two in common usage. Epistemologists sometimes say that knowledge is "objective" if there is agreement amongst individuals concerning the thing known. Generally, when people say that scientific knowledge is "objective", it is in this sense that they use the word, peer reviewed or something. It doesn't mean "objective" in the sense of "of the object, because knowledge is property of the human beings, not the objects which are known. Nor is it really "objective" in the sense of an aim or a goal of a subject, because it is common to many subjects. It is a sense of "objective" which means "inter-subjective". We must be careful not to confuse this sense of "objective" which is inter-subjective, with "objective" in the sense of "of the object".
Right - I perfectly agree. But it is writ large in cultural discourse, regardless. You see that in many comments and posts on this Forum - posters frequently muse on whether 'happiness has evolved for a reason' or some such - if I could be bothered I could find current examples right now. So I'm perfectly aware of the 'myth of all traits being adaptive' - it's exactly what I'm criticizing. Michael Ruse, who I'm sure you are well aware is no friend of intelligent design, says
Again, I'm criticizing what is generally called 'scientism' - the deeply-embedded view that science is the definitive guide to what is real, and that (as Pseudonym says), other sources of insight are ultimately or only subjective in nature.
And you can say all of that without maligning the science of evolutionary biology in the slightest.
This perpetuation is an example of the disingenuousness I referred to earlier, but I predict Wayfarer will remain in denial about this, refuse to address it, and continue to promulgate the same tired old tropes. To what end exactly I have no idea. :roll:
Many of your criticisms of my posts are based largely on not understanding what I'm talking about. You 'fail to see why such and such' is the point, then blame me for not having explained it properly, and then propogate the same tired old ad hominems. That is why I will set an example by ignoring your posts henceforth.
If SLX does create that thread on evolution and ethics, I will be pleased to jump in.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't call that metaphysics. As I mean metaphysics, it's the discussion of what discussably, describably is.
In your quote of Plotinus, he's talking about something other than metaphysics. He isn't discussing, but only asserting.
Or, if his statement is taken as metaphysics, it's unsupported metaphysics:
Metaphysical statements should be supportable and supported. Because there are one or more metaphysicses that neither have nor need any assumptions or brute-facts, then there's no need for brute-facts or assumptions in metaphysics.
I don't think that metaphysics can cover, describe or discuss all of Reality.
(But, to me, "emergence" is part of Materialist or quasi-Materialist philosophers' Spiritualist mumbo-jumbo.)
From your quote, it sounds to me like Plotinus is expressing an opinion or individual feeling, and that's legitimate. But it seems to me that he's saying more detail than can be said about meta-metaphysics.
...and, as I said, if his statement is taken as metaphysics, then it's insufficiently-supported metaphysics.
Plotinus's statement sounds similar to things that are said in Vedanta writings. Those Vedanta writings, and Plotinus's statement, could be interpreted as meta-metaphysics that I don't understand, and which (I feel) says more detail than can really be said about meta-metaphysics--or else as metaphysics that doesn't meet my standard of support, and absence of assumptions or brute-facts. ...and of complete uncontroversialness.
Michael Ossipoff
This is untrue. You simply fail to address most of my criticisms of your claims, criticisms which are similar in kind to criticisms made by others; which you also fail to address, often by deflection. But, strangely, you seem to take particular offense at my questioning of your ideas.
If you really believe your characterization here of my responses to your posts is true and accurate; then present an example and explain why you say it is "not understanding what you are talking about" and/ or "ad hominem". Why not engage in honest and open discussion in a spirit of having nothing to protect?
I am simply nonplussed that you take all this so personally. From my point of view, I have genuine criticisms of the ideas you are presenting, ideas which I understand only too well insofar as there was a time when I argued for similar ideas myself. I'm not questioning your right to believe whatever you want; but this is a philosophy forum, and all ideas presented here should be prepared for merciless questioning.
If there is a "passive-aggressive" tone then it is due to feelings of frustration at your lack of engagement. It didn't start out that way. Even if there is such a tone; why should it matter? the important thing is the critique of ideas, isn't it?
If you truly believed it is "going over my head' then you could take the trouble to explain what points you think I don't understand. But you never do that. But, if you want to ignore my posts in the future then that's fine; I'll return the favour.
Yet you have never once ceased to bring up the adaption myth when talking about evolution, almost always without acknowledging its mythic status, and instead of correcting the science, use it time and time again as a crutch with which to browbeat it. Whether or not you are 'perfectly aware', your consistent instinct to is wield the worst of scientific interpretations in order to characterize the field of science in its generality, making it the conveinent 'other' against which you can push your spiritualist agenda. Your rhetoric is consistently dishonest in this respect, and of all the apparent plethoa of posters who link evolution with the adaptationist myth, you are without doubt its number one practitioner. The irony seems to be that the more the science begins to align to your philosophical POV, the [I]less[/i] likely you are to mention it, because it rids you of your ability to demonize it. A rejigged anxiety of influence, l think.
Poor old Wayfarer. He has his views and he promotes them pretty politely. He doesn’t deserve your shrill tirade.
@Apokrisis - :ok: Actually learning to deal with counter-factuals is one of the main reasons I post to forums. That, and because I love to write this kind of stuff. But, appreciated.
Now, the comment I was responding to, was from a contributor whose orientation seems to me overall 'positivist' and oriented around science as a source of normative truths. That was the context of the remark.
Look at the top paragraph of that post I was responding to, and see if you can use your analytical skills to spot the blatant self-contradiction it contains. Furthermore, I was quoting from an essay by Steven Pinker, who is also an advocate for neo-Darwinian materialism, as an example of the kind of tendency I'm critical of. I'm well within my rights to criticize those kinds of ideas, and I think they're fully deserving of it, hysteria notwithstanding.
So correct the damn science and stop playing the 'science is bad for philosophy' card. It's a disservice to both science and philosophy, the antagonistic relation between which you've done more to foster than almost any other poster on this forum.
Quoting Pseudonym
In light of me being accused of recklessly attacking science, I will come back to this remark, which really started the exchange leading up to that accusation.
I had been saying that I take issue with the idea of science as the ‘arbiter of what is meaningful and important’. And I do maintain that science often occupies that role in modern culture, and that a lot of it is grounded in evolutionary theory.
In respect to belief in God - there have been a large number of popular philosophy books published in the last decade, which appeal to evolutionary science, to argue on the basis of the science to ‘show there probably is no God’. And that is the kind of thinking I’m responding to.
When it’s said that ‘no-one of a scientific worldview is claiming that you may not have that belief’ - of course this is true, as it is a tenet of liberal societies that one may entertain any belief you like. But note that this then relegates beliefs to the domain of individual, the private - tantamount to, if not exactly the same as, a matter of opinion.
So we have the domain of ‘public knowledge’, which is objective, and which is normative in respect to matter of fact, and the domain of private belief. Further:
Quoting Pseudonym
And it is what I take issue with. My concern is a factual basis for values - a metaphysic of value, you might say. I did not devise the idea that scientific materialism is generally antagonistic to philosophies of those kinds, and that evolutionary theory is often used in support of that. The whole tendency of positivism, of various kinds, and various forms of economic and scientific materialism, is to undermine or attack belief in the spiritual aspect of the human being. So here I’m calling it out, and I willl continue to do so.
Right. To me it's just metaphysics masked as science to twist science beyond its proper realm. In free societies, individuals are more or less expected to work out their own salvation in the usual ways. Science creates tools for the pursuit of goals that are synthesized with politics, religion, art, etc.
I want science for its neutrality (as something that gives me just the facts), because I want to decide what to make of them (perhaps or rather always with help from non-scientific culture.)
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not against this, but can it hope to do so objectively? The excessive claims of the metaphysical animal are one of the reasons we needed science to begin with. Even a metaphysician views some other metaphysicians as peddlers of superstition and confusion. In some ways, science is the matricidal son of philosophy.
Anyway, I understand that thinking inviduals will wrestle with the meaning of life (and immeasurables). Engineers can't do everything for us yet.
For me there's a tension in your writing between the cultural critic and the metaphysician, which I may be mistakenly projecting. Do you understand yourself to be stating preferences? Doing politics at an abstract level? 'Our culture would be better if...X' Or are you ultimately saying that science is blind to an important objective truth. 'This or that non-scientific approach nevertheless offers us objective truth, not just preference or opinion.' To be clear, I'm not implying that preference is unimportant. I'm just interested in drawing the line between what we might like to be the case and what is the case.
Quoting Rich
I think that's the ideal. As experiments get more complicated and technical and the entities get tiny or distant, the layman is unfortunately more and more in a position of having to trust specialists. Of course the average person these days doesn't know what a differential equation is, even if the entities were easily seen. Even smart people are often almost proud to be bad at math, but that's another issue.
On the other hand, I've have flown through the air above the clouds at hundreds of miles per hour. I ride little boxes 50 stories up in towers made of concrete and glass. I carry a little rectangle in my pocket that let's me communicate almost instantaneously at will with others who are hundreds or even thousands of miles away. I don't mean telegrams, either. I mean face to face video. This is proof in the pudding. For me it is finally about the tech. If the theorists love their absolute physical truths, fine. But would I care about science without its technical offerings? Maybe, for aesthetic reasons, but not as much.
Admittedly, religion or music or art can also provide proof in the pudding on an individual level. I like Coltrane. Others hate all jazz. But technology works whether I want it to or not, whether I believe in it or not. When an engineering student learns how to write an operating system, that doesn't strike me as particularly ideological. Does the damned thing do what we want it to do? Of course deciding what we want it to do is up to us, and I think that's where religion and philosophy especially have their say.
As far as political preferences go, I'm not particularly interested in debating those here, though I don't forbid myself an occasional indulgence. I mention this because some of your posts suggest that you view some common understanding of science to be socially detrimental. I don't think there's much payoff in that kind of thinking. We usually fail to persuade, in my view, and spend our energy more wisely in adapting to the world and its stupidities as we find and shall probably leave them. To be sure, this is a fine place to air out such things if one is so inclined.
Agree with every word.
Quoting foo
Perceptive observation. My approach has always been the quest for enlightenment, commencing with the 60's counter-culture. (Speaking of which, one of the seminal writers for me was Theodore Roszak, who coined the term itself in his book 'Making of a Counter-Culture'). So there's a strong element of protest in that - the sense that normal society - 'the straights' - are caught up in an illusory 'consensus reality' and it's the task of the individual to break free. (Of course, life being what it is, I turned out pretty middle-class after all. But that's what was the original motivation.) That lead to reading a lot of spiritual books and working back from them, through the various philosophical traditions. Later in life, I've realised the profoundness of the classical Western philosophical tradition, on which I see scientific materialism as kind of parasitic outgrowth. (Not for what science can do, but when it becomes a kind of belief system in its own right, as I've been saying.)
I happen to know that book. I stumbled on a yellow copy in a used book store. He turned me on to other writers, and he was interesting in his own right.
Quoting Wayfarer
I suppose we vary here. Though I have been intensely moved at times by 'positive' philosophers (those offering systems), I especially relate to the spirit of someone like Hume these days.
By the way, you didn't actually answer my question (which is fine if you don't feel like it, but I thought you might like to clarify your position.)
It was not a quote of Plotinus, it was me describing Plotinus' metaphysics, in a very brief way. The assertions were mine, as part of my description. When one describes something that person makes assertions about the thing.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
You'd have to read the entire "Enneads", (and some Plato and Aristotle as well) for that support.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Are you saying that you think metaphysics must be completely uncontroversial to be metaphysics?
Quoting foo
Some of my contemporaries went into politics; one became a leader of a State Greens party. No, all I’m doing is discussing and debating philosophy, from a counter-cultural/contrarian viewpoint.
With respect to the last question - nothing is ultimately objective. I take that to be one of the most important implications of the Critique of Pure Reason. But I’m also not an out-and-out relativist. Understanding the implications of that is one of the main tasks of philosophy.
Thanks for clarifying. I don't disagree with this 'ultimately,' but my anti-metaphysical streak (influenced by linguistic philosophy) ushers me away from 'ultimately' as it might from brains in a vat. So I can agree and yet think such an agreement is not terribly important. Why? Because 'ultimately' is so elastic that it can always be stretched to counter objections. I do see that objective reality can be understood as intersubjective overlap. I've been down the rabbit hole and came up with a sense that I didn't bring back anything valuable apart from a sense of the futility of trying to fuse all of our specialized vocabularies into one harmonious vocabulary.
We know that there is stuff out there that is not us, yet we have to be here for it to be here, etc. No matter. Never mind. The chair is atoms or waves. Or the chair is concept organizing sensation. Or the chair is a thing for sitting on. Or the chair is the product of human history. Or the chair is crystallized labor. Or the chair is a node in the one object, a self-contemplating God. Or the chair exists primarily as possibility, as what we might do with it or call it in the future. Or the chair is all of these things, and whatever I left out, including the interpretations that I can expect generally but not predict in particular. One can imagine how these statements would fit within various conversations and put to various purposes. I can understand the desire to tame this proliferation, but I no longer think it's plausible to do so.
I like exposing myself to many of these 'vocabularies.' Having done so, I find it hard to be completely taken by any particular vocabulary. I suppose I associate metaphysics with the attempt to give the true and binding vocabulary.
I think this is exactly what it does mean. It means that, if my knowledge of the object is exactly the same as your knowledge of the object in some meaningful way, then our knowledge must be truly "of the object" because it is unaffected by our own subjectivity, It is related purely to the object. To the extent that my knowledge of the object contradicts yours, then that knowledge cannot truly be "of the object" because the object cannot be both things, our knowledge must therefore be subjective.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So this can be true but only if you carefully circumscribe what it is you're referring to. So take God, for example. If we are to say something objective about God in this second sense, then we are specifically talking about your God, the one in your head, not some general God in the public sphere, because only this former type is an 'object' about which something positive can be said objectively. If my God differs from your God, then 'God' is clearly not an 'object' about which we can speak because it cannot have both those contradictory properties. 'My God' and 'Your God' are the only objects which exist in the sense you've defined the term about which we can talk objectively.
Yes, we know you maintain that position, we (or I at least) have been asking for some evidence to back up that claim, some quote or activity of 'modern culture' where science is acting as the arbiter of what is meaningful All you've so far provided is areas where science acts as the arbiter of what is objectively the case and what can be objectively said about the existence of things in the physical world, which is exactly the role of science. Just give me one example of a thing that you think is meaningful that 'modern culture' has arbitrated is not 'meaningful' (not "unlikely to exist", not "not a theory that can be justifiably adopted in a secular democracy", actually "not meaningful").
Quoting Wayfarer
How are you 'responding to' it? By denying their right to make such arguments? I don't understand what your position is on this at all. Lots of people think your metaphysical is wrong, enough people to constitute the mass of society. It's not a conspiracy, or some kind of mass delusion perpetuated by mysterious powers, it's just that more people think you're wrong than think you're right.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, that is where private beliefs belong, you can discuss them with others, shout them from the rooftops if you want to but what else do you expect people who hold a broadly physicalist metaphysics to do with your private beliefs?
Quoting Wayfarer
It's not "antagonism", there's no "undermining" and "attacking", we just don't agree with you. Some even think that such ideas as your can be harmful in some way and so are vocal in their disagreement, that's entirely to be expected if they think some harm might result from thinking that way.
If you think that physicalism is wrong, or that evolutionary theory does not apply to the areas others think it does, then make an argument to that effect and present it publicly, but don't expect that it won't get shot down by the people who think it's nonsense, and if that happens to be most people then you're going to have to face a lot of criticism, so I suggest some tougher skin might be in order.
Evidently.
Quoting Pseudonym
You asked, and I answered. I mentioned Steve Pinker. He's a prominent popular intellectual (and one whom I think has a lot of worthwhile and interesting things to say), and also a prominent advocate of just the kind of point of view that I am criticizing. This sub-debate started when you asked me to 'quote from one person who says that science is the arbiter of what is important and meaningful'. So I referred to an essay by Pinker, who says exactly that, in an essay devoted to that very topic.
That elicited the following self-contradictory response:
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Pseudonym
But what was at issue, was whether Pinker's quote is evidence of the claim that 'science is the arbiter of what is meaningful and important'. And this is exactly what he says it is.
Quoting Pseudonym
But in claiming that science 'provides us with a method of obtaining morals, etc', he is making the exact claim that you said that 'nobody is seriously making'.
Now you continue to ask for evidence. First, address the evidence that has been provided.
I don't get why you can't see the difference between someone claiming that science can make falsifiable statements about morals and someone claiming that science can decide everything in the world that is meaningful.
Are you suggesting that morals constitute 'everything that is meaningful'? If not then how do you get from someone claiming science can say something about morality to science is claiming to be able to decide what is meaningful? If a scientists claims to be able to say something about gravity, are they not also making some kind of statement that their theory says something about what is meaningful?
It sounds like you're just opposed to science making any claims at all that you don't personally approve of, and you're opposing that, not by presenting arguments against those particular claims, but by invoking some false 'slippery slope' argument that because scientists claim to be able to make falsifiable statements about morality they're suddenly claiming authority over everything that's meaningful.
Popper (as I explained yesterday) devised the criterion of falsifiability specifically for the kinds of empirical claims that science is suited to examine. So falsifiability doesn’t come into it. (And what would ‘a science of morality’ look like...)
The whole question of ‘meaning’ is not an obviously scientific matter. The term ‘meaning’ obviously has many applications, but in respect of ‘the meaning of ethical statements’, then that is plainly not a concern of science as such. And I can say that without at all impugning science. Science is concerned with measurable data, with a methodology to discover facts about the vast domain in which it is applicable. But it is generally not the least applicable to what ought to be the case. This is the import of the well-known ‘is/ought dichotomy’ of Hume’s.
Quoting Pseudonym
Not at all. You’re simply seeing the argument through a perspective which simply assumes that science is the only real source of knowledge. Your approach is textbook positivism: science is the only source of real knowledge, if it can’t obtain knowledge of ethics, then neither can anything else. Oh sure, people can like opera, or religion, or ski-ing, but that’s just their personal stuff. When it comes to what really counts, that’s the knowledge ‘in the public square’, and only science can deliver it.
Tell me if I missed anything.
Yes, and some prominent and perfectly rational neuroscientists think that morality contains kinds of empirical claims that science is suited to examine. You're acting as if the matter was settled and all you need to do is point out that it isn't so without any argument to support that claim.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, some people think it is. You have to actually construct an argument if you want to dispute their claim, and if more people agree with their claim than agree with yours then that is the direction rational society will take. You can't win an argument just by repeatedly stating what you think is the case and whining when others don't agree.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, that's pretty much it, when it comes to knowledge about physical things (including people), and your opposing argument is....?
Such as...?
Quoting Pseudonym
Such as...?
Quoting Pseudonym
Right, so I suggest you desist.
Quoting Pseudonym
I was reading about John Stuart Mill recently. He was concerned with 'the tyranny of the mob'.
I think W is talking about science claiming moral authority, or, actually, certain individuals claiming moral authority in the name of science. To the degree that morality is 'visible' (certain practices that are publicly accessible), it's clear that predictions can be made. We have of course social and behavioral sciences.
But it's not clear to me how "the extent to which an action is right or wrong" is in the domain of science. What people tend and will tend to call 'right' or 'wrong' does seem to be in that domain. But what we (or specifically I or you) should seek as oppose to what we tend to seek does not seem to be in that domain. I can't think what it would mean to test an 'ought.' Science seems to live on the 'is' side of the is/ought divide. Just the preference-independent facts, please.
I don't generally share W's position, but I do think you are somewhat justifying his concern by sneaking over the is/ought line or misreading his point.
This is an OP I often refer to in respect of this question.
Patricia Churchland, Sam Harris, for example.
Quoting Wayfarer
See above
Quoting Wayfarer
If you can't tell the difference between constructing an argument and repeating statements as if they were fact then I'm not sure I can help you, but let me try.
"Science can talk meaningfully about an increasingly wide range of subjects because it can demonstrate the remarkable predictive power of its theories, and thereby show a remarkable justification for it's metaphysical presumptions in terms of utility." - An argument, note the key use of the word 'because'. One thing I claim is the case 'because' of another which I think logically causes it.
"...in respect of ‘the meaning of ethical statements’, then that is plainly not a concern of science as such." - A statement, not an argument. No "X is because of Y".
This is probably a question for a thread of its own, but to give you a brief reply, although there are a number of responses, I will outline my personal approach.
Basically I consider the evidence from neuroscience to be sufficient to consider that the self and free-will are both illusions. They are ad hoc stories our brain tells us to reconcile our actions into a coherent teleology.
As such there is no 'ought', there is only what we 'are' going to do.
Science can therefore make predictions (which is its job) about what we 'are' going to do and how we 'are' going to feel in certain circumstances. Therefore, given that we definitely 'are' going to want to bring those circumstances about, science can make statements about what courses of action are most likely to succeed. There's no further debate about whether we 'ought' to do these things because we just will, or will not depending on how convinced we are of them.
Really? What kind of predictions? How we are going to feel if we drown? Or maybe the level of ecstacy if we win $100 million. Maybe we should study the effects of losing a parent? Sadness? Grief?
I just read a study that predicts lonely people tend to be less happy than people with a large community of friends. And what are we supposed to do about this if we have no choices? If we are just neurons that are slaves of those Laws of Physics? What's the point?
This is clearly wrong though. If you and I both agree that the sun moves around the earth every day, then this is not knowledge "of the object", because it is just an incorrect opinion which we both hold. So agreement between us, though it does make "objectivity" in the sense of "inter-subjective", it does not make "objectivity" in the sense of "of the object" because it still might be wrong. That we both believe the same thing does not make our knowledge truly "of the object", because all this is is consistency, agreement in our subjectivity.
Science does not claim to achieve objectivity any more than it claims to achieve truth, its about methods which approach those things.
If you and I both think the sun goes around the earth, that is a good deal closer to being likely to be a property of the object than my personal opinion that the sun is held up by the moon on strings, which no one else seems to share.
Its not that the scientific method is a guarantee of objectivity and truth, it's a far cry from that. But it's the best system we have, nothing else is going to get closer to true knowledge 'about the object'.
I agree that science does not make such claims concerning "objectivity", as I said, that's what philosophy does. But you had made the contrary claim. "Scientists certainly do not consult philosophers to check whether their results are objective. They already know whether their results are objective by the confirmation of others." So that's one thing I objected to, and I'm glad you now realize that what you said wasn't really correct.
Quoting Pseudonym
But both descriptions are clearly wrong, and so both are obviously not properties of the object. Why do you think that one is "closer to being likely to be a property of the object"? Each is a description, and as such it is subjective, of the subject. Subjects make descriptions so a description, though it describes an object, is property of a subject. That you and I agree on a description doesn't mean that the description is any closer, or more likely to be "of the object", because a description is always something made by subjects, so to be "of the object" is a completely different category.
Quoting Pseudonym
I tend to disagree. The scientific method deals with descriptions so it is inherently subjective in the way that I described. This is the problem which Kant exposes with the distinction between phenomena and noumena. Our descriptions are based in phenomena, how the world appears to us through sensation. To gain knowledge about the object, we need to go beyond this, and ask what does it mean to be an object, to exist as an object, and these are the question which ontology and metaphysics are concerned with. While the scientific method, on the other hand, due to its standards of empiricism, is restricted to dealing with descriptions, so it has no approach to the object itself.
Common sense knowledge deals with descriptions; science moves to the next level; the level of explanation.
What a sadly impoverished worldview!
The point being that the explanations are description based, i.e. empirically verified. There is no scientific explanation of what it means to be an object, or to be a property of an object, because these are not empirical principles, empiricism being fundamental to the scientific method.
What it means to be an object can be thought in at least two ways. First it can be thought as a sheer definition, which would be a common sense descriptive approach.
Or the attempt can be made to think it in a comprehensive way that incorporates common sense, scientific knowledge, epistemology, phenomenology and metaphysics; an all-encompassing investigation, which will yield a picture that includes the human cognitive process as it is experienced, understood and judged to be. Obviously this second view of what it means to be an object cannot be a static, timeless one; it will be evolving along with the rest of human thought.
The same process will apply to what it means to be a property of an object.
I didn't mean to go that far. I just meant that I myself want to avoid saying things that can be convincingly disagreed-with, and that a metaphysics that depends on controversial statements, or needs assumptions, or brute-facts isn't very competitive with metaphysicses that don't..
...like the metaphysics that I've been proposing.
For example, the statement about Plotinus's position sounded a lot like Advaita. I used to assume that some Advaita statements were probably right, as metaphysics, just because I have great respect and regard for the philosophers of India.
I even tried to rationalize those statements into the metaphysics that I was proposing in a different forum some years ago. The result was that my metaphysical proposal was criticizable as unsupported.
Then I decided that I didn't want to say anything that can be disagreed-with, or anything that depends on any assumption or brute-fact.
But, in my previous post to this thread, I mentioned 2 possible interpretations for what Advaita and Plotinus said: Metaphysics, or else meta-metaphysics that I don't understand.
The latter interpretation is maybe the better interpretation of those statements from Advaita and from Plotinus.
Meta-metaphysics isn't a matter of proof or argument, or any claim of complete or accurate description.
It's about impressions.
So the Advaitists' and Plotinus's meta-metaphysical impression is different from mine. I don't say that they're wrong. As I said, my feeling is that they're saying more detail than can rightly be said about meta-metaphysics. ...but that's just my impression. I certainly don't claim to be in a position to say someone else is wrong about meta-metaphysics.
I feel that we're exactly what we seem to be: Individual animals. Sure, at the end-of-lives, identity and individuality don't remain. And, as I've said, the timelessnesss of that identity-less sleep beats the temporary life (or lives) during which we strive as individuals. The final and timeless state-of-affairs is the more natural and normal state-of-affairs, I claim.
So there is a sense in which we (eventually) won't be individuals with identity.
So there's that sense in which I don't disagree so much with Advaita. I just claim that right now we're individuals, instead of saying that we aren't, but seem to be individuals. But, because I also don't make any claim that our life-experience possibility-story, or its constituent if-then facts, are "real", then it could be said that my disagreement with Advaita is about a matter of wordings.
I've also been saying that the Nothing that's the quiescent background behind the hypothetical if-then facts is arguably what's more fundamental and natural. ...and it's what we approach at the end of lives.
So, the difference could just be a matter of wording.
Michael Ossipoff
In neither Plotinus nor Advaita is physical death understood in terms of non-existence or non-being. What it does mean however is obviously not going to be an easy thing to say or to fathom. Suffice to say that the common aim of those traditions is to realize an identity that is not subject to death.
In Plotinus, that is through seeking the identity of the soul with the One - very similar to Vedanta.
So the purpose of the spiritual discipline or sadhana is to ‘realize the Self’ (in Vedantic terms) instead of identification with ego and sense-objects. Realizing that identity is called mok?a.
I think you have something mistaken here Janus. The second view, what it means to be an object cannot be changing or evolving, or else existence itself would be evolving and changing. But what really changes is the properties of an object, and what it means to exist as an object remains the same. Existence remains the same. Otherwise, if what it means to be an object is changing along with the rest of human thought, you have just reduced the second way to the first way, what it means to be an object is how we define it.
What do you mean by meta-metaphysics?
Which is why discussion is pointless - because if that is true then there is no means of ‘persuasion by rational argument’. You can’t change someone’s mind if there’s no mind to be changed.
I guess determinists don't realize (because it had been determined so) how meaningless is everything that say or do. It has sunk in because the Laws of Physics doesn't allow it to be sink it.
So how does philosophy do it then?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, fair enough I was being inaccurate for brevity, what I should have said was that ""Scientists certainly do not consult philosophers to check whether their results are approaching objective"
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Because if two descriptions match the probability that the descriptions describe properties of the object increase. The probability of two descriptions which entirely made up in the head (ie have no reference to properties of the object) matching are no better than random as there is no reason why they would match. The more they match, therefore, the less likely it is that their matching is a random coincidence, thus is requires an explanation. The theory is that the reason they match is because they describe some property of the object. That theory becomes more and more likely the more people match because it become increasingly unlikely that the match is coincidence.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If you read my posts, I'm talking specifically about what it is that something meaningful can be said about. Talking about the questions metaphysics "asks" is irrelevant. Theology "asks" questions about religious texts, it doesn't mean their answers are meaningful. The question is not what better techniques do we have than science for 'asking' questions, it is what better techniques do we have than science for answering them.
How does the addition of knowledge make a world view more impoverished. Personally, I think the rejection of knowledge in favour of dwelling on what we want to be the case is impoverished, but if you want to reverse the enlightenment you carry on.
Why does the conclusion that the self and free-will are illusions lead to the conclusion that discussion has not impact on beliefs?
When did I say there was no mind?
I take it this is an attempt to solve the ‘is/ought’ problem by declaring that one ought not to say ‘ought’.
But then:
I should know better than to tackle any proposition which has scare quotes around ‘are’ - but anyway, the two phrases that stick out here are:
‘Given that we definitely are going to want....’
And
‘Depending on how convinced we are’.
Who is this ‘we’? How does what ‘we’ want come into a ‘fully objective’ description? Why should ‘our’ convictions have any bearing on what ‘we’ are going to do? Surely ‘what we are going to do’ can be predicted by a third party, according to your own argument. But if the outcome depends on ‘what we want’ or ‘how convinced we are’ - then how is science going to predict that?
Then I agree with them. Whether reincarnation, or timeless sleep, it isn't nonexistence or non-being.
Only Materialists believe in the non-existence and non-being, though it's unlikely that they know what they mean when they say it.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't claim to know what it will be like, other than it will be a lot like going to sleep.
Of course, if there is, or isn't, reincarnation, we won't know, because, by that time, we'll be too unconscious to know that there was this life. One thing for sure is that death will involve going to sleep.
After that, if another life begins, it will be like the beginning of this life was, and we'll have no idea that we lived before.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm the first to admit that i don't understand that.
Everyone dies.
I don't understand that goal. I have no such goal. The Neo-Advaita teachers, who probably have counterparts among Buddhist teachers too, offer the drive-through Enlightenment that Westerners want to buy. I have no idea what Enlightenment is. That's ok, because I'm sure that it isn't time for it,
I agree with the Hindus when they say that life-completion comes after many lifetimes, during which a person eventually improves his lifestyle.
Instead of "not subject to death", maybe it's "eventually not predisposed to rebirth".
Quoting Wayfarer
I think there's reason to believe that there's good intent behind what is,
...and cause for gratitude because of how good what-is is.. That's an impression, not something to argue, debate, or convince anyone about (...so if anyone disagrees, don't ask for proof, description, explanation, justification or debate) This paragraph isn't about metaphysics, by which I mean the topic of what discussably, describablly is.
Anyway, that impression is all I know about meta-metaphysics. What you referred to in the above passage that I quoted--That's meta-metaphysics, rather than metaphysics, isn't it?
If it's true, it isn't knowable to me.
...unless you're talking about a metaphysical position that can be explained. But it doesn't sound like that. I've always gotten the impression that sages were referring to an emotional, attitudinal understanding, and that isn't metaphysics. But that advanced attitudinal, emotional understanding might only be for the longtime life-completed person.
Some Neo-Advaitists think that if they attend enough lectures or satsangs, they'll "get" it. I have no idea what they're talking about, or what they want or mean.
It seems to me that the experiencer--the primary component of the hypothetical reality that is his/her experience-story, the protagonist that it's about, the reason why it's an experience-story--could be what is meant when people refer to a soul.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't know what they mean about realizing the Self, but maybe part of the eventual life-completion would include less egoism, subconscious and conscious wants, needs and recently-earned feelings of guilt.
Quoting Wayfarer
...something that I have no understanding about the meaning of, and which will probably only be for, and understood by, the longtime life-completed person.
Michael Osspoff
By metaphysics I mean general discussion of the limits of what describably, discussably is.
By meta-metaphysics, I mean what else is.
But I emphasize that some people think that everything that is, is discussable and describable, and that i'm not making any claim about that matter, or arguing a position about it, or inclined to debate it, or qualified to explain it or give details about it.
I'm the first to admit that I don't claim to know about the matter.
Michael Ossipoff.
Well, that's true. If you read Plotinus, you will discover he is very similar to the Advaitin sages, like Ramana Maharishi who died in 1950, and who has a large readership in the West. Such sages really do appear, although very rarely, I'm sure.
Metaphysics is like the preserved sayings of such individuals. Because of their great insight, they will utter various things, which from their perspective is completely clear and obvious, but from the viewpoint of those around them are profound and seemingly impossible to fathom. So the students write down their talks and lectures and try and organise them into a body of ideas (which is exactly how we come to have the teachings of Plotinus, as they were written down by his student Porphyry.) That is where metaphysics comes from. But the sages themselves are by no means attached to metaphysics, nor do they see them as profound. Ultimately their teaching is silence and their actual presence. (That is why actually meeting with a sage is regarded as more effective than any book-learning in the traditions; such an encounter is called a 'darshana', a 'seeing'. Also in India, their teachings are called 'darshanas'. Actually sages are quite dismissive of metaphysics and philosophy. Ramana Maharishi used to say, they're like a stick you use to get the fire going - once it's burning, you throw the stick into the fire.)
Here, I'm certainly not claiming any special insight or knowledge of profound truths. All of what I've said above is available in many of the popular books available on such topics. And I do agree that there are traps and pitfalls such as 'pseudo-Advaita' and other pop versions. It's unavoidable that these occur, but as the saying goes, 'there would be no fool's gold if there were no gold.'
Wierd, that's the second time someone's commented in that way on my use of single quotations. Do they mean something different in America? In England (in academic writing anyway) they just mean that the definition of the term is contested and is being used in the specific sense. I'm acknowledging that we probably don't agree on the meaning of the term.
Quoting Wayfarer
The organism involved. The limits of this organism might be hazy (do we include the bacteria on our skin?), but that haziness doesn't make any difference here.
Quoting Wayfarer
The same way as any scientific theory, probabilistically. We can't say with certainty that the earth orbits the sun, its just our observations make it increasingly likely it does. Most people seem to want the same broad set of things, neuroscience can refine and improve on these observations making any theory based on them even more likely to be accurate. I don't see what's so magic about morality that makes it uniquely immune to scientific investigation.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, given a complete set of a person's 'convictions' and details of the environmental influences, a third party could predict my actions. Advertising agencies are already remarkably good at predict people's reactions to stimuli and we're only at the very beginning of modern neuroscience.
Quoting Wayfarer
Because 'what we want' just isn't that much of a mystery. Why do you think advertising works so well, why are there only two main political parties in most democracies, why is it that if you landed in a high street in any developed country in the world you won't even be able to tell where you were (other than by meaningless differences like language).
Again, the more we investigate, the more we know about the things, I really don't understand what you are finding so hard to grasp about that concept.
That descriptions reference objects does not mean that the descriptions aren't entirely made up in the head. You seem to think that the descriptions are somehow outside of the head, as properties of the object. In logic, as in grammar, there is a subject and a predicate. Predication is of the subject. So we have a clear separation between what is in the head, and what is not. That a specific object is designated as corresponding to that subject, requires a different judgement.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
So you are positing something which is, which is other than that which is. Isn't that contradictory? I know that you say the one "is" refers to what we can talk about, and the other "is refers to what we can't talk about, but haven't you just talked about it by saying it "is". So if it's not contradictory, it's at the least, very hypocritical. How is it possible that you can mention the thing, and have a meta-metaphysics to talk about the things which we can't talk about?
I grasp it alright, I just say it is muddled. It is such a melange of mixed metaphors and misunderstood ideas that it’s not worth spending more time on.
What you refer to is not knowledge, but an attitude which rules out much more than it includes. It is better characterized as an ignorance than as a knowledge.
But we are addressing human understanding and knowledge of these things, neither of which remain the same. What does remain the same is the fact that the basic common sense understandings always precede the understandings and knowledge that come from further comprehensive investigations and dialectical developments.
I'm not suggesting that the two are literally the same thing, but that the are sufficiently similar.
There is a way that the world is, even if you're a solipsist and consider the world to be entirely a construct of the mind, then that is the way the world is.
This world is divisible into parts, if we allow the divisions to be arbitrary.
Each part of the world (a thing) will therefore have a "way it is" (its properties), because it is a part of the world, which has a "way it is".
I can either form my opinion about the way a thing is (its properties) somehow from the thing (physical properties eminating from it, or mental states caused by it), or I could make them up (by which I mean form them from stimuli which did not in any way come from the thing.
If I form my ideas about the thing the latter way, and you do too, then our ideas about the thing are unlikely to be the same because they are formed from some other source (in case I actually need to explain probability, this is because there are more things that aren't the thing in question than there are which are it).
It follows, therefore, that if you and I both have the same idea about the thing, we would naturally look for some explanation, the similarity is not what we'd expect by chance. One explanation is that we might have discussed our ideas and deliberately made them similar, but if we can rule that out, the next most plausible explanation is that our ideas both have the same cause - that they in fact reflect something about the way the thing is.
What nonsense, are you trying to claim that theories of neuroscience which have considerable empirical evidence do not even count as knowledge? Then what does?
After finishing his PhD., Harris has never lectured in neuroscience, nor authored any scientific papers in that subject, nor been employed as a neuro-scientist. His entire career has been in popular philosophy (if you can call it that) and the ‘evangelical atheism’ on which he made his name, as one of the so-called ‘four horsemen of new atheism’.
For a cold hard look at the pretentions of neuroscientism in respect to philosophy, one standard critical text is The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, Bennett and Hacker.
You are conflating the science as practical knowledge with its interpretation as worldview.
No, we were discussing objectivity, what it means to be an object regardless of human understanding. Perhaps you joined into this discussion a bit later, but human understanding is a property of the subject, "subjective".
Quoting Pseudonym
What? The logical subject is sufficiently similar to the physical object? No, there is a categorical difference between them. They do not have the same type of existence at all.
Quoting Pseudonym
You demonstrate inconsistency here. If the divisions are arbitrary, then the "way it is" of the part is dependent on the division. The description of the part is dependent on the division made. This we can know. That there is a "way it is" of the world as a whole, is just an assumption, so we cannot actually know that. And, relativity theory assumes as a premise that there is not such thing as the "way it is" of the world as a whole. It assumes that the "way it is" is dependent on the perspective of the part. So there really isn't any support for your assertion that there is a "way it is" of the world as a whole.
"What it means to be an object regardless of human understanding" seems to be hopelessly incoherent.
Perhaps, but I was just trying to get a handle on what is meant by "objective", in the sense of "of the object". I take it that you think this to be hopelessly incoherent.
'Objective' and 'subjective' are categories of human understanding; so nothing wrong with trying to clarify the differences ever more precisely. Nothing incoherent about that!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes. It's completely contradictory.
Of course I didn't say it. :D
I didn't say that metaphysics is the discussion of all that is. I said that metaphysics is the general discussion to the limits of what discussably and describably is.
No, the "Is" s don't have different intrinsic meanings. But one of them is accompanied a limiting-quailfier.
If I tell you that there are national secrets, things that aren't allowed to be discussed, and you say, "But you've just discussed them by saying they are. That's hypocritical.", how much sense would that make?
Are we grasping at straws?
I've often used the additional adverbial qualifiers "accurately and completely" with "discussable and describable".
Add that, if you like.
Michael Ossipoff
I think that makes a lot of sense. So my objection holds. Why would you mention, or bring up for discussion, something which you claim cannot be discussed. That's nonsense. Either they really cannot be discussed, in which case you wouldn't be able to mention them for discussion, or your assertion that they cannot be discussed is false. Clearly your assertion is false because you are saying "I cannot talk about the national secretes which I am talking about".
Therefore, I think that unless you can explain your distinction between metaphysical and meta-metaphysical, in a way which makes sense, you are just talking nonsense.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
To each their own :D
It must--You say so yourself :D
Indeed it is. I didn't bring it up for discussion.
(...but it seems to be getting lots of discussion :D )
I define meta-metaphysical matters as regarding whatever is, but doesn't come under my definition of metaphysical matters.
But I don't assert that not all of Reality can be accurately and completely discussed and described. I don't assert it, and I'm not going to debate it. I've already said that. Perhaps you missed that part :D
Are you clear about that yet?
I didn't mention them for discussion. You insist on discussing them, but don't blame me for inviting you to or telling you to.
I don't assert that there's anything that you can't accurately discuss and describe. As I said, I don't make assertions on the matter, and I'm not going to debate it.
I didn't make an assertion. I stated a definition. See above.
You're getting yourself all confused. Re-read my definitions of metaphysics and meta-metaphysics.
In those definitions I don't talk about matters of meta-metaphysics other than to define them as "What else is."
That definition isn't a statement about "whatever else is". A definition of a topic isn't a statement about that topic's matters..
My definitions of metaphysics and meta-metaphysics state their distinction.
Only you know what makes sense to you. I won't tell you what should make sense to you. That's entirely your business.
You know, we've been over this several times, and you keep repeating already-answered claims. Continuing this conversation would serve no purpose.
It's time to just agree to disagree.
Michael Ossipoff
Yes, certainly. But there are two people at these forums who are giving me humungous flak for even suggesting a word for a matter of what is, but isn't covered in metaphysics, and isn't a subject for assertions, argument, debate, or accurate, complete descriptions.
Michael Ossipoff
I define "objective" as "perceieved by more than one individual, and, in some (not necessarily specified) manner, more than hypothetical".
Michael Ossipoff
Vilayanor Ramachandran also considers there to be a neurological correlate of religion, he's a professor at the University of California, teaching and researching for 36 years.
Bruce Hood also agrees with Sam Harris's work, a doctor of Philosophy and professor of psychology teaching and researching for 27 years.
Michael Persinger is also of this view, a Neurologist actively researching, publishing and teaching for 43 years.
Robert Sapolsky takes Harris's opinion even further yet he's a neuroscientist of 47 years teaching and research experience and has won several awards for his contributions.
Michael Inzlicht, professor of psychology and neuroscience 25 years, Jordan Grafman, neuroscientist 38 years, Patricia Churchland, neuroscience teaching and research professor of 35 years.
Since we're on the subject, the Statistician who supposedly investigated Sam Harris's paper is a Gun-For-Hire self-appointed "Statistician to the stars", recently found to have misunderstood the most basic of statistics http://gregladen.com/blog/2012/02/01/william-m-briggs-has-misunders/.
Check your facts before you start engaging in your pathetic ad hominem attacks.
No, I'm saying that evidence-based theories are as good a definition of what constitutes knowledge as any other. There are evidence-based theories which suggest that free-will and the self are both illusory and are not what we think they are. Therefore, learning about them constitutes knowledge, not ignorance.
Ignoring them because we don't like their conclusions is ignorance, the clue's in the name.
No, I'm saying that the similar things are the properties as contained within the 'idea of the thing' are similar to the properties of the thing. In the same way as a photograph of the Eiffel tower is similar to the Eiffel tower in some important aspects despite being in a different medium (2D paper as opposed to 3D reality). Everyone would still recognise the Eiffel tower from a photograph of it, no-one is going to say "well I don't know what this is at all, the Eiffel tower is a massive three dimensional steel structure, this is a piece of paper with some photographic ink on it, the two thing are completely unalike".
Moreover, everyone would recognise that a photograph of something else entirely was totally unrelated to the Eiffel tower in a way that the photograph of it was not.
The blue prints for the Eiffel tower would represent it even more accurately, despite still being ink and paper rather than three-dimensional steel structure, as would the blueprints for another building be totally unrelated.
So it is with our 'idea of the thing' and 'the thing in itself'. If our 'idea of the thing' comes in some way from 'the thing itself' then it will likely be similar to everyone else's 'idea of the thing' because all 'ideas of the thing' will have had the same cause and so will be similar, like if everyone took a photograph of the Eiffel tower, they might be from different angles or photographic quality, but all recognisably similar.
But if my 'idea of the thing' differs radically from yours, then it is more likely that the ideas have been causes by something other than 'the thing itself' because how could 'the thing itself' cause in us two such radically different ideas? It would be like seeing two radically different photographs and claiming that they were both of the Eiffel tower. Not impossible, but unlikely.
The claim of ad hominem does not depend on the attack being a lie, the fact that your assessment of Harris's CV is accurate has nothing to do with it. It's ad hominem because you placed this attack in an argument about a subject matter on which Sam Harris also speaks. You're clearly trying to say that this line of argument is likely to be false because one of it's proponents lacks teaching experience, without paying any attention to all of its other proponents, and you accused him of cherry-picking.
If you have an actual line of argument then lay it out and defend it, please, as many have asked before me, stop making wild accusations against physicalists and then hiding behind long historical anecdotes or ad hominem attacks when you are asked to support your claims. It makes for a very poor discussion, which is what this site is all about.
I don't think you've responded to anything in the OP, and I can't see anything in any of what you say that amounts to anything more than basic scientism. Done talking to you.
OK, then give an account of such a theory and the evidence that purportedly supports it.
If free will and self are illusory, so are all scientists and everything they comment on.
I obviously can't give an account of an entire neuroscientific theory and all the evidence used to back it up on a philosophy forum. Unlike the bullshit that's often peddled here there is a vast weight of experimental evidence which supports the argument, far more than would fit in one post.
If you actually want an account (I'm guessing you don't and you're just being rhetorical for effect), then I suggest you read 'The Self Illusion' by Bruce Hood, which is a good approachable introduction to the subject.
For a brief introduction, there's a slideshare of Rick Hanson's talk on the subject https://www.slideshare.net/drrickhanson/notself-in-the-brain-rick-hanson-phd
If you want a more philosophical approach you could try 'The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self' by Thomas Metzinger.
Susan Blackmore has written extensively about the illusions of both self and conciousness, the argument is laid out in 'Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction'.
Patricia Churchland's “Touching A Nerve: The Self As Brain.” also gives a good account.
The argument is, in it's most basic form, that a wide range of studies such as these (just to give you an example) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002770400099X https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn.2006.18.9.1586 show that what we talk about when we describe our 'selves' in neither consistent, nor reflected in our actions. Something which does not have an effect on the real world (the 'self' that we describe does not affect our actions), and changes it's properties entirely based on a subjective feeling, is not real. If it were, then Jabberwockies would be real too.
The materialists, such as Churchlands, trivialise the question by insisting that decisions are the actions of neurons, of synapses, of biochemical reactions. However, you can never find anything corresponding to 'judgement' or 'meaning' or 'decisions' in the data of the neurosciences. If you wish to find it, you must immediately embark on a process of judgement as to what the data means. 'See this area of the brain here', you might say. 'It means such and such'. But to do so requires reasoned inference, the supposition that 'this' means 'that', that 'this data' signifies 'this meaning'. And that act, that supposition, is never in the data itself. It is always internal to the operation of thought, as logic is found in the relationship of ideas, not of objects as such.
'Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, are devoid of any inherent meaning [as materialists never tire of telling us]. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc. In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes.'
~ Feser.
Thanks for the references, but I'm already well familiar with the arguments. I've read The Ego Tunnel and quite a bit of the Churchlands and some Blackmore. I just don't find those kinds of arguments for the epiphenomenality of consciousness convincing. Also, no amount of neuroscientific research can show that consciousness is an epiphenomenon; that will always be merely one among other possible interpretations of the results.
Absolutely, that;s why I am always (well...usually) careful to make the claim that "There are evidence-based theories which suggest that free-will and the self are both illusory and are not what we think they are". Suggest, not prove.
What I objected to was your trying to claim that it was "not knowledge". I honestly know of no better description for knowledge than a falsifiable theory which is based on existing justified beliefs and against which there is no overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Such is the theory that free-will and conciousness are illusions.
To say "there are evidence-based theories which suggest..." doesn't seem right. Theories don't suggest, they posit. Perhaps you mean 'there is evidence that suggests...'?
For me, scientific theories are knowledge only in the sense of knowing how, not in the sense of knowing that. The observations that underpin a theory are knowings that, and the actualities that are observed in experiments designed to test the predictions of a theory are knowings that.
So. experiments like Libet's, for example, do not demonstrate that free will is an illusion, but that is one possible way of interpreting the results. I can't think of any experiments which even purport to demonstrate that consciousness is an illusion. Do you know of any?
'Suggest' is listed in my thesaurus as a synonym for 'posit', so I'm not sure what the distinction is you're making here, perhaps you could clarify what the difference is, philosophically.
Quoting Janus
Knowledge how X comes to be the case, is just knowledge that Y causes X. Again, I'm not sure I see the distinction. We might have degrees of certainty about our knowledge. We might be certain that the Earth orbits the Sun, but there are remaining uncertainties about the theory of gravity that is how the Earth orbits the Sun. That doesn't mean, by any standard use of the word, that the theory of gravity is not 'knowledge'. We cannot, after all, be certain the Earth orbits the Sun, it might be an illusion.
Knowledge is just justified belief. A theory which, when applied to some circumstance, reliably produces the expected results and is useful.
The theory that we have no unified 'self', nor 'free-will' would predict that in certain cases of brain damage, changes would take place to what we call a person's 'self', and they do. A theory that we have no free-will would expect to see something like the results in Libet's experiments, and it does. It would expect to see ad hoc rationalisations of sub-concious actions, and it does. It would expect to see strong links between environment and behaviour, and it does. It would expect to find no central brain activity associated with conciousness, and it doesn't. It's a good theory.
This doesn't mean it's true, or that it won't be replaced by a better theory. It may well be that dualism is right, it may well be that some mysterious aspect of quantum indeterminacy somehow allows for free-will, but none of those possibilities make it a poor theory, it's doing what good theories do. It's making predictions which turn out to be the case.
What alternative theory of free-will and conciousness can make predictions which turn out to be the case?
Go figure.
I didn't say theories are not knowledge; I said they are knowledge-how. They give us knowledge of how to make predictions and construct experiments to test them.
Quoting Janus
So now I'm confused. Are you saying the the idea we do not have free-will or that the 'self' is an illusion is not a theory?
Let's say that everything is determined, for the sake of argument. What now? The mere assumed fact that the future already exists in a certain sense doesn't give us access to that predetermined future. We still wrestle the experience that we'll continue to call 'choice' or 'free will.' We might joke that we are 'suffering from the illusion of choice' again, but this is the same kind of suffering. It involves an ignorance of what we will do ahead of time (in borderline situations especially.) That's my attempt to demonstrate that the mere abstract truth of determinism doesn't have much weight.
My second point is that we are all already soft determinists. We reason about how others may or may not react to different requests, provocations, seductions, etc. We reason about what they will do in terms of what they in particular have done and what humans in general have done in similar situations.
What would truly be freaky here is the kind of perfect free will that was utterly unpredictable. How would behavioral science be possible in the context of this radical free will? Would this not imply that any inferred patterns are a matter of chance? That all scientific results on human behavior are null and void? This is similar to denying that nature is lawlike because we can not ground induction in deduction without an axiom that dodges the issue.
In short, hard determinism is trivial without access to the future. [Such access might not even make sense, for sci-fi movie reasons.] Also soft determinism suffuses our ordinary activity and thought in the world.
Hi. I haven't looked into this deeply (disclaimer), but I'm surprised if it's the case that scientific theories include terms like 'self' and 'free will.' And what is it that we call a person's 'self'? Can we pin down the word? Do we want to?
I can understand theories as prediction functions from observable brain states to behavior, or from one kind of behavior to another. But I can't make sense of 'we have no free will.' That's because I can't make sense of 'free will.' Sure, it has a vague meaning.
On the other hand, I do see how a tendency toward ad hoc rationalizations of subconscious actions could be framed as support for the vague and metaphysical theory that we have no free will.
I think you are forcing a particular meaning on the word 'responsible' here. It seems to me that it wouldn't matter that we were all (under the assumption of determinism) ideally irresponsible. We still as individuals and societies have to deal with violation of taboos, crimes, etc. We would still hold people responsible in the weightiest sense of the word. True, a shared belief in determinism might change the way we make and enforce laws, but we would still reward and punish.
I don't [I]think[/I] I referred to either as 'scientific' theories. Although I'm not sure that would matter. I have quite a broad definition of what constitutes science, but I know others don't so I try to avoid ambiguous uses of the term.
Quoting mrcoffee
We use the term all the time. "He wasn't himself", "self-confidence", "self-awareness". They all imply that there is a constant and unified thing such that a person could act in such a way as to be contrary, or untrue, to it. The psychological theory is that no such thing exists, that we are just a collection of contradictory impulses. The evidence seems to support such a theory.
Quoting Pseudonym
As I argued above, I can only understand the a science of behavior in terms of the prediction and control of said behavior. But what are we modeling if not the entity that behaves? This entity is the unified thing that can be 'untrue' to our current model of it. As I suggested to Rich above, we all do folk-psychology (which seems to me to be implicitly deterministic, if 'only' probabilistically). We'd be surprised if a person yawned when his hair was on fire. That would be part of our general idea of the human. Then we specialize with individuals. Cathy over there is a little bit different from every other human who has ever lived, probably. Some sequence of stimuli would generated different 'output.' Language is probably the easiest manifestation of this uniqueness. How many sentences are still out there that have never been uttered?
I probably agree with you in spirit if not in letter, though. For one thing, I don't think there's a 'thine own self' to which we can be virtuously true.
I just think the self of ordinary language exists more than it doesn't exist, to the degree that it is worth the trouble to pick sides about the use of a decontextualized word. I don't think we know exactly what we mean by 'self' in most cases (if ever), but that may apply to every word. How exactly can we say what 'mean' means? It's as if we find ourselves in a basic competence, perhaps because our self-for-ourselves is mostly made of words? I view philosophy as (among other things) this kind of identity construction.
But if the future already exists, in a hard determinist way, we wouldn't have any incentive to attempt to influence what we apprehend may or may not occur, because it's already determined. Whether or not I'm getting the job I want is already determined, so I don't need to send a resume.
I have no idea what the concept of "we" or "wrestle" means under determinism. Nothing has any meaning with determinism. There is no reason to even take discussion of meaning seriously since whatever we utter has already been determined. Do we even have can choice about taking anything seriously? Of course not. It is a chasm of meaningless existence.
There is no Free Will. There is only the ability to choose a direction of action. We have habits, sometimes very addictive ones, such as believing in determinism, which we have a choice to try to change.
No particular meaning. If humans don’t freely act as agents by making decisions and carrying them out, then they’re not responsible for their actions. Justice can’t be carried out on the basis that it’s just ‘as if’ they’re responsible.
The nature of the self, whether the self is unitary, and so on - these are no doubt deep philosophical questions, but the materialist view that humans are ‘only’ or ‘simply’ a ‘bundle’ of autonomic actions and reflexes undoubtedly undermines any notion of agency or personal responsibility. No amount of sophistry about ‘idealised definitioins’ will get around that. (However, this is another topic altogether from the OP.)
There is a confusion in modern cultur,e owing to the prestige accorded to scientific objectivity. According to some, only what can be objectively validated in scientific terms can be considered real. But the self as ‘subject of experience’ is never among the objects of scientific analysis.
There are various ways of dealing with this. One road was taken by Husserl and later phenomenology generally, which methodologically criticised the attempt to ‘naturalise’ the mind, by arguing that mind in an important and real sense, precedes any naturalistic explanation. Husserl criticised Descartes for treating res cognitans in a naturalistic manner i.e. by positing it as an objective reality, which has had many profound consequences in later philosophy.
Another route, which a few here seem to be favouring, is the behaviourist, which declares that the self/mind/subject is actually non-existent, or at any rate ought not to be considered as part of any ‘truly scientific’ analysis but is an artefact of ‘folk psychology’. Daniel Dennett and the other eliminaitve materialists are arguably all fundamentally behaviourist in their outlook. (I have no wish to discuss or indulge behaviourism or scientific materialism other than to note its fundamentally self-contradictory nature.)
Interesting point. The way our knowledge of hard determinism would affect our actions which in turn would affect this future would have to be already baked in to that future. Some of the problems in sci-fi movie plots start to manifest.
For me the issue is a probabilistic determinism that, in my view, we already believe in in terms of practice. (Of course QM is probabilistic and our knowledge of human behavior is fuzzy). I plan my interactions with others according to an image of what they are more or less likely to do in response to this or that prompt. I don't suggest to an alcoholic that we go out for a drink, secure in the radical freedom of the alcoholic to decide a new. (With 'hard free will' there would not be alcoholics, since past behavior would give no information about future behavior.)I get to know myself this way too. Maybe I don't buy ice cream at the grocery store, because I tend to eat too much of it once I start. Finally, we hate abuses of children not only for the immediate trauma of the abuse but also because we think of the damage to the child's personality that might resonate for decades or a lifetime.
I've never heard of "hard free will", would that be like every decision is a completely random decision?
Let's imagine an extra-terrestial with a superior brain and/or technology who can calculate future individual human behavior with pretty good reliability. Just as humans calculate the weather a few days in advance, our alien friend can calculate your behavior a few days in advance, at least in broad strokes. But here's the twist: she doesn't tell you what her algorithm gives (what you are most likely to do). Yet you believe that her algorithm exists and that it works well enough.
Does that keep you from struggling with decisions? Admittedly, it may creep you out to think of her knowing what you'll do (with some possibility of error) sooner than you will. Her machine will have to take your knowledge of its existence into account. (If she tells you its predictions, you might intentionally try to violate them, which you presumably could. The machine's accuracy might depend on your ignorance of its specific output.)
Quoting Rich
Hard determinism is problematic, but (as I have suggested) soft determinism is the common position in practice if not in theory.
I made it up, and, yes, a 'completely random decision' is about all the sense I can make of free will. (Randomness is its own fascinating concept. Incompressible information is one interpretation of what we mean by 'random.')
I'm not using any particular philosopher's terminology here when I say this, but the 'essence' of an entity (seems to me) is the 'law' of that entity's interactions. A perfectly free entity would be vacuous. Of course with humans and free will there is still the belief in the laws of the human body and the world it exists in. The freedom is constrained by physical limitations, but not (as I understand it) by psychological limitations. Indeed, free will understood in a hard or radical sense would seem to destroy the possibility of psychology (understood as a search for regularities or patterns in behavior.)
Let's not. This is what had turned philosophy and demonstrably science into fantasy and sci fi (e.g. time travel, and humans are computers). Let's just stick with what we actually observe and the fantastical possibilities. I admit that fantasy is fun, exciting, creative, and amusing but way too much philosophy and science is fantasy nowadays.
Now, the story you told is quite creative and interesting, but it had nothing to do but with the nature of nature and the nature of life. Why not just talk about what we actually experience everyday in our lives - choices.
I have no idea what soft determinism is or how it is defined. If there is a single instance of choice or random/unpredictable event, no matter how small, then determinism is demolished. What's left had nothing to do with determinism other than the word.
Do you not believe that there are possibilities concerning what will happen in the future, and that your decisions can have an affect in relation to what will and will not happen in the future?
Ah, but it already is, I'd argue. Don't we think that badly raised (abused, neglected, ill-fed) children in bad neighborhoods are more likely to be incarcerated? Yet we punish them nevertheless. We don't let them go because they had less of a chance to be good citizens. Maybe the incarceration is less punitive (as we see it) and instead a humane locking away of the 'mentally ill' victim of circumstance. In any case, we don't let murderers and rapists run free.
Quoting Wayfarer
There is a problem for me with this 'or.' A science can't declare an entity non-existent at the same time that it excludes that entity from its consideration, it seems to me. It makes sense to me to 'pre-scientifically' admit that of course there is subjective experience and then (for a maximum of objectivity) focus on the objective aspect of the agent (his actions and words). Of course words are connected with subjectivity in a profound way, but they are public entities that can be counted, etc. We can feasibly predict with some degree of accuracy the words that will be said as a function of the words that have been said (frequencies, etc., come to mind.)
Of course. When I calculate how others will likely react to prompts, for instance, these prompts will tend to be my actions in pursuit of a goal. If I want to marry someone, I will likely 'calculate' her response to my proposal. If I want to ask for a raise, I will 'calculate' the likelihood that the boss will capitulate.
Behavior has a fuzzy law-likeness, else there could be no knowledge of the human 'soul.' But in this fuzziness lies all of the drama.
So you believe in free will, that the future is not determined. You do not believe in determinism. Why do you claim that we are all naturally soft determinists?
I think we should distinguish between random and unpredictable. As science progresses, the once unpredictable becomes predictable. We can then project backwards and say that such and such was theoretical predictable (within a margin of error), but the humans then didn't have Newton's physics, for instance.
Soft determinism is simply probabilistic determinism. Some outcomes (given the situation) are more likely than others. We find this in QM as I was taught it, and I believe we 'live' this in our interactions of with others and in our political conversation.
If believing in free will only means believing that the future is not exactly determined, then I believe in free will. But I'm not sure that that's how 'free will' tends to be used.
I associate it with human behavior in the context of praise, blame, prediction, and control. If we think that humans are somewhat predictable, then I think this works against 'ideal' or 'hard' free will. We might say that 'soft determinism' == 'soft free will.'
That's a valid point, but judges should, and generally do, take an offenders' circumstances into account when judging a case. That is often found to be a mitigation in regard to sentencing.
But if it were true that 'there is no free will' and all our decisions are pre-determined or made despite our intentions on the basis of neural programming over which we have no conscious control, then it would be irrelevant. Nobody would be responsible, because there would be no free agents. This is why the so-called 'scientific argument' that there is no free will is such a complete nonsense. It is simply a way to avoid the hard truth that we are, in fact, responsible, in my view.
Quoting mrcoffee
I'm afraid that's just positivist wishful thinking. There is no way for you to be able to statistically determine what a person might say. So, eggplants to that. ;-)
I believe we have choices in which direction we move, which are constrained. Such a situation leaves the future unpredictable but still constrained and limited.
We can. And in either case it leaves us with zero evidence for determinism. Belief in determinism is tantamount to deep faith, comparable to Calvanism, which hold similar beliefs contrary to all observations and evidence.
Quoting mrcoffee
Actually, as of 100 years ago, it is going in the opposite direction.
Probabilistic determinism only preserves the word, other than that, the concept of determinism perishes. Some events are more probable, but still precisely unpredictable.
Well hard free will, in the way you described it as completely random acts, doesn't really make sense. And I've never heard a description of "soft determinism" which makes sense. Some people profess "compatibilism" but I find this to be incoherent. So I guess we're left with free will (call it soft if you like).
As I mentioned before, 'soft' free will strikes me as equivalent to 'soft' determinism. I understand soft determinism simply as a constraint on the future determined by the present and past. If I drop a heavy object, I do not expect a future in which the rock floats away. If I sexually harass a bodybuilder's wife in the grocery store, I do not expect him to walk away bored. My thesis is that we largely understand both people and objects in terms of such constraints (of what they will do as a function of their place in a network of people and objects.) We can include the past in this network in terms of present memory.
I think you have a scarecrow in your target here. I'm not arguing for strict or exact determinism. I'm making the smaller point that we already behave as 'soft' determinists. I'm not too attached to the terminology.
A second point is that observations and evidence can have no weight unless we believe the future is constrained by the past. (Hume's famous problem.) If anything can happen at anytime, with equal probability, then experience is worthless for predictive purposes. I believe this would also obliterate the intelligibility of objects. For instance, I would not be able to say that an apple was a kind of food. It could poison me one minute and cure cancer the next. It would not even be a fruit. Apples could spontaneously appear, or emerge from dirty snow. But in such a chaos the word would have no stable meaning. So language itself depends, I'd argue, on a soft determinism. Or it implies and manifests a soft determinism that is akin to rationality itself.
Indeed, and we approve of such mitigation precisely because we are soft determinists, I'd say. We are also less impressed by the success of a child with affluent and loving parents. Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think we're far apart here, really. This reminds me of left and right politics. The right tends to lean into 'free will' and personal responsibility. The left, on the other hand, emphasizes the individual as embedded in a determining social structure. As a matter of opinion, I think the individual is ennobled by insisting on personal responsibility, even if he or she 'knows' otherwise. Of course he or she could view the ennobling insistence on personal responsibility as a kind of effective tool. A culture as a whole could also insist on its responsibility or 'freedom.' Because life is only indirectly about reliable prediction and fundamentally about control of the subjective situation, our best objective theories are not morally binding. Instead they are 'if then' statements. The 'then' we pursue, I'd say, is ultimately (inter-)subjective.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think we can use this forum as an example of my point. Why do we have handles if there is no continuity of personality from post to post? Do you in fact have no information to offer about posters you have long observed? Do you really think you couldn't predict some of the keywords that will appear in the their future posts? At a level that is above random guessing?
Some posters will always drag in their favorite philosopher. Others will drag in the same system again and again with tweaks. Others will complain about the same social evil again and again. Etc. Now this is informal, but I think we could do statistics on their key words. We could compare the proportion of these key words among the rest of their words to the proportions of other posters, etc.
Of course I do not at all think that we have the means to predict the specific sentences of individuals. Personality is just way too complex. It is vaguely and hazily conceivable that a very superior extraterrestrial species could get surprising accuracy, but I would expect the ET to have a far more complex nervous system in order to do so as well as use technology that scans the brain in ways we haven't thought of. (That brains are related to subjective experience is something we imply with the use of the caffeine molecule for pleasure.)
You can say that. I'm not that attached to the word. But 'free will' also vanishes. Roughly, soft determinism is the same as soft free will, and IMV this is the default and reasonable position. It is perhaps unavoidable and therefore trivial in practice. This would place both determinists and 'freewillers' in similarly counterintuitive positions.
Sorry, I took that to be what you were driving at with the statement that I was responding to. But I agree, we're probably not that far apart. (I was shooting at someone standing behind you ;-) )
Ok. Then let's drop the word, because it is inapplicable, unless there is something about the word that needs saving. If the universe is not deterministic we have to figure out what it is.
Quoting mrcoffee
Based upon my own observations, our actions are constrained. The future is simply a possibility in our minds. We take actions based upon the possibilities.
I agree. An equally unobservable and that is unsupportable by evidence and phenomenon. I just wonder why it is still discussed.
There is nothing soft. What we have are choices and we make choices all the time like choosing to drop Free will and determinism.
I would say that we largely figure out what it is by detecting regularities in experience (determining it more sharply, finding tighter constraints). To be fair, this could be called 'how' as opposed to what it is. Still, an apple is largely (for us) a system of probabilistic relationships. If I eat one every day, it'll probably keep the doctor away, or so they say.
Quoting Rich
I agree. The future exists as possibility, and in that sense (because we are future-directed) possibility is higher than actuality. The actual is framed and used in pursuit of the possible, and the possible is itself a function of the actual (including the memory of what was once actual.)
I agree. There are habits everywhere in the universe, like a pendulum.Quoting mrcoffee
I agree. Memory becomes an important concept in understanding actions and habits.
I think it figures into certain religious and political visions. Sartre believed in something like free will or pure consciousness, at least earlier in his life. It is an ennobling myth. It also justifies punishment and helps the rich understand some of their luck as achievement. On the flip side, a total denial of free will justifies sloth, despair, apathy. As I understand it, life is a game of both chance and skill, like poker or monopoly. The ideal general strategy may still lead to disaster, and a bad strategy in general could work in the particular case.
Right. 'Habits' is a nice word. We think of the universe as habitual and therefore in terms of laws. In the human case, however, we see that humans have a habit of changing their habits. We might then try to find a regularity in the rate or the nature of such changes. We might speak of paradigm changes as involving the change in a dominant metaphor.
Quoting Rich
Indeed. Memory seems to be near the center of what it is to be human. The future is a cloud of desired and feared possibility that is shaped from the stuff of memory, one might say. Memory is (one might say) actuality chasing possibility and generating more actuality in this pursuit, and so more memory. Memory is the stain of the actual that has ceased to be actual, in this vocabulary. The memory is itself actual, as memory. The table will not fit in a closet. A memory of the table takes up far less space, and indeed lives in a virtual space that still (as we see it) constrains the future along with the conditions obtaining in physical space.
Humans makes choices and have will (energy applied in a specific direction) that they can exercise to effect that choice. The choices are constrained but unpredictable whichever creates the possibility of creative evolution.
Quoting mrcoffee
I agree.
Yes, I agree. Creative evolution is a good description of personality. It can reasonably be extended to a description of reality itself, which (especially in or through us, so far as we know) is creatively evolving.
I agree.
Free will and determinism are different ways of seeing human actions, human existence. The fact that the rock will fall has nothing to do with determinism. One can believe the inanimate world to be deterministic without believing in determinism, which relates to human acts. This just requires that one accepts such a fundamental difference between human beings and inanimate things.
Quoting mrcoffee
Do you recognize that it is much more difficult to predict human behaviour in a particular situation then it is the behaviour of the inanimate object? And, do you recognize that even though you can assume with a high degree of certainty that the bodybuilder will not walk away bored, it would still be very difficult for you to predict exactly what that person would actually do? That you can predict what a person won't do is not a good argument against free will.
Quoting mrcoffee
I'm still not seeing where you get this idea from. I think it's quite clear that we behave as if we believe in free will, not as if we believe in any type of determinism. When something is important we take our time to deliberate and make a responsible decision.
I agree that this is theoretically possible. At times, I read Sartre to be saying something like that. Consciousness is pure freedom, so I can't really be any of my roles, not even the defender of free will. So Sartre now cannot truly be Sartre five minutes ago. He has to drag his past actions along.This is an attractive theory. It's almost a painting of the ideal situation. We want be to freer and less predictable. We strive to increase our options and the complexity of our behavior. But we do this among others who are somewhat predictable, which is to say among personalities with a certain amount of continuity. The alternative is lots of bodies with 'brand new souls' who aren't essentially tied to what those bodies have done before they arrived (always just now.)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But what are these same deliberations? Do they not largely involve the likely responses of others to our own actions? Deliberation is a kind of possibility machine. If I try this, then approximately X results. If I had tried this, then maybe I'd have Y rather than Z. We do this in a network of both objects and people. Of course people are far more complicated, and we have more feelings about people. But the calculation in both cases seems to involve a probabilistic constrain on the future in terms of the past. The softness of both determinism and free will is in this 'probabilistic.'
Of course.
It's not that either concept is soft, it is that neither has ever been observed, so maintaining either simpler muddles an inquiry. Best to jettison both.
What we do observe it's that we do make choices on how to act based upon memories of the past that are projected as possible actions into the future. From this observation about ourselves we can now begin to develop an ontology based upon memory. will, and some creative mind that projects the possibilities and initiates actions.
The concepts of free will and determinism get one no where except further into endless confusion. I'm amazed that such concepts have endured so long in the face of so much evidence that neither exist.
That's the nature of time, it makes reality rather complicated. But it's not necessarily true that "we want to be freer less predictable". In reality we general strive to be less free and more predictable. Remember how "hard free will" appeared as complete randomness? Nobody wants that. And, it's quite evident in communication, and most social activity, we make an effort to be predictable. We allow ourselves to be educated, and this is the free will tending toward conformity. Perhaps in reality we want to be less free, and more predictable.
Quoting mrcoffee
There's more to the complication of human beings, than just a constraint on the future imposed by the past, because there is also a necessity to consider within human beings what is wanted in the future in the first place. Constraints of the past restrict the reality of what one can get, or bring about, create, in the future, but they do not put restrictions on what one can want, or desire. So we can desire things which are impossible. Intention has a great influence over one's thinking and if we don't properly distinguish between what is possible, and what is impossible, physically, our thinking may be corrupted.
I think it is incorrect to represent thinking, deliberation, and calculation as the past putting constraints on the future, because thinking is driven by intention. And intention allows fundamentally that we can want anything, almost to the point of hard free will. So it appears to you, as if thinking is an act of the past (memories) putting constraints on what is wanted for the future. In reality though, thinking is not necessarily clear, accurate, or correct. We often use thinking to rationalize goals which are really irrational.
So we need to characterize thinking in a way which allows this as a reality. This implies that thinking is really a process whereby intentions for the future incline us to make a representation of the past (memory), and bring this representation to bear upon future possibilities. Therefore it is not the actual past which is doing the constraining in the act of thinking, it is really just the representation of the past (memory), and this is why we are prone to making mistakes. So when we make decisions concerning free will and determinism, we must be careful not to consider these representations (memories) as the past constraining the future in a determinist way, because the memories are produced and employed in a free way. The consequence, mistakes.
The idea that we do not have free will or that the self is an illusion is a hypothesis that may count as a theory if it can produce predictions that can be adequately tested.
I didn't say theories are not knowledge, I said they are not knowledge-that, but knowledge-how; specifically knowledge-how to make predictions and devise ways to test them. So, no matter how well tested the theory that we don't have free will or that self is an illusion is; it can never constitute knowledge that we don't have free will or that self is an illusion. It always remains a conjecture, which may be thought by different interpreters to be more or less adequately formulated and/ or more or less adequately testable and/ or more or less adequately actually tested.
Physical models can of course simplify the situation and treat the dynamics of the world as mechanical and time-reversible. But that Newtonian view is known to be an over-simplification both due to the laws of thermodynamics and quantum theory.
If we put all our physical laws together, they tell us the world is a place where the past does constrain the future, but can't absolutely determine the future.
Then when it comes to freewill, there is further science to inform our metaphysics.
Any living and mindful system is a dissipative thermodynamic structure that employs information to regulate dynamics. It uses a symbolic memory and code - like genes, neurons, words - to step back from the world so as to be able to control that world.
So biology depends on an epistemic cut that is the basis of autonomy or "freewill" in the broadest sense. Physics has no direct or deterministic control over what gets written into the memory of a mind. Biology exists as a state of matter because it uses a semiotic mechanism to divorce its essence as completely as possible as it can from the particular "hardware" on which it runs its "computations".
Of course, biology then can only choose to use that power over nature to act in a self-interested fashion - to build and maintain a body, to function and thrive in an environment. But it is completely unmysterious why organisms exhibit autonomy. We know that biology is dynamics + information. We can see exactly where the disconnect between even the relative determinism of the one, and the almost complete lack of determination of the other, takes place.
That folk continue to think Newtonian determinism is some kind of fundamental problem for complex human psychology some 330 years after the Principia is actually amazing.
Quoting apokrisis
In terms of purpose, the only biological purpose is survival and reproduction, but the end point - the ‘final cause’, so to speak - is the recovery of thermodynamic equilibrium, which is to all intents non-existence, is it not?
Sure. We have to pay for our freedoms in terms of the much greater amount of waste heat that we generate.
So we can have our private purposes that seem diametrically opposed to the largest purpose that is the Cosmos's own project - the drive towards the ultimate simplicity and tranquility of its Heat Death. But those private purposes are ultimately entrained to that general Cosmic purpose. And often - as with global warming - we don't even seem to want to oppose that generalised project. We don't really care about the freedoms we can extract from fossil fuels as we don't really seem to have our own private projects that are actually "diametrically opposed" to the general entropic flow.
So sure. We could spend our freedom more wisely by developing a better sense of purpose. We might want to care more about our long-term flourishing. But still, ultimately, we are part of nature and so constrained by what is, in the largest sense, natural.
If we choose to be a boom/bust extinction event, that is still a pretty routine evolutionary choice.
Well, you see, I think this is ultimately a nihilistic attitude, regrettably, and that it comes from limiting the understanding to only what is physical or natural. So that is where we part company. But don't worry, I am not going to try and persuade you otherwise. ;-)
Technically it is not "nihilism" to believe that Nature has intrinsic purpose and that we also have the freedom, indeed responsibility, to construct our own personal meanings within that.
Also, it is isn't an "attitude" if it is simply what reasoned inquiry shows to be the case. It is accepting how things are having asked the question of how things are.
But yes. Rejecting supernatural explanations that have the epistemic status of being "not even wrong" seems a small sacrifice to make in metaphysics.
Is a good bet one that is reasonable, or did you have some other definition of a good bet?
But there's your problem. If it ain't your Heaven and Hell version of a Biblical creator, then which of the umpteen varieties of speculative supernaturalism should I pretend to treat as if it were a real constraint on my everyday life? A Muslim one? An Aztec one? A Satanist one? An Eastern reincarnation one?
And if it winds up being your kind of divinity - one with all the rough edges knocked off to make it some kind of vague and bland feel-good generality - doesn't it also then loose all its bite? It doesn't in fact make a difference. We all wind up in the same place anyway?
So your "good bet" needs some actual fleshing out here.
The one that means something to you. And none of them do, then the answer is ‘none’.
If supernaturalism is not a real theory in that you agree it has no particular form, let alone any particular consequences, how could we reasonably ever believe in some or other version of it? What on earth justifies a belief for which there is neither a theory nor the evidence?
As usual, the only argument you can make is that - in some specified way - current natural theory fails to explain some kind of observable that matters.
That kind of criticism is important. But what did my account of natural teleology leave out exactly?
If there is no big daddy god with his own mysterious purpose in mind, what more is there to the Cosmos than what I've outlined? If you believe it to be the Platonic Good, then put it on the table as a counter-argument.
And the funny thing is that these supernatural alternatives - either the unpatterned bliss of Nirvana or the frozen eternal perfection of Platonia do sound remarkably like a Heat Death cosmology. Is a life without contrast and challenge really ever going to be that exciting or fullfilling?
I do have an objection to the way that biosemiotics claims to incorporate the Aristotelian sense of ‘final purpose’ however. And that is because from the biological perspective, the only purpose can be to survive and pro-create. Whereas for Aristotle himself, the final goal of the philosophical quest was something much more ethereal - the philosopher contemplating the eternal Ideas (or something along those lines). In that sense, nature herself is teleological, directed towards some ultimate end, other than just quiescence or non-existence. What that end is, however, might be unimaginable from the physical perspective. I think many of the ancient philosophers were ‘religious’ in that sense - I mean, Aristotle is counted as a ‘pagan philosopher’, but it was a different age, and had a very different mentality.
This is the subject of an essay I often mention, Thomas Nagel's Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament. He puts it as follows:
But Nagel also notes that 'the religious temperament is not common among analytic philosophers, but it is not absent. A number of prominent analytic philosophers are protestant, catholic, or jewish, and others, such as Wittgenstein and Rawls, clearly had a religious attitude to life without adhering to a particular religion. But I believe nothing of the kind is present in the makeup of Russell, Moore, Ryle, Austin, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Strawson, or most of the current professoriate.' So it is in a secular culture.
Huh? My pragmatic approach is open to revision. All it says is that to be meaningful, it has to make a difference. So if you want to talk about what lies "beyond" our current understanding of nature, you have to speak about something that might make an actual causal difference.
I don't have to make up my mind in advance. Or rather, epistemically my mind is organised to have this open-ended approach to inquiry. So if you can tie some theory to to some evidence, go for it. It is your claim after all.
Quoting Wayfarer
Biology is larger than you allow. Is there no sense in which an eco-system flourishes? Does biology not get the value of a rich community with a nested hierarchical structure and resilience or ascendency?
So you are simply arguing based on a Darwinian caricature of nature red in tooth and claw. It's like you believe the Scientism you are so fond of attacking.
Quoting Wayfarer
Hmm. You may be projecting here. Plato or even Pythagoras would make a better target of this particular fantasy. :grin:
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep. Our ideas advance. We ought to bear that fact in mind.
Naturalism as a philosophy is generally pretty clear about what kinds of causal differences it is willing to contemplate, and they're generally objective in nature. Like, it is not concerned with the kinds of philosophies that aim for a qualitative difference in the life and mind of the practitioner, as for example Pierre Hadot described in his books on 'philosophy as a way of life'.
Quoting apokrisis
Not so.
Of course, as I acknowledged, this was very much part of the cultural milieu in which Aristotle lived and taught. But what I'm saying is that, retaining the Aristotelian idea of a 'final cause', but then omitting the theistic basis for it, changes its meaning altogether. Now, it might be that Aristotle was mistaken in this regard, but that is not really the point at issue.
That's true, but I had the 'anxiety of influence' in mind. I don't think we like to be boring or cliche. I'll grant that especially fearful types might prefer that to jutting out in an embarrassing way.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think we both provided half the truth here. As a courtesy, we try not to scare people off. Living in crowded cities, we need a background of 'programmed' interactions. The alternative would be maddening. But the foreground would be our intimate relationships and our creative work. Here we very much want to be unique in a positive way. Here being predictable is failing. The creative class wages a war against cliche.
I'm not so sure about this. I think we learn what's possible from the past. We learn a set of acceptable desires. If we have nonconforming desires, we probably justify such desires in terms of still another part of our heritage, the ideology of the philosophical rebels, for instance.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As I use the words, a goal cannot be irrational. I do think I understand what you mean. We want things that are not good for us or won't really make us happy. I understand rationalization to be a kind of self-deception. Our intellectual hygiene can fail when we want something more than this hygiene (and at other times.) And then perfect rationality might be a sort of mirage or ideal. I mentioned formal systems in another thread because I think this is where we get quite close to perfect rationality ---but at the cost of reasoning about intrinsically meaningless symbols.
I agree that thinking can be unclear. In fact it is perhaps usually unclear and only clear enough for this or that purpose. I like a metaphor from computer science. If you want a better floating point approximation of the irrational real number, that will cost you.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How about we put it this way? Memory in the present is a function of the past, and the constraints we project on the future are a function of memory and therefore a function of the past (by composition of functions)? As to why we make mistakes, I think there are lots of reasons. We work with partial information, for one thing, and our 'operating system' which is 'ordinary language' or a 'form of life' is for the most part in-explicit.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
For me constraint and determinism are one and the same. A constraint determines. I still would argue, also, that it is not a given that memories are produced and deployed in a free way. Indeed, I think the continuity of personality, a familiar fact, suggests otherwise. Would you not agree, also, that desires are largely experienced as 'givens'? I find that I am thirsty or attracted to so and so. I cannot decide to be thirsty, though I can decide on an interpretation of an unclear desire. ('I'm in this mood because of X.') The tools I reach for to satisfy this or that desire are usually in memory. Occasionally someone clever combines techniques or even dreams up a new technique.
Well, I disagree. I think we learn what's impossible from the past, not what's possible. We make up possibilities with our minds, logical possibilities, they are all imaginary and not things of memory, they are creations of the mind. We make up logical possibilities and our experience from the past allows us to eliminate some of them as physically impossible. But we don't learn what's possible from the past, we make that up.
Quoting mrcoffee
This is not really a case of the past constraining the future though. Our memories are selective, always incomplete, and sometimes wrong. So it's really a case of the person in the present attempting to use past experience to constrain the future, for the sake of some purpose.
Quoting mrcoffee
Why would you think that a goal cannot be irrational? Irrational means unreasonable or illogical. Do you not think that a person may at sometime set as a goal something which cannot be obtained by that person? Wouldn't that goal be irrational?
Quoting mrcoffee
No, this is where I don't agree. Memory is a function of the living being, at the present. It's not a function of the past, it's how we relate to the past. And those properties of memory which I mentioned, that 'it's selective and sometimes wrong, indicate that it's really not a function of the past, but a function of the living creature, now. The fact that we make mistakes in our memory, and we act on those faulty memories toward constraining the future, as if the memories were correct, indicates that it's not really the past at all which is constraining the future in this way. It is the actions of the living being, to remember and to act on those memories, which is constraining the future in this way.
OK, I don't deny a kind of pure creativity. But I think our imaginations mostly manifest influence, and that's what I had in mind.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
To be more exact, I was suggesting that the past constrains the expected future via memory. The expected future is just an image, of course. I don't claim that the future is 'actually' constrained by the past, though I do in fact believe this on a gut level.
I agree with the last sentence quoted. We presently use the past to constrain the future in order to attain some goal. Or rather this is common state. Sometimes we are just daydreaming, of course.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Our disagreement here is at most a matter of word usage. I cede that your usage is quite common & I agree that the kind of goal you describe above could be described as 'irrational.'
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I may have asked for trouble by using a mathematical metaphor. I had f(m(p)) in mind. The expected future is a function of memory which is a function of the past. Hence the expected future would be indirectly a function of the past, mediated by memory, which is obviously not the identity function. And of course these are only mathematical metaphors, which I mention not for you but others.
Right. That's my understanding, too.
Quoting apokrisis
That makes sense. It definitely reminds me of the conscious intention of human individuals. Philosophy, for instance, is (among other things) a kind of conquest of confusion and essential danger. The confusion part is obvious. The conquest of essential danger would include rhetorical strategies for making peace with the 'evils' of life, such as personal mortality, perceived unfairness, etc. This is the 'spiritual' side of philosophy, and I'd say that non-objective side.
On the lower levels though, I imagine some codes just replicating more than others. Would control not be metaphorical here? Or a synonym for successful as opposed to unsuccessful replication? (I haven't studied biology closely.)
It's not the future that is constrained by memory, it is the choices that we might make. One may choose not to try to walk through a brick wall. However, there are many possible choices that the person (mind) may take and the choice itself is not determined until it is actually made (walk around the wall, jump over the wall, break through the wall, etc). Choices are constrained. Precision in describing the actual creative process reveals that we have memory, creative thought, and will, which evolve into the future through duration.
Speaking personally, I’m only interested in philosophy in the sense of the Western tradition of critical thinking. So it is all about de-subjectivising our belief systems, for me.
Quoting mrcoffee
Sure. But still, the key point is that life gains organismic autonomy in being able to use information to regulate physics. So the basis of freewill - that is intelligent, selfish and goal directed behaviour - is there right from the ground up. As soon as a molecule becomes a message, we are talking about life being freed from the kind of strict Newtonian determinism that causes all the metaphysical angst about human freewill.
This is straying from the topic, but it seems a contradiction that Aristotle starts by defining flourishing in terms of self actualisation and building a life through rational action, then you want to make this the final takeaway - that contemplation is an “ethereal” ultimate stage of development.
It might be highly abstract, but that’s different in my book.
I remember that there's a ripe avocado on the counter downstairs. It wasn't ripe enough last night, so I left it there. I'm likely to make my way downstairs today, and I expect the avocado to be there. So my image of the future is constrained my the memory of this avocado. (My image of the future is something like a branching tree of possibilities, which could be phrased in terms of if-then statements, perhaps.)
I see that you are pointing out a fascinating phenomenon. I'm a little uneasy about calling lower level replication goal-directed and selfish, but that's a quibble. I realize also that 'God plays dice' (or I trust the physicists on this), so strict determinism does seem like a dead issue.
This is why absolute precision is required. The image is getting the avocado.
The future is seen as virtual (possible actions). Your choices are: when to get it (initiation of will), how to get it (directional action), what to do with it once you get it.
Your future is not avocado. Your future is what you are going to do with it but once you get it. All require memory, will, and creative thought (a salad?).
If one wishes to understand life and nature, one needs to set aside all biases and just observe with skill. Besides memory, will, and creative mind, this also requires lots of patience.
I agree that possible actions are at the center of our concern, but the future is also the background of possible actions, their context. Certain actions are possible or not according to whether this 'background' is one situation or another. Because I believe the avocado is down there, I can decide ahead of time whether to eat it rather than something else that is also down there.
Yes, we create an image based upon possible actions.
Quoting mrcoffee
Yes, we create images of possibilities and that images (possible choices) guide our actions.
By observing life closely, we begin to understand it. The more we observe, the more skilled we become, and the more we understand. This is philosophy.
Beats the hell out of being a heat sink. ;-)
Hmm. If you checked, what would would be your daily kilojoule production?
https://cncf.com.au/carbon-calculator/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIubWR-dzP2QIV0o6PCh3K7gt0EAAYASABEgJNKvD_BwE
The notion that everything about life can be understood in terms of ‘energy gradients’ is analogous to that. It is looking at the world, in roughly the same way that a physician looks at a patient. We might indeed be patients, at some point in our lives, but unless we’re chronically ill (God forbid) ‘being a patient’ doesn’t really define who we are.
My point is that it does, although the fact you can’t see it speaks volumes. ;-)
Sure. But I'd also say that we don't even have to look closely, even if that's advisable. Pain and pleasure will sculpt some kind of understanding in any case. I'd call that 'life' as much as 'philosophy.' For me philosophy would be something like the more abstract 'parts' of this accumulated understanding, which will usually include an understanding of understanding (this one, for instance.)
That is such a large and open-ended question that I really ought not to respond.
But anyway....I recently heard an account of a Mah?y?na scripture, which says that at the moment of the Buddha's enlightenment, beings in the remotest regions of the Cosmos were suddenly able to see by the light that was cast.
You might say that it's clearly a mythological idea - but it does symbolically address the point.
From the perspective of Western philosophy - I refer again to the comment from Nagel that Plato's 'motivation in philosophy was in part to achieve a kind of understanding that would connect him (and therefore every human being) to the whole of reality – intelligibly and if possible satisfyingly.' And that is an aspect of many traditional cosmologies. Such an understanding might be anachronistic from the viewpoint of modern physics - unless you're willing to read it symbolically. Then it might have allegorical meanings that don't necessarily conflict with the science. (And for that matter, there is an uncanny feature of ancient Indian cosmology, which is that it assumes a cyclic universe that expands and contracts across 'vast aeons of kalpas', which accommodates some of the kinds of ideas that are being entertained in current cosmology.)
In any case, in various esoteric cosmologies, there is the idea that the human is in some sense a recapitulation or epitome of the Cosmos ('Cosmic Man'.) So the meaning of self-realisation in some of these mythologies, is conveyed by the idea that the human is part of the way the Universe comes to understand itself (hence, 'Cosmic Consciousness').
As I say, these are ideas associated with esoteric traditions, with which I have only the most superficial acquaintance, through having studied Mircea Eliade and others of that ilk. But I suppose the underlying point is that according to these cosmologies, we are not simply cosmic flukes or accidental tourists that have been thrown up by the random shuffling of stardust; we have a kin relation to the underlying order (logos) of the Cosmos. By mis-identifying with the domain of sensory perception, we forget our real nature - and our awakening to that is a cosmic event, as it is integral to the whole process of cosmic evolution.
(I hope I don't regret writing this. :groan: )
Well, yes. And what is that underlying order then? Are you denying that physics has found thermodynamics to be fundamental? So wouldn't we then understand ourselves as an expression of that cosmic logos? It should be no surprise to find our intelligence entrained to that most general of all projects?
You would have to argue it the other way round to give the answer you want. You would have to be an idealist who says that the cosmos is an expression of our consciousness. We are causing it to strive to be in our image.
But there is rather less evidence for that version of cosmology.
You're arguing from objectrive, or at least intersubjective, empirical investigation whereas Wayfarer is really arguing (despite what he might like to think) from subjective feeling.
When it comes to conviction regarding metaphysical or religious matters, I see nothing whatsover wrong with being convinced by my own subjective feelings, in fact when it comes down to it I believe we all inevitably are and should be, but I would never expect another to be convinced by my feeling, or argue that my subjective convictions carry any intersubjective weight.
I agree with Lonergan that the basis of objectivity really cannot consist in anything but authentic subjectivity; or as he formualtes it in his 'transcendental method', being "attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible".
So I might feel there is an intelligence underlying or immanent in the logos of thermodynamics or I might not, either way it really comes down to feeling after all.
Well exactly. That is what I'm pointing out. I am basing my view on what we can definitely know by way of reasoned inquiry. Wayfarer would be doing something else.
But remember also - in being Peircean - my view does start with phenomenology. It does take subjectivity seriously. So it expects the Cosmos to be "mindlike" in some absolutely general fashion. If human consciousness is a natural phenomenon, then it's presence ought to be discernible even in the organisation of the cosmos itself. This is the speculative metaphysics of pan-semiosis.
So stressing the role of thermodynamics (or rather, infodynamics) is simply accepting that mind and cosmos are actually going have the same fundamental organisational principles.
Wayfarer has to demonise pan-semiosis or infodynamics to keep his own vague theistic paradigm going. He must manage to paint it as being the "other" to his mysticism - that other being Scientism. And so anytime I mention entropy, he pretends that that does not contain also the complementary notion of negentropy. Chaos and order go together. And the long run goal is a heat death equilbrium.
Utter peace, if you like. What comes after a frothy bit of excitement. :)
Quoting Janus
Well that is nonsense of course. And by your argument, I don't even now have to give either reasons or evidence for why I should feel that with such subjective conviction.
And given that you say what is private feeling is private feeling - it would carry no weight in terms of one mind speaking to another - I would expect you to withdraw into solipsistic silence on all epistemological matters. You have disqualified yourself from further debate by your own words.
Yet funnily enough, you won't. So I can only point out the inconsistencies I find in the position you claim to hold.
Quoting Janus
And so now you circle back to an epistemology based on being reasonable, particular and pragmatic. You arrive at the right answer, even having dismissed the epistemic grounds that I would give for that being the optimally "objective" approach.
Well, what I am saying is that the subjective conviction should not be subjective in the bad sense, but should be resultant upon being "attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible", upon authentic subjectivity, that is. In other words following the authentic method of subjective inquiry will never result in universal inter-subjective agreement (and how horrifying if it did!), because everyone has different experiential feeling bases to begin with.
Also, there is nothing to preclude individuals discussing their respective experiences and influencing one another in authentic ways, even if the subject they converse about is beyond the ambit of precise inter-subjective corroboration. Think about the arts for a very obvious example.
So, the contradiction you thought you found in what I said was merely apparent. :razz:
You are still relying on the hypothesis that feeling is unanalysable and beyond reasoned communal inquiry. And that isn't a strong position given that we know that so much of our "feelings" to be socially constructed sign relations with pragmatic function.
You just said think about Art. And so you meant, think about Art as it is socially constructed in the modern Romantic condition. Get ready to feel awe, intrigue, momentousness, depth ... the sublime.
Now I agree that in the limit, our private experiences are unanalysable. My position has to be able to handle "the Hard Problem" of ineffable qualia. So in the end, there is some subjective limit to any community effort to objectify and analyse phenomenology.
And my answer there is that objectification runs out of steam where it runs into a lack of observable counterfactuals. So I can motivate a neurological account of hue discrimination up to the point where yellow is explained as a lack of blue, and red by a lack of green, but then if we try to ask why should red have the particular quality of being red, then there is no counterfactual to continue on.
The Hard Problem arises where we can't stand in some objective relation even to our own subjectivity. We can't even imagine a difference in terms of what we might feel or experience. And if we can't do that in terms of ourselves, then a wider communal view - the one that is optimised epistemically as the scientific method - can hardly do it either.
So I have an epistemology that accepts a limit to objectivity, but also identifies that limit clearly in the notion of the counterfactual observable - the possibility of something being other than what it is. And on those grounds, I reject your claim that our "feelings" are unanalysable in some generic fashion. They are in fact pretty damn easy to analyse using psychological science.
You say "what about Art?", as if that should be a conversation-ender. Well no. Art history tells us all about the social construction of Romanticism and its notion of the Sublime.
I never took my kids to church, but I certainly dragged them around enough art galleries to do my part in teaching them to master the appropriate cultural responses, just as my parents did with me. :)
C'mon. You're smart enough to understand the game. Romanticism is the new Theism. It demands that we look inside and find our ineffable essence, that spark of pure aesthetic response which is our soul. The social construction of that state of belief is an open book to any historian of the modern world. It's been analysed to death.
I am not convinced that subjectrive feeling has been shown to be exhaustively socially constructed. Of course all subjective reactions are socially mediated. But even when it comes to romanticism; I don't accept that it is socially constructed as opposed to mediated. The subjective feeling of the sublime is simply a human affective possibility; which is well exampled in cultures other than our own wetsern culture. Same goes for theism; in its various forms it has been pretty much universally present across cultures; so the argument that it is culturally constructed cannot hold water.
I was brought up in a very plebian culture with little exposure to 'high' art, music and literature. I found it all by myself in my early teens and was immediately transported to a brave new world of feeling.
As we have discussed many times, physics currently has very large gaps in its accounts of the nature of the Universe. It is being held together and simultaneously driven apart by some unknown force. So it is plausible to argue that what we understand ‘matter’ to be, is not fundamental but only one aspect of a larger reality. At the very least, it says that either the laws themselves have large explanatory gaps, or that there are vast amounts of matter~energy of unknown types.
Within the context of known physics, the second law of thermodynamics is inexorable - but if physics is not comprehensive, then it doesn’t have the all-encompassing explanatory scope that is often attributed to it.
Quoting apokrisis
We don’t know that. Science doesn’t explain that order, it simply discovers it and is able to make predictions on the basis of those regularities. But why that order exists is another matter altogether.
Historically, the ‘laws of nature’ were originally envisaged as ‘God’s handiwork’. But due to the development of Western philosophical and scientific culture and the rejection of religious philosophy, the laws were then felt to be self-explanatory and the universe somehow self-originating. But as Wittgenstein noted ‘people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable just as God and fate were treated in past ages’ (TLP 6.372).
I don’t think any spiritual movement sees it that way. But as I have explained to a number of sceptics, I don’t regard that as an argument for God; I remain agnostic on that question. But it is an argument for an awareness of the inherent limitations of scientific naturalism. Science is not omniscient (in other words, agnosticism extends in that direction, also).
Earlier in this thread a statement was made:
Bolds in the original. And that is a typical attitude in today’s scientific culture. It’s thrown the baby out with the bath water as far as I’m concerned.
Good job I'm not arguing for exhaustion then. But any feeling given any kind of name is being socially constructed - even if that name is naming its supposed fundamental unnameability or ineffability. As when we call the Sublime.
And even failing symbolic reference, social construction can make use of indexical or iconic semiosis. It can hang a picture on a wall in a fashion that is meant to be approached via a search after signification.
If R.Mutt signs a urinal and puts it on show in a gallery as the "Fountain", it is pretty obvious that we are suppose to "feel something" - even if it might be so novel to us that we struggle to give it an exact name.
Quoting Janus
How are the two different? When I say socially constructed, that doesn't mean there is no biological construction going on at a deeper level. Semiosis is the recognition of multiple levels of signification or mediation. It is a holistic approach like that.
So I think you are just trying to turn my position into a straw man when you know it is more complex than that.
Quoting Janus
So if something is found across all cultures, it can't be constructed? How does that work?
If it is across all cultures - and not elsewhere - then surely that shows it is culturally fundamental, not that it is not cultural.
Quoting Janus
Hmm. Immediately hey? Just went from whoah to go in a simple transcendent leap of consciousness with no process of enculturation.
Sounds like some convenient myth-making there.
But perhaps the bigger gaps lie in just how much science now knows compared to how much the general population understands?
So you keep saying the glass is 99% empty - and you might be judging that from only having seen the top 1% of a glass that is pretty damn full to the brim now.
If we know the history of the Cosmos in incredible detail back to around the first 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000001th of a second, is there still "a very large gap"?
Quoting Wayfarer
What are you on about. Dark matter and dark energy are known to be two different things.
Quoting Wayfarer
Alternatively, it is the approach that has done the most to dispel the air of mystery that has hung over existence.
I agree that Scientism deserves criticism. But in your constant attacks on that, you risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater yourself. You are rejecting the holistic metaphysics of a systems science approach to reality.
The feeling is not socially constructed, though. It must already exist in order to be named, referred to and spoken about. As I said before human feelings are socially mediated, modified or mythologized. The reason I don't like the term 'socially constructed' is that it implies exhaustivity.
Quoting apokrisis
If something is across all cultures, it shows that it is fundamental to culture, that culture depends on it, not that it depends on culture. Of course it depends on culture for its expression, but not for its existence as feeling.
Quoting apokrisis
I responded to forms I had previously not been familiar with immediately. Of course I had to be able to read, to know what a painting is, to know what music is; so if that is what you mean by "enculturation" then of course.
Surely you are not going to deny that romantic painting, literature and music present a range of human emotions that are universal, and represent one suite of possible responses to the human condition considered cross-culturally?
The sense of the sublime, the transcendent, the sacred, feelings of reverence, oceanic oneness, divine beauty and so on are all romantic responses. The sense of the ordinary, the mundane, feelings of indifference or neglect, separation, ugliness are its nihilistic counterparts. These are two universal possibilities of human feeling.
Quoting Janus
Again, I’m not saying that there is no biology to our feelings. Without neurobiology, there would be nothing to work with at all.
But neurobiologically, feelings are not basic in a sense that they are more fundamental than cognition or perception. The brain works holistically so an emotional response is an act of orientation, a preparation for action, some suitable form of arousal. The valuing is part of processing whatever is happening in the moment in a whole body and ecologically appropriate way.
So what I stress is your social construction of our emotions as an arbiter of cognition. It is not a completely wrong construction. It does feel like something - an aha! - when we make either a significant match or mismatch in cognition. There is a physiological orientation response that is what it is like to feel with sudden conviction that we have definitely got something right, or equally, that we have definitely just been caught out by something that was a surprise.
Yet still, the Romantic model - where our feelings know better and truer than our cognition - is a social construction. It dates back to at least Plato's charioteer analogy - the Greeks having separated off rationality or logos in the first place. Science would construct its own more convincing and evidence-backed view of what is really going on.
So I am responding to your first comment - "I see nothing whatsover wrong with being convinced by my own subjective feelings."
We know that the brain is pretty reliable when it comes to assessing the threats and opportunities of our environment. Millions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning will do that. But once humans became linguistic and cultural creatures, that biological apparatus got turned towards an assessment of a social world of ideas and attitudes and imaginings. And we know how we can talk ourselves into different view on any issue that will evoke quite opposite evaluations or subjective feelings.
With Trump, you could talk him up as some crazed demon that evokes disgust and aversion and fear. Or you could talk him up as a brave patriot willing to take on the dangerous elite and - just by listening to the way the situation is being socially constructed - start to feel the very opposite as your "trusted, deeply felt, gut reaction".
The same with Duchamp's urinal. Is it the wittiest, cleverest, work of art ever? Or is it a tawdry and mean-spirited joke with zero actual aesthetic merit? You should be able to take either set of words and begin to feel the warm approach or the cold withdrawal that is the dichotomous orientation response which your brain is set up for. It is the cognition that is the basis of the feeling here. The idea that we can bypass the cognition and drill down to discover our true and authentic emotional response to the urinal is a Romantic myth.
So in dealing with the world at an animal level, sure we trust our instinctive feelings. Evolution gives us good reason to take extra fright at anything wriggly and snake-like, or something small, leggy, scampery and spider-like. Just as it gives us good reason to think sugary foods are to be gorged upon anytime we are fortunate enough to encounter them.
But to judge philosophical positions on the basis of "subjective conviction" is obvious bad epistemology. Even if, in the end, feeling something is believable or unbelievable does wind up being a state of neurobiological assessment that includes a state of felt orientation, as that is simply how it works. We need to be left prepared with some clearly dichotomous resolution in terms of our action. We need to make up our minds whether we are approaching or avoiding the idea that is at the current centre of attention.
So I am not denying the reality of subjective emotional assessments. I am saying they are no more fundamentally reliable than the frameworks of cognition which they subserve. It's a package deal. You can feel great conviction - then discover you were completely wrong about the way you were construing the situation.
And then, the idea that subjective conviction is some kind of philosophical bedrock is itself a social construction. It is a way of understanding "feelings" that presumes the human mind can connect with a higher transcendent sphere of meaning. And science finds little evidence in favour of that ontology.
Sure, our neurobiology can be manipulated by mindset to evoke a generalised blissful oceanic feeling flooded with a sense of everything understood or connected with, the self depersonalised and immersed in a reality beyond it. Hell, there are drugs that can do that when you might be feeling shit about life.
But to then claim that evoked mental state is genuine or functional is a social construct. The reality is that we are just playing games with our neurobiological possibilities. And if we truly lose control over such games, that is when you get the messianic personality, the psychotic state, the depersonalised person. We kind of know when the social construction - as happens in an "appropriate way" in a church or art gallery - has become a neurobiological pathology.
It's a mischaracterisation.
'Sutra of neither increase nor decrease'
Quoting apokrisis
But this 'holistic metaphysics' only serves to emulate or simulate the processes of life and mind for the purposes of biological sciences, as a way of modelling. It approaches reality as a problem to be modelled, not as a first-person understanding of life and living. The reason that semiosis enters the picture is because the prior mechanistic model was seen to be hopelessly inadequate to the task of modelling the way life and mind work, as they're intrinsically language-like, rather than mechanistic. On that we're in agreement. But there's an existential point over and above that provided by the scientific approach - that is where we diverge, because it's seen to be religious. But, I maintain, philosophy has a religious aspect.
Quoting apokrisis
I think a better model is the one that Karen Armstrong created, along the lines of the difference between mythos and logos. The former is the allegorical, the mythological, the symbolic, whereas the latter is the quantifiable, what can be precisely mathematically modeled. The problem in Western culture is that this is completely misunderstood. As Joseph Campbell said, '“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions...are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.” That sure is writ large on this forum, but then it's only a microcosm of the greater culture.
So you seem to be mischaracterising the Heat Death?
The Heat Death, as a final eternal state of being, would lack differentiation or duality. There would still be a state of being - a generalised state of "nothingness" that is the equilibration of all particular somethingnesses. But it would have become changeless and featureless. No destruction and no action.
Although to be more accurate, there would be a dim quantum fizzle of black-body radiation - virtual photons with wavelengths the size of the visible universe - being emitted by the cosmic event horizons. Which is about as ethereal a state of being as you could possibly expect from materialistic science. :)
Quoting Wayfarer
OK. You make a sharp distinction between philosophy as a means to know about reality and philosophy as a means to know about the self.
But that hinges on the presumption that we aren't natural phenomena. Your division relies on there being that actual division. And I ask where is the convincing evidence? Once we start to ask the questions in a reasonable fashion, life and mind start to seem much less like supernatural phenomena.
So I take the view that the most reasonable hypothesis is that we are part of nature. Metaphysics can be unified under natural philosophy - which is holism and systems science in modern times.
I am happy for you to make an argument for a supernatural angle on life and mind. But why should I take seriously any theory that is "not even wrong" in being an explanation without observable consequences? What is reasonable about such an epistemology?
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't exclude religion or anything from either science or philosophy. A scientific approach is the one that doesn't rule out conjecture from the start. It only claims to constrain our belief by the end.
Quoting Wayfarer
Which is the one with the relation to the truth of reality, and which one is the construction of cultural identity?
And isn't the semiotic view that the two are related in a pragmatic fashion? We don't actually get to see reality as it is, only how it is useful for us to socially and psychologically construct it. But on the other hand, if there were no reality, then our mythologies would be really pointless.
The point of the quote is that Nirvana is not a 'state of quiescent nothingness' (as to what it is, I don't think it has any analogy in science.)
Quoting apokrisis
Well, there is another Buddhist notion that is relevant here, that of 'Yath?bh?ta?' which is precisely 'seeing reality as it truly is'. But in this context, 'seeing as it truly is' has an implicitly ethical dimension, in that 'seeing truly' requires detachment from the passions and obscurations. 'The Buddha' (or 'the sage', more generally) sees things 'as they are', because she or he is disinterested, not attached, and is not subject to the obscurations.
Something like that was actually preserved in scientific method, except that in the context of early modern science it only applied to quantitative judgements - to what can be measured according to scientific method; there's no provision for the qualitative or the 'domain of values'. That is because Galileo adopted the Platonist attitude that while dianoia was indeed a type of 'higher knowledge' in that it is not subject to individual predilection, the 'domain of values' was then identified with the subjective realm, which made it to all intents a matter of individual conscience. And that has the effect of collapsing the Platonic distinction between real knowledge and mere belief or opinion (doxa or pistis) when it comes to ethical questions. (Hence the debate above about whether aesthetics and so on are really or only 'subjective').
Quoting apokrisis
Which is fair enough, but again, is nowadays understood in purely third-person and empiricist terms. There's no lexicon or methodology for the domain of the qualitative. It's about what is effective in an instrumental or utilitarian sense.
You might say that we can develop whatever qualitative standards we like - but again that implicitly 'relativises' the question. And again that is very characteristic of the culture we're in, where the the third-person or public domain of scientific fact is opposed to the subjective domain of the qualitative. I'm trying to show that whilst that domain not objective, it's also not only or purely subjective, in the sense of 'pertaining only to oneself'.
But anyway - please don't interpret this as 'an attack'. It's a been a useful exchange of views as far as I am concerned because it is really obliging me to spell out what I am saying.
Well I quoted what it is not - not differentiated and yet still a state of being. And I would point out how that resembles the Western tradition of a substantial potential that tracks back to Anaximander's Apeiron and gets its thorough logical working out in Peirce's metaphysics of Vagueness.
And now physics itself has concrete models of vacuums being full of virtual particles that become manifest when relativistic constraints are applied. This kind of stuff can be calculated and observed these days.
So I stack up that against whatever woolly non-theory you might propose by way of a metaphysical orientation.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well if you include social and cultural utility in that pragmatic equation, then yes. And why not?
The Peircean position is that scientific reasoning gives us the answer that a community of inquiry would agree to in the long run, if no needless barriers are put in its way. So the third person perspective is not the objectivity of naive realism. It is the collective view of a set of like-minded inquirers following the three logical steps of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation.
So it is a method rooted in the purposes of those who have a reason to be interested.
And as such, it recognises the essentially socially-constructed nature of human knowledge. Thus it is obviously the right way to go about things if social and cultural utility are the highest intellectual goods. The collective mind collectively constructs itself through an open-ended process of reasoned inquiry.
What the individual thinks, standing alone, drops out of the picture as how could any isolated mind figure anything useful out if the mind itself is a collective social phenomenon?
That is why I say the Romantic model of man - the one that urges us to look inwards to our individual essence to find our transcendent connection to some "higher mind" - is a load of damaging guff. It gets in the way of understanding our true nature. It is a brake on the development of the higher state of socially-constructed consciousness that we need to get to.
So your argument is that Scientism blinds us to the higher issues. And my reply - from a natural philosophy stance - is that a higher self is what we humans have a social and cultural responsibility to invent. Science - being the reasoning method applied in best collective fashion - has to be the basis of any real advance on the very issues which you say matter the most.
Quoting Wayfarer
Hostile? You know I don't take it personally. I'm just arguing for my point of view. I don't see you as attacking me either. You are making as strong a case for an argument as you can. And I enjoy your online presence much more than many others because of that. You do stand up for your view with an actual argument. So I might attack your case, but I don't think anything negative about you. :)
Nor Janus, when it comes to that. He also is one of the more reasonable people here.
Quoting apokrisis
'load of damaging guff' did seem to me a hostile type of response. Wasn't it? There's also the fact that it's connected with the phrase 'understanding our true nature'. What you're saying 'our true nature' is, is a 'social construction' - whereas that is exactly what I am calling into question. 'True nature', in the Buddhist lexicon, has almost the opposite meaning.
Anyway - it's nothing to do with 'Romanticism'. In your personal schema, that is where you categorise (or pigeonhole) whatever Peircean Triadic Semiotics and model of scientific progress. can't accommodate.
And hey, I'm all for progress. I even went into bat for Steve Pinker's new book. But it's only one side of the story.
The problem is that there is a gap between the apparently-purposeless processes of evolution - which are, as we've established, simply a byproduct of entropy - with the purposes which homo faber is then enjoined to 'construct'. As these purposes not actually rooted in nature herself, they can only ever be fabricated or constructed. So what kind of resonance do they have with the cosmos at large?
From a discussion of Habermas' re-evaluation of the role of religion in the public square:
Phenomenologically considered, feeling is more basic than cognition or perception. The infant's world is a world of indeterminate feeling before it is a world of cognition and perception. Our knowing is a matter of feeling; how do we know that we know? As the Skeptics pointed out knowing can never be deductively validated. We know that we know when we experience ourselves knowing. I don't define knowledge as being necessarily correct; the notion of correctness is unhelpful.
We know in the sense of being familiar with things; that is the basis of knowing. We are familiar first; I know Catherine, let's say; that doesn't mean I cannot be wrong about her. When we know people we know how to relate to them, how to deal with them, in various ways. Knowing-how is the basis of all knowing-that. Common sense knowledge, phronesis or practical wisdom is knowing how to deal with the world insofar as we are interested in it. Scientific knowledge is, ideally at least, disinterested knowledge; knowing about the world for its own sake. We everywhere operate with fallible knowledge.
Quoting apokrisis
Sure, but I don't argue for that. I say that, when it comes to metaphysical views or any viewpoint which cannot be rigorously inter-subjectively corroborated, we choose the ones we find most convincing, and that being convinced is really a matter of feeling.
Being intellectually honest is a matter of feeling; how do you know you are being intellectually honest in your preference for one view over another? You must be self-aware and examine your own desires; see if you are turning a blind eye to alternative views because you are emotionally invested in wanting some particular view to be the true one. The kind of "feeling" I am referring to is the desire for truth and intellectual honesty that enables you to see where you might be indulging in "confirmation bias".
The essence of any religion consists in loving God, however that God might be conceived. The experience of that love is the most enriching human experience possible, in my view. I believe that if you experience that love then you will necessarily have religious faith. Religious faith does not consist in objectivised claims or reifications, though.
Also when I say feeling is fundamental to human experience I mean that it is the calibre and kind of feeling that predominates in a human life that determines the happiness, the overall tenor, of that life
Well, Buddhism doesn’t see it in those terms.
I think the underlying tension owes a lot to the insistence by Protestantism on ‘salvation by faith alone’. That is one of the major motivation for the rejection of the ‘super-natural’. But that is another topic.
//ps// although I do agree that ‘feeling’ in the sense you have described it is often foundational in spirituality. That’s Schleiermacher main idea.
There doesn't appear to be any one way Buddhism sees things
I did say "however that God might be conceived". The number one thing for Buddhism seems to be compassion; which consists in loving all beings. God, for the Buddhists, would thus seem to be Buddha Nature, conceived as the real nature of all beings. I don't think there is as much difference between Brahmanism and Buddhism as is often made out.
Quoting Wayfarer
The notion of salvation by faith alone is not really a significant part of the point I am making at all. Of course wisdom, intelligence, responsibility and discipline, among other virtues, are all important elements in any soteriology. I am not emphasizing faith as a beginning, but feeling. If you don't feel love, that is if you do not love God and your neighbour as yourself, then you cannot be saved; it is as simple as that. Loving God and your neighbour as yourself just is salvation, as far as I can see. So, love should constitute faith. Faith without love (and wisdom, intelligence, responsibility and discipline) is blind. Salvation cannot come from blind faith.
It comes back to our different metaphysical pictures of causality.
For me, there is "nothing" until the everythingness, the vagueness, of a potential is constrained. And so that makes "purpose" fundamental. A constraint must, by definition, express some kind of natural wish or tendency. So for reality to have some definite persistent character, there must be a good reason for that state of regulation to be in place.
You instead want to argue that purpose can't be found in the self-organisation of nature. For you, the presence of purposes is thus made a problem.
Does the science support that view? For a human newborn, everything is pretty indeterminate in a phenomenological sense. Even to smile takes a few months to develop.
Quoting Janus
Sure. I said that we need to be able to recognise stuff fits to also recognise when it doesn't. And both have a characteristic feel because both result in suitable physical preparatory responses. We can feel ourselves gearing up to approach or avoid, accept or reject, attend or ignore.
And when thinking at a linguistic level, we still have to bounce our thinking off this same basic neurobiology. We consider the idea and react with a match or mismatch response.
This should be obvious from the various meta-cognitive illusions that we might experience, like deja vu. We can feel conviction even when we know there oughtn't be.
Quoting Janus
But how does that deal with my reply that what we feel is easily manipulated by the way some matter is presented?
Sure, the feeling of being convinced is a genuine thing. We go aha!, all the bits fit. But it is not a reliable thing. Everyone has great insights on drugs or when they are half-asleep, but then the conviction slips away in the cold light of day.
So our brain has evolved to make reliable "gut instinct" judgements about what is familiar, what is suspect. And we continue to apply that to the imagined world we conjure up in our heads through language. Yet there is a large literature on cognitive biases to show how wrong gut instinct can be.
It is a long list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Quoting Janus
But that goal of being objective and dispassionate is about as socially constructed as it gets. Believing in it is a product of modern culture, hardly the natural human condition. It is a social habit, a taught method, not a "feeling" that we find deeply buried underneath all the usual self-righteous, self-serving, ways of thought that might be more the human norm.
Why do we keep pointing back to the Ancient Greeks as our philosophical model? Did the Greeks suddenly evolve a neurobiology that set them apart from the Persians or Egyptians in this regard? Or did they accept a method?
Quoting Janus
All I can say is that this means nothing to me. My alternative would be to reply that the most enriching thing would be loving life, warts and all.
Quoting Janus
I don't deny that. As I argue, cognition involves the production of the self along with the world. Our experience of the world is really our experience of ourselves in that world. We feel where the one stops and the other starts.
But I think you are relying on a loose definition of "feeling". Neurobiology tells us that the brain has an "emotional response" to whatever passes through the eye of attention. We react to whatever matters in every way we need to react. And that includes a lot of rapid changes in arousal and physiological set which then - in sensory fashion - feel like something to "us".
I'm referring to feeling as it subjectively seems to us. I'm not concerned with what it might be 'objectively'.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm talking about the basic desire not to deceive ourselves; to know the truth. I take that to be a universal human quality, not in the sense that it operates in all people though.
Quoting apokrisis
We only "know there oughtn't be" based on some story or other that we tell ourselves and feel is true and correct; in other words on the basis of some other conviction. I haven't denied that we can have conflicting convictions.
Quoting apokrisis
That's right, we can come to think our convictions are mistaken and thus all our convictions must be questioned and understood in relation to our entire experience. But this doesn't change the fact that as it is experienced all conviction is based on feeling; and that the desire for intellectual honesty and for the truth (if it is felt) is a feeling; and also that it is feeling which gives us the best guide as to whether deceive ourselves.
I mean, if we don't feel our own self-deception then who is going to feel it for us? If someone tells me that I am deceiving myself and I don't feel they are right, will I blindly follow them just on their say so, or accept some analysis that doesn't ring true to me? You might call it "romantic individualism" but there is no getting away from the fact that each of us is responsible for our own judgements, convictions and decisions, and who would want them to be dictated to us by others, in any case?
I think your attempt to objectify human experience, to make it something measurable and quantifiable, is doomed to failure. I mean what does it matter what our experience "really is", if I don't have any feeling of caring about that, or if I feel convinced that thinking we are able to 'get outside' of our experience in order to objectify it is a fool's errand? What really matters is what our experience is to us as it is experienced; what matters is what leads to heightening the felt quality of our lives, not arriving at some cold analysis of what our experience, our lives, are reducible to, or to what we take to be an objective explanation for their possibility.
Quoting apokrisis
And my reply to would be that for you loving God then consists in "loving life warts and all". Life warts and all is your God; and I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that. We all have our own Gods; the important thing is to love something greater than ourselves.
If we care about something greater than ourselves then we have religion. The etymology of religion has been traced to the "Latin 'religio' ‘obligation, bond, reverence’, perhaps based on Latin religare ‘to bind’" *. We are bound to life and to others when we care, when we feel obligation, responsibility, when we feel reverence; if we don't care, if we don't have these feelings, then we are really nothing; our lives are a nihilistic, atheistic nothingness no matter how immense our intellectual understanding might be.
.* quoted from Online Etymology Dictionary
I come across people who are passionately convinced about all sorts of things all the time - UFOs, gun ownership, Hollywood bearding conspiracies, you name it. If you think that the subjectivity of unanalysed "feelings" is the answer, and that objective analysis is not about a methodology for arriving at what is honest and truthful, then there is nothing more to discuss.
You argue according to your strength of conviction, I instead believe conviction arises once doubt lies demonstrably exhausted for all practical purposes. There is no common ground if you are to be believed.
Quoting Janus
Except it is no sort of God. It is Nature. Please call it that. Let's not pretend to agree on what we fundamentally don't.
Are they really passionately convinced or are they just neurotically protective of beliefs they are attached to for some obscure reason?
Quoting apokrisis
For me my convictions represent what I believe I have the least reason to doubt in the light of the whole of my experience as I presently understand it. No doubt there is room for improvement, and I will come to find that some of my convictions are based on neurotic attachments. I pray my feelings allow the intellectual honesty to see my own self-deceptions. :smile:
Quoting apokrisis
Spinoza said "deus sive natura", "God or nature". I tend to think the same. Perhaps we don't fundamentally agree: but do you at least acknowledge that it is important to love something greater than ourselves?
So where would that leave you and your true and honest subjective convictions? How could you deny them theirs?
Quoting Janus
Define God. Define love. Definitions will uncover your ontic commitments - to the degree that something definite stands behind the use of the terms.
I wouldn't myself talk about love as if it were something ontically foundation. I simply say that central to flourishing is not hating the world as it naturally is.
Likewise I wouldn't talk about it as being higher - transcendent. Rather I am talking about embracing it as being essentially part of "myself" - immanent. To reject nature - as it actually is - would be misguided.
So I don't think we can agree here. You want to believe an ontology that seems opposite in every important respect.
I have no doubt we all protect some attachments or other. The truth and honesty of other's convictions are their affair, not mine, unless they try to shove them down my throat.
Quoting apokrisis
God is what we conceive to be greater than ourselves. Love is the emotion of caring about that greatness. It could be very different things for different people; which is only right insofar as it is in accordance with the nature of diversity.
Quoting apokrisis
Not hating something is the first step; but it is not the same as loving it.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't think in terms of 'transcendence' either if by that is meant something substantive. I think in terms of immanence; of what is within us. In no way do I condone rejecting nature or science as the study of nature; so I'm not sure from where you are getting this impression.
I can't think of any way in which my ontology differs significantly from yours, other than that I might be more inclined to accept the idea of an immanent, in-finite intelligence. Such a notion leaves the whole of science untouched, in my view. That is why some of the great scientists can also be theists. Having a sensible religious faith could not preclude anyone from doing science at any level.