Idealism vs. Materialism
Does Berkeley provide an instrumentally better theory than Locke? Does he rely on the same arguments that he used to refute Locke? Does his attack on abstract ideas really undermine materialism in the way Berkeley believes it does?
Comments (1006)
No one better give me grief about this
Speak true, brother.
To be is to be perceived.
Berkeley's idealism is actually very informative. He demonstrates that "matter" refers to nothing other than an idea; it doesn't refer to anything which we can sense. At his time, it seemed like a radical idea, but it's commonly accepted today. .
Berkeley was no slouch, and I think simply dismissing his arguments, as Samuel Johnston famously claimed to do by kicking a rock, indicates simple incomprehension. Kant had to go to some lengths to differentiate his work from Berkeley’s, by inclusion of further arguments in his second edition of CPR.
The basic problem most people have, is that they imagine that what Berkeley is arguing means that ‘the world is all in my mind’. But if that were all he was saying, then nobody would have read his works, and there would be no debate. His argument could be better paraphrased as ‘all our knowledge of the world comprises ideas’ - that what we take to be independently existing objects are in actual fact ideas in the (not necessarily my) mind. It does sound incredible, but it is exactly that incredulity that Hylas, the sceptic in his dialogue, brings to Philonious, only to see all his apparently sensible objections refuted.
He may attempt to do that, but he certainly doesn't succeed.
Again, the simple confusion of knowledge and what knowledge is about.
:lol: Shucks, I guess that no awareness can then be. As in, you can see your eyes in a mirror but not the you as an ever changing awareness that is seeing your eyes in a mirror, etc. Hence, by entailment: an awareness-devoid philosophy ... right up there with the presence of homunculi. Sounds oddly reminiscent to physicalism, wherein awareness itself is only an epiphenomenal illusion. So ... back to serious/true philosophy where all these issues are willfully ignored so as to magically make the ontic presence of awareness nonexistent.
What is this awareness you speak of? Have you sensed it? Sounds like an idea to me.
You seem to not have read my post. No, I've never seen it. I'm venturing that nether have you.
So:
A: awareness exists because we are aware.
or
B: awareness doesn't exist because no one has ever seen it.
... as to what it is: I'm still working on the "Know Thyself" bit.
On Thursdays I think I sense awareness but all other days of the week I doubt it so severely and whine to myself that the universe could be so cruel to contaminate my mind with such unwieldy ideas. Ideas are rather like diseases.
If so, the cure is then to abstain from philosophy.
You're probably right. But I can't decide whether I have free will, either.
:razz: hell, if the cosmos makes you do things ... but then the cosmos is an idea as well. What isn't?
Fine by me. No one will miss the debate about whether or not holes exist.
I have yet to see from you anything other than naive realism.
Where Berkeley fails, in my opinion, is due to his nominalism. Because of it, he can’t accommodate the fact that certain classes of ideas, such as logical and mathematical proofs, have universal application. This is the subject of C. S. Peirce’s criticism of Berkeley, which I intend to study.
Did you read Berkeley's "Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonus"? If so, it appears like you didn't understand it. He clearly demonstrates that there is no reason to believe that there is anything called "matter" in the world that we sense. The notion that there is matter out there being sensed, is just an idea created by the mind.
Excuse me, but in what way is what he said wrong? I missed the part where you addressed the charge of simple confusion of knowledge and what knowledge is about.
In any case, even though it might seem obvious to distinguish between 'knowledge' and 'what knowledge is about', it is actually a very thorny philosophical problem. Take the proverbial tree/chair/apple that is customarily used in such debates. There it is, the tree - surely you can't say that is something that only exists in the mind, right? The tree is over there, the mind is inside my skull, obviously they're different, right?
The problem with the apparently obvious statement is that it too is dependent on an intellectual construction, one which runs pretty well seamlessly in the mind, at all times, and which stitches together 'the world' in which me, the tree, and my knowledge of the tree are situated. Because that 'stitching together' is indeed a conscious act, something which the mind does, and something which 'knowledge of the tree' is always dependent on.
Realism, especially naive realism, doesn't actually consider that. In fact, not considering it, is what makes it 'naive realism'. So from a naive realist point of view, then Samuel Johnston's famous criticism of Berkeley is all that needs to be said. And on the off-chance that you are not familiar with it, I will repeat it verbatim:
Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (quoted in Wikipedia).
If you take the time to read any of Berkeley's dialogues (which I linked to above) you will find that they are meticulously (indeed exhaustingly) detailed. Kant (no slouch himself) had to devise quite an ingenious argument to show what was wrong with Berkeley's basic thesis. But then, Kant was not a naive realist either, and although he disagreed with Berkeley in some profound ways, he too understood the role that the mind plays in the construction of knowledge.
Its not a thorny problem at all once you realize the difference between knowledge and what the knowledge is about.
I too have read Terra’s other posts, likewise with yours and many others. Is that relevent? I was talking about the charge he laid, not his general philosophical views.
Attempts to base the reality of the physical world on appearances has traditionally led into problems. One example being that of Berkley’s need for an all-perceiving ego. Reasoning concerning causal interactions, however, can lead to an understanding of the physical world as a realm of causal interactions with which we all interact. Perceptions are then only a limited set of these causal interactions.
This of itself doesn’t presume physicalism. To the same degree that our thinking entails our agency to enactively produce or else influence our own thoughts, we as lifeforms also hold a limited agency within the commonly shared physical world of causal interactions we inhabit. This physical world of interactions that affects all living beings can then be further interpreted as an effete mind, to use Charles Peirce’s terminology. This can be likened to a universal mind that is devoid of the agency which we are endowed with as living beings. As Peirce puts it, roughly expressed, its causal interactions and natural laws are themselves habits of thought. So interpreting makes “effete mind” and “physicality” indistinguishable concepts when addressing how individual brains interact with their respective minds. Nevertheless, here the monism changes from that of dual-aspect physicalism to one of either dual-aspect idealism or dual-aspect neutral-monism.
I do uphold that perceptions are important, but very much believe that the external world can best be evidenced via its causal interactions, this whenever the question of its presence holds a potential to arise.
I don’t know how this perspective will strike you, but I wanted to provide some support to what you stated in your last two posts. Namely, that physical existence is contingent on interactions—this rather than upon our perceptions of it.
Maybe I misunderstand you, but I fail to see how this is harmful. Any examination of reality eventually leads to cause and effect in an endless chain that is always carried out in observance of man's pride. He/she unlike other animals can look back, understand, and master reality but only through the fogged lens of his desires, through the senses and mental faculties he has been endowed with presumably honed for acquiring the means of subsistence - and thus he has to constantly fight in a pathetic attempt to break away from his yoke.
"I do uphold that perceptions are important, but very much believe that the external world can best be evidenced via its causal interactions, this whenever the question of its presence holds a potential to arise."
Keep in mind that we are in no way distinguishing between what is correct, false, true, erroneous, that these are all separate from what it means to be a subject of the material world.
No, I didn’t intend that it is harmful. I intended that such approach is beneficial to establishing the presence of what is often termed the external world. This in what I presumed to be an overall agreement with your own perspective.
Which is an interesting point when you consider the nominalist argument Berkeley uses to attack abstract ideas, Locke is also a nominalist btw apparently not as much as Berkeley. It is interesting if his failure to accommodate logical and mathematics proofs is the biggest weakness in his theory because not everyone is convinced by math, Russell felt it was largely based upon fallacies.
As you should expect, given that I'm a naive realist. Another theory of perception would have to be well-supported, have good reasons for belief, be plausible etc. for me to change my view. I won't be holding my breath.
Nominalism is one of the few things Berkeley got right in my view. I'm also a nominalist.
Yes. Do I remember much of it now? No. I read it a long time ago.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Come on, now. You can't be so unintelligent that you believe that not agreeing with something amounts to not understanding it, can you?
You do realize that Berkeley is proposing a form of naive realism? He is actually giving you theory to justify your belief and refute Locke's veil of perception.
On what grounds do you dismiss him so flippantly?
Yeah, and Cheetos are really broccoli.
Excuse me, I'm not just an idea of yours. How rude. :D
No you are not an idea, you are a mind / spirit. Thinking beings are different to unthinking objects. I still haven't worked out which category Terrapin Station belongs in.
When it's a sound argument, and one disagrees, it is obviously a matter of misunderstanding. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize that.
Others reading his works and debating would all be ideas in his mind.
Idealism logically and inexorably leads to solipsism.
Quoting WayfarerThis explanation isn't any better. All there are are ideas, not independently existing objects, like you and your internet forum post. "Your ideas" (your forum posts) only exist because they are my ideas.
Put that mirror down, son.
It shouldn't take a third-grader to realize that just because you think that something is true, it doesn't imply that others agree, hence it's still unbelievably unintelligent to think that not agreeing amounts to not understanding. It's not as if not agreeing can be consistent with understanding only when everyone else thinks that something is false. That would be a comically ridiculous take on that.
Yeah, positing a magic genie makes the view a lot more reasonable.
Finally we are getting somewhere. The question is does positing a magic genie provide a better explanation than positing a material substratum that has equally mysterious properties as the genie.
Locke says that material objects are supported by a material substratum. Until today science is dealing with the mysterious nature of this substratum and we still remain on the wrong side of the veil of perception and so only have indirect knowledge of any true nature beyond our limited sensory perception.
Berkeley says 'ballix to material substratum, God is the support for all objects in the world. By accepting Gods role we can be sure that we directly perceive objects as they are. There is no veil of perception, we can be naive realists once again after Descartes pulled out the rug.
The point is that the metaphysics of the quantum physics are as equally mysterious as the metaphysics of God so what reason do we have for choosing one over the other?
Your explanation of "mind" is inconsistent. We can't be mind independent if we are part of another mind.
A better explanation is realism. There is a shared world that is represented in unique, yet similar, ways in unique, yet similar, minds.
You have to use the notion of realism - that there are external causes to your experiences, ie God - to prevent idealism from collapsing into solipsism.
Not a substratum. Material is all there is--well, material, relations of material and motion of material. We're not positing things we don't observe.
Like I say Berkeley doesn't really explain how God does it or even why he does it but shows us where it is happening, which is everywhere.
Materialism also relies on a belief in the causal powers of objects, it is the objects existence that causes us to perceive it. Hume undermined this belief and showed all we know is constant conjunction, Berkeley anticipates Hume's refutal of causal power in objects. All causation is from God.
You observe their mind-independent existence.
Aside from that, mind is material too.
Firstly observation and perception are mind dependent. A mind must be present in order to do these things. Mind independent perception is a contradiction in terms.
Secondly, you say that mind is matter by which I can only assume that you mean the brain is matter. For Berkeley,as with Descartes minds and spirits and souls are synonymous, we have little enough empirical evidence of 'minds' and none what so ever about spirits or souls so your claim that minds are material is highly problematic.
No. That's what you implied when you said:
Quoting Jamesk
Quoting JameskYet we do have ideas about other minds and of God's.
If minds are not ideas then minds are objects - material.
Nothing you have said falsifies anything I have said. You don't want to have a discussion. All you want to do is to continue to spout your fundamentalist claims and hope they stick to something.
Isn't Hume's arguing against the self via Berkeley's skepticism of the material very similar. The material fits in the same vague category as the self, a higher up abstraction from a series of sense perceptions.
The same old idiotic confusion from poster after poster here:
You observe their mind-independence. You don't non-consciously observe anything. If you're observing something, then obviously there's an observer, but you'd have to be in the market of not being capable of feeding yourself to be confused whether you're only observing the observer per se.
It's like you screw in a lightbulb that is hand-independent. You don't hand-independently screw the lightbulb in. You're not only screwing in the hand-screwing.
You walk on a sidewalk that is foot-independent. You don't foot-independently walk on the sidewalk. You're not only walking on your own foot-walking.
This is so simple that a toddler should be able to understand it, yet poster after poster here is confused (yet arrogant about it).
And the only way you'd have little empirical evidence of a mind is if you don't have one, which may very well be the case given how confused you appear to be.
It can't possibly be that idealism rests on such a moronic confusion. I refuse to believe that the entire history of idealism in philosophy is a parade of short-bus candidates, but maybe so.
James K is actually just repeating what Berkeley argued, not that it is true. Folks are just trying to be charitable to Berkeley.
The ad hominem is probably warranted because some have used it against you in this thread but it'll only get worse if we carry on.
I think it's a problem--and I consider it dishonest--when we pretend that we don't think something is stupid when we do think that. That's one way we end up wasting so much time with this sort of nonsense in the first place.
And no, I don't think that something isn't stupid just because it has a long history of respect. Just look at religious beliefs.
Thanks but look again at the title of the thread and the questions asked. I clearly state that I want to compare between the two theories and see whether Berkeley''s argument is as sound as it seems. I am not being charitable to Berkeley, I am just defending him (along his own lines as you pointed out) against the ungrounded attacks, I can argue against him as well but everyone else seems to be doing that just fine.
I thought that we would have some proper philosophical discussions here but some people are more into trolling.
A "proper philosophical argument" requires that (a) you actually present an argument, not just a set of claims, and (b) you don't just give up when objections are made, you don't just give up when people don't acquiesce after a step or three. You need to be able to defend against a whole series of objections, objections to attempts to defend against objections, etc.
I think 'ego' is incorrect terminology here. An all-perceiving mind/consciousness, perhaps; but not 'ego' which is 'one's sense of oneself'. My counter-proposal to Berkeley's would be that this factor is actually provided by 'mankind' in the general sense; that in human form, the Universe knows itself. 'A scientist', said Bohr, 'is simply an atom's way of looking at itself'.
Quoting Jamesk
Actually not naive realism, but Berkeley is categorised as an empiricist. His argument could be paraphrased as depending on the observation that we cannot go beyond the content of experience, and that experience requires a perceiving subject.
Quoting Terrapin Station
The reason for your aggravation/aggression, is because your native sense of what is real is being called into question. It's annoying, but that's what philosophy aims at doing. You haven't actually got to the point of the critical analysis of your own perceptions and conceptions, which is the activity of philosophy proper. You might argue that that's what 'science' is for. But science acts on the basis of a limited sub-set of experience, which is built on the basis of axioms and exclusion of many factors which are not tractable to precise measurement. But in this case, the subject matter is one that is not itself measurable or analytical in scientific terms, as it is a consideration of the nature of 'lived reality', not reality as observed 'from the outside', as a matter of scientific fact. But you have so thoroughly and completely internalised that scientific perspective, that you look at everything from inside it, without being aware that you're doing it. You here you have to look at your spectacles, not just through them.
I happened across an interesting video animation in The Atlantic which talks about the way the mind constructs reality. I disagree with the author's use of the term 'hallucination' - I think what is happening much nearer in meaning to Schopenhauer's 'vorstellung' which is usually translated as 'representation' or 'idea'.
[quote=Schopenhauer]"The world is my idea" — this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun^ a hand that feels an earth ; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this.[/quote]
Yes, it was written in haste. I here intended “ego” in what I understand to be its Latin sense. But, even so, I acknowledge this could still become ambiguous more quickly than not. To clarify:
Berkeley supposes some being that perceives and that via this faculty is all-perceiving.
I was alluding to a possible argument that this very concept is self-contradictory. In summation: To perceive is to have a point of view from where perceptions occur, yet the very presence of a point of view would entail that some things are not perceived—thereby precluding the possibility of perceiving everything in a simultaneous and eternal way. Otherwise, devoid of such point of view, omni-perception as a hypothetical could maybe be denoted as consisting of all perception from all co-existent point-of-view-endowed beings simultaneously. Yet Berkeley specifies a being that governs all by perceiving everything as singular point of view. Something that to me is self-contradictory. As it is, I don’t currently care to more formally argue this out. But I do deem it to be a problem with the consistency of Berkeley’s overall paradigm.
Notwithstanding, I agree with your post.
No one has ever sensed matter. We do not observe matter. The things we observe are objects like the chair, the table, and the various other objects we encounter. To say that these things are somehow composed of matter is to posit something we do not observe, matter, as a material substratum.
Who says something like that?
If you really think that you've observed matter before, tell me what does matter look, sound, taste, smell, or feel like?
Matter occupies space and - in common day life - has a weight. Anything that has these properties is made of matter. That's the definition.
He is an empiricist, no doubt. Why do you say he theory is not direct realism? By refuting abstract ideas and the primary / secondary quality distinction the veil of perception disappears. We are left with direct access to the object itself (even if it is only an idea in our head) hence I called it naive / direct realism.
You oversimplify it with your partial definition.
mat·ter
/?mad?r
noun
1.
physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit; (in physics) that which occupies space and possesses rest mass, especially as distinct from energy.
"the structure and properties of matter"
Newton asserts the absolute existence of matter, force, time and space. Berkeley undermines their absolute / independent existence by offering an alternative cause in God.
When we see a chair, how do we not see what it is composed of? If we can't say what it is composed of, how can we even say that what we see is a chair?
The question is: does it even matter what word we use to say what the chair is composed of?
With Berkeley the object is as we perceive it, no annoying atoms or bothering quarks or other particles, just the pure idea in itself. Berkeley was a great scholar of Plato and I am sure that the theory of Forms is being exploited here by him.
Why is that oversimplified? The basic definition of material objects was given.
Mass is a good keyword. Mass implies inertia. Reality is resistance.
Per definition: a measure of matter.
Spirits dull or impair the mind. :)
Anyway, Berkeley conjured up his deity as a coat hanger for his world, a mental monism, like others have come up with whatever other things.
But it's the justification that matters.
I guess it's impossible to get things wrong, there's nothing more to things than the experience, there's no difference between hallucination and perception, for example?
We don't perceive and learn when unconscious.
We don't experience another's self-awareness.
There are few odd things by subjective idealism on its own, a kind of solipsism.
Right. So according to the article that you cited:
According to the same source (i.e. Wikipedia):
So I don't see how Berkeley fits into (1).
I have a huge problem writing about idealism. I swear before each exam never to answer questions on Idealism but the subject fascinates me so much and I spend too much of my time studying it out of pure interest.
I think that any school of idealism requires a kind of gestalt shift. Realists struggle with it, because of their habitual stance of being ‘a subject in a realm of objects’, which is simply assumed as the basis of all enquiry. Whereas idealism of all kinds focusses on the act of knowing and the role of the subject, which is generally ‘bracketed out’ by realists. I sometimes think of it in terms of Lewis Carrolls’ Through the Looking Glass - I’m sure he was wise to these ideas.
In short, I can't perceive anything if I'm not around.
But that does not entail that anything isn't around.
Conflating epistemics and ontology (which, I think, has been pointed out plenty over time).
Similarly ...
Quoting jorndoe
... even when around, hence ...
Quoting Jamesk
... another's self-awareness, which would then prompt Berkeley to deny existence (except by special pleading).
Solipsism by Berkeley's own line of thinking.
In fact, as indicated by the image above, knowing someone else's self-awareness is even harder than knowing the existence of their (object-like) hands, for example.
We encounter other people's "physical" bodies before their minds, we encounter their minds via their bodily goings-and-doings.
Berkeley and Locke take this from Descartes. Berkeley recognizes the weakness in his argument and defends against the objections. Introspection provides us with notions of ourselves and things like us, spirits in other words. Again it gets very Cartesian at this point and cannot work without God.
Here the question is whether he is a scientist, a christian, a scientific christian, is he trying to prove science or God or one through the other.
That's just an idea though, an assumption, not an observation. You are claiming, to paraphrase, "anything that occupies space and has weight is matter". But what we sense, and observe, is particular things occupying space and having weight, not matter. So the validity of this idea, this assumption, or claim you've made, needs to be supported.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't see any logic in what you have written here. I see a chair, as a distinct entity, a unity, a chair. I do not see a collection of parts, molecules or atoms or any such thing. Therefore, I can say that I see a chair, this is supported by empirical evidence. The claim that the chair is composed of something, molecules, atoms, or matter, is the claim that needs to be justified.
Chairs and tables are matter.
I've been studying philosophy for 45 years now, and I have a "formal" background in it. So no. Idealism isn't actually rampant in the field at large. Why there are so many idealists on this board I don't know. Same with so many religious believers here.
By the way, after I first discovered Berkeley/idealism in general, as well as Descartes' obsession with certainty, etc. I thought that stuff was pretty interesting (even though I didn't agree with it (well, idealism at least) and thought it was bizarre when I first encountered it) and presented something of a challenge when I was about 16-17 years old. But then I advanced. That was about 40 years ago now.
What you rather need to do, if you find yourself seduced by the "you can only know/there only are ideas" doctrine, if you find yourself seduced by representationalism, etc. is realize this: you're making a decision between believing that (a) "you can only perceive/know ideas" and (b) "you can perceive/know (things that aren't simply ideas in) the external world." In making that decision, you should have good reasons to believe one of those options instead of the other. You need to critically look at that, critically look at what you consider to be good reasons for buying one option rather than the other, and I can help you be critical regarding the typical reasons given for (a), because the typical reasons for that are very poor. Maybe someone has some unusual, very idiosyncratic reasons for choosing (a), but in that case, let's hear 'em, and we'll see whether they're good or not.
If solipsism/idealism is the case, then the chair only exists as an idea along with whatever it is composed of. In idealism, the chair really is made of wood and plastic - as you see it. (Indirect) Realism is the one that says the chair is not as you see it.
What difference does it make what word we use to refer to what things are composed of? Answer the question.
You philosophers like to argue over nonsense and/or throw together a bunch of words that don't mean anything, or are useless.
Idealism/solipsism is actually a type of naive realism. What you experience is actually how things are.
One cannot say that things are composed of ideas, for how would you distinguish one idea from another? Ideas themselves are composed of sensory impressions/representations. Yet ideas are different from an experience of the same thing. Is idea of your pet the same as your experience of your pet. The idea is vague, faded, and an overlay of the actual experience.
For it to be naive realism, though, it has to not just be ideas that you're observing or that you believe exists.
No, those are deductions made from observations. How would you sense that the chair is composed of wood, plastic, a seat, or legs?
Quoting Harry Hindu
It makes a lot of difference what words we use to refer to what things are made of.. Each word has its own meaning, and some claims are more easily justifiable than others. That the chair is composed of a seat and legs, or even that it is composed of wood or plastic, is much more easily justified than that it is composed of matter. The latter appears to be entirely speculative.
How is ideas all the way down different from matter all the way down? The only difference between a naive realist and idealist is the word that they use to refer to what things are composed of. They both still believe that things are as they see it.
It's like asking how a shoe is different from a jellyfish. What would require an explanation is not being able to see any differences. Ideas are not the same thing as not-ideas, and that's an important difference, even if there are plenty of similarities, too.
But it's a necessary component of the idealism vs. realism distinction that realism isnt positing that we only know or that there only are ideas.
Claim? That is the established definition of the word - go figure!
So you're telling me that you can't see the difference between a wooden chair and a plastic one? What is imitation wood if not the appearance of wood so that you can't visually distinguish between the plastic it is made of and actual wood?
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverEach word means what it refers to. What is the actual difference between ideas and matter?
It's what things are composed of that we are talking about. For the naive realist, ideas are composed of matter, so for the naive realist it is just matter that he observes and it is matter all the way down. For the idealist, it is only ideas that he observes and it is ideas all the way down. Again, what is the difference?
If you had read the Dialogues you would know that Berkeley already addresses this question as well as all of the other objections that have been raised so far in this thread.
The difference between ideas and matter is that ideas are mind dependent and matter supposedly is not. Berkeley is very good at demolishing the foundations of material substance but not so good at supporting his own foundation for spiritual substance.
At the end of the Dialogues he allows that the only real difference between the two is the materialists insistence that non-thinking objects or what you call material objects can exist without a mind that perceives them.
Right, to define something is to state an idea. It doesn't indicate whether the defined thing could be observed or not - go figure.
It is the claim that the defined thing, "matter", is something observed rather than just an idea, that is what needs to be justified.
Quoting Harry Hindu
What I'm telling you is that I cannot look at the chair and tell you that it is made of wood, or that it is made of plastic without having some idea of what wood and what plastic are. By reference to these ideas, I can deduce whether the chair is made of plastic or wood. And, as your example of imitation wood indicates, I might sometimes be wrong in my deduction. So clearly I am not observing with my senses what the chair is made of, I am deducing it.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Matter is an idea, but not all ideas are matter.
Kant, for example, could not explain it's resistiveness and preservance in other ways. There cannot be a will to lift a thing up and one to hold it on the ground in one subject at a time.
But - again - this is not part of the definition of matter.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I guess it is a nominalistic "We call things with those properties material." No claim - just calling names. It is not my problem that you go on and try to make the materialness a property inherent and important to the essence of the existence of everything(tm). Your are mixing up matter and materialism as well as ideas and idealism.
Objects are ideas surely? We have no idea of matter because we cannot directly perceive it.
So you literally have no idea what the difference is between thinking that there can be matter that's not just an idea and thinking that there can be ideas that aren't matter?
Again this is incorrect. We directly perceive matter all the time.
We perceive material objects all of the time, we do not perceive matter. The material substratum supporting the mind independent, absolute existence of those material objects is invisible.
You say that the atomic structure of a tree is what the tree is made of, however we only experience the tree not the swirling cloud of atoms that provide solidity and colour etc.
When was the last time you directly perceived an atom? a molecule? a particle? Never, because you can only experience them indirectly through their extensions i.e material objects.
Why in the world would you be thinking that matter is only microscopic?
That is the same as saying we do not percieve colors. We perceive a black-red screwdriver, we perceive ....
Fair enough - why would we need abstractions? We don't observe objects...
Quoting Jamesk
You, too, are mixing assumptions of materialism into the definition of matter. Here is a definition for you:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/matter
There's a definition above, but it's certainly not only microscopic. It's not as if quarks and leptons and protons and neutrons etc. are matter, but when they're in larger combinations--including rocks and shoes and trees and buildings and mountains and planets, it's no longer matter.
So now, how about answering what I asked you--why in the world would you think that "matter" only refers to something microscopic?
Do you understand the sense in which your response to Berkeley is similar to Samuel Johnson’s, and why that matters? You’re basically saying: ‘c’mon , don’t be ridiculous’. That is about the strength of it. Your argument is simply that ‘naive realism is obviously correct’.
In respect of the nature of matter - what is at issue is the reality of matter. I can quite agree that tables and chairs exist, as I use them all the time. But recall the context of the debate - it’s about what is real, and what grounds there are for asserting the basis of its reality. Materialism is the view that material objects are inherently real, that the fundamental constituents of matter are what really exist, and these exist independently of anyone perceiving them.
But the difficulty is that it is just the reality of such supposed fundamental constituents that has been cast into doubt by 20th c physics. Particles are now ‘excitations of fields’, and fields are...well, what, exactly? And there are many serious and sober scientists who are prepared to entertain the apparently outlandish world-picture presented by the ‘many worlds interpretation’ (especially as an alternative to the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation.)
Much of this, it shouldnt’ be forgotten, originated with the ‘observer problem’ in quantum physics, the precise implication of which was that the act of observation did indeed have a material and philosophical bearing on the observation of the purportedly ‘mind-independent reality’ of sub-atomic entities. And I can help you with that. ;-)
Citation?
I mean if you're going to either be that thick or dishonest, whichever it is . . .
Aside from that, you're seriously arguing from a subservience to the conventions of the discipline of physics interpreted non-instrumentally?
If the particles aren't matter, and the combination of particles are not matter, then what is matter?
I'll answer. The usual folk notion is that matter is a stuff, a substance - physical being. So it is a material suitable for construction. It exists in stable located fashion, occupying space and time. It has stable inherent properties. And it is suitable for turning into mixtures or combinations of greater complexity. It is pliant in some regard while also being stiff enough to maintain its identity as a part of some composition.
In short, this deep ontological question is normally approach from the shallow end of the pool where a human-centric set of concerns is uppermost in our minds. We are looking out into the world for stable, yet plastic, building materials. The kind of stuff that we can form into arbitrary objects like a chair or table. And atomism arose as a metaphysics to support that constructive mindset. It made sense that the base of a substantial reality would be little bits of ur-stuff acting and reacting with each other in an a-causal and thoughtless void.
So in summary, it has to be stable stuff that can be plastically re-shaped into stable forms. Materialism is the ontology of mankind the builder. That is the pragmatically useful way of understanding nature ... so it must be true. :lol:
Wait--why would we be saying that either the particles or combinations of them are not matter?
So is the idealist saying that the primary substance is mind, not ideas? If so, then the question becomes, "what is the difference betweeen mind and matter?" Ideas would be matter-dependent or mind-dependant. Again, what is the difference?
Quoting JameskBut we perceive thinking objects just as we perceive non-thinking objects. The difference lies in their behavior, not how they appear - as material objects. Both thinking and non-thinking objects are governed by the laws of physics (cause and effect).
You said they were not matter, implying matter was something else beyond particles and objects. I was trying to unearth the folk notions that you are probably relying on there.
The failure of that kind of materialism was exposed by Aristotle. Nature needs to be understood through the lens of ontic structuralism or hylomorphism. But still, folk notions of matter continue to rule for everyday pragmatic reasons.
No. I was responding to someone who seemed to think that matter referred to something only microscopic.
I basically said, "it's not as if 'a if F while b isn't F,' even though b is comprised of a."
So then, if matter isn't about a microscopic vs macroscopic distinction, how are you defining matter exactly?
Quoting Terrapin Station
So can the macroscopic stuff "comprise" the microscopic stuff just as well as the other way round?
Are you arguing for a top-down relationship as well as a bottom-up one in your understanding of materiality?
I'm not asking you to tell me what the chair is composed of. I'm merely asking if you can make a distinction between different materials visually - without having to convert those distinctions into language to tell me what it is composed of. The difference isn't in the idea, but in how it actually appears and feels, and our words merely pointy to those distinctions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover what are ideas composed of if not matter or mind? Ideas can be about matter or about other things, but all ideas are composed of matter is what a realist would say.
Again, there's a standard definition a few posts up. Or you can just google "matter definition."
Why would it have anything to do with a microscopic/macroscopic divide? Where is that idea coming from?
Quoting apokrisis
How would "the other way around" make any sense? Smaller bits comprised of larger bits??
I'm neither saying anything like "bottom up" nor "top down." Matter simply occurs on both microscopic and macroscopic levels.
But I asked if you could supply your own. Interesting that you won't.
Quoting Terrapin Station
This is an example of the confusion I was hoping you would clarify.
Is it true that chairs ARE matter? Or that chairs are comprised of matter? Or indeed that a chair is an idea we impose on matter?
If you are arguing for an Aristotelian position on substantial being, then all three of these statements work as different aspects of the same metaphysical package.
But I doubt you have any desire to endorse hylomorphic thinking. So how can a chair BE matter, as you state?
A naive realist.
I'm not using the term in an unusual way.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, of course.
Quoting apokrisis
That too. Why would they be matter but not be compromised of matter, or be compromised of matter but wind up as something other than matter?
Quoting apokrisis
We have ideas of chairs (and since we're talking about an artifact in this case we make them as we do because of the ideas we have), but the chair itself isn't an idea.
Re hylomorphism, matter necessarily has form. Form isn't something separate.
Naive realism is a view re philosophy of perception. "all ideas are composed of matter is what a realist would say" doesn't have anything to do with philosophy of perception.
As you pay for it's disposal per kg. A bottle can easily be just glass... :)
Right, that's what I've been trying to explain to those people who have been suggesting that we could sense what the chair is made of, matter. We can't do that, we have to take our sensations, and put them into words through the means of ideas. We cannot sense what the chair is made of, be it wood, plastic, matter, or whatever. We sense differences, as you say, not what a thing is made of.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I really don't know what an idea is made of, but that is irrelevant. I'm just arguing against those who claim that we observe the existence of matter through sensation.
I don't think you are really thinking about what you are saying. If it is "just glass" then how is it "a bottle"?
You can separate the formal and material causes of substantial being. So you can point to the form - the bottle - and you can point to the matter - the glass. But then you are losing sight of the thing you thought you were talking about - substantial being - in saying the form "just is" the matter. Hey presto!
I don't think you are talking about the actual thing. You know to put bottles into a glass-container, no?
Too true. That is the problem. You are content with the usual folk metaphysics.
Quoting Terrapin Station
So if matter can never lack form, then ontically, what is matter in contrast to form? What could define it as fundamental?
I ask the question even though I know you will only talk past it.
I can't make sense of this.
If It's "the usual folk metaphysics" and there's supposedly a problem with it, there would need to be a good argument for whatever the problem is supposed to be.
Quoting apokrisis
Why would you be trying to contrast them or say that one is more fundamental? They're inseparable and incoherent without the other.
And I ask that knowing that you won't even attempt to answer.
Sure. If we redefine matter as idea, I guess problem solved?
What are you talking about?
In other words you cannot. Saying a concrete thing was a bottle is just as aspectual as saying it is glass.
Correct.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Again correct.
So the problem remains that you don't see the contradiction between the two statements.
Substantial being can't be just matter, or just form. And yet the folk position is that matter just IS substance and form ISN'T substantial. :chin:
Hence hylomorphism. Sure.
The thing is - the bit that actually interests me - is that we can talk very clearly about the formal aspect of substantial being, but it all goes very shifty as we try to drill down into the material aspect of substantial being.
Glass is just informed substance. Bottles are one of those possible forms. The silca molecules composing the glass are just another deeper level of informed substance. Silicon and oxygen can compose other possible forms. Particle physics tells us that the electrons and quarks composing the silicon and oxygen atoms are yet again just informed substance - localised excitations in a quantum field or frustrations in a vacuum condensate.
So for the materialist, it is turtles all the way down. Yet materialists don't seem to think they have a problem.
Well, here are two:
Quoting Terrapin Station
And another:
Quoting Terrapin Station
No doubt there would be many more, but life’s too short for me to waste time reading back to you what you actually say.
Again - you show not the least comprehension of Berkeley’s arguments, beyond asserting that they’re simply not credible. Which is not, as far as I’m concerned, a philosophical argument.
So then my view isn't "the folk position." I couldn't care less if it is or isn't "the folk position," assuming that even clearly refers to some single stance, which is mind of dubious.
One good argument runs along the lines of: Because awareness matters … to all of us … except maybe when we've got our head in the clouds philosophizing about what is real. But matter as substance doesn’t explain the presence of awareness or any of its charms, things like its happiness and suffering, and its ability to cause these same attributes in other instantiations of awareness. The best a physicalist can do is do that faith thing which they often detest theist for: someday it will somehow magically be explained. Thus presenting a good reason to question that “everything is matter”.
I doubt that anyone here in their daily lives can’t colloquially/intuitively differentiate between that which is physical and that which is thoughts—regardless of their philosophies. Yet the affirmation that “all thoughts are composed of matter” has the equally justifiable—and also not perfect—alternative that “all matter is composed of thoughts”. Just that the latter can explain awareness, agency, and the like—especially when adopting a view such as Peirce’s objective idealism—whereas the former can’t.
(Besides which, there’s always the dual-aspect neutral-monism position wherein all stuff is, roughly speaking, basically just information that causally interacts, hence neither matter nor thought but that from which both manifest in their respective forms. Thought I’d trough this one in since it’s my view.)
Where do those saying anything like "Here's my argument," or in any way suggest that I'm presenting an argument, or say anything resembling "naive realism is (simply) obviously correct"?
Quoting Wayfarer
Where am i commenting on Berkeley's arguments to even say one way or another anything about what my understanding would be?
Your comments here suggest rather that you have zero reading comprehension ability.
Yep. Your position is that you back two contradictory positions without apparently realising it.
Wait a minute--let's clarify this first: "the usual folk metaphysics" is physicalism re the mind-body issue?
And the contradictory positions are?
I'm not going to get into an argument about what the "usual folk metaphysics" is ... other than to say that most folks take matter to be substantial.
Personally, I don't believe that "the usual folk" could give a rats ass about metaphysics (pardon my English) ... they just care that things work out better for them in their immediate lives. Which does entail the presence of awareness.
As I said, I'm skeptical that "the usual folk metaphysics" would clearly refer to a single view, rather than many different views. I was simply asking because that's what you quoted a comment about before launching into a mind-body discussion contra physicalism.
Ok, taken in context of this thread, it was addressing what the "good reason" to question materialism is. I feel certain that other reasons can also be found. But I provided one.
Substantial being can't be just matter, or just form. And yet the folk position is that matter just IS substance and form ISN'T substantial.
First I'm not even using the term "substantial being" am I? And I wouldn't. What in the world is that term saying that "matter" doesn't say? So if I'm saying something contradictory, It's nothing about "substantial being" and its relation to matter or form.
What is "matter is substantial" supposed to be saying?
Okay. But I don't see the fact that physicalism doesn't seem intuitively right to you as a good reason to reject it.
I believe that was in reference to my statement. Its saying "matter as sub-stance (that upon which everything is founded)"
"Quoting Terrapin Station
No, my intuition has little if anything to do with it. Materialism is self-contradictory to that which appraises its truth: the presence of awareness.
Quoting Terrapin Station
So in those 45 years, did you ever actually bone up on basic Aristotelian metaphysics? Seems not.
Yeah - the problem with this is if we ask "How?" you're going to formulate the justification for this proposition in terms of precisely the sort of reasons everyone is haggling over in this thread. Though maybe you can do it? Would be lovely to see you pull it off. I defy you to justify this statement - "Materialism is self-contradictory to that which appraises its truth: the presence of awareness" - with reasons that don't terminate either in your intuition or in a the formulation of a line of reasoning which can be addressed and debated by someone with a materialist perspective.
The problem with that is that I wouldn't say that anything is "founded on matter." Everything simply is matter/dynamic relations of matter.
Quoting javra
That just reads like gibberish to me unfortunately.
Yea. It's in the works. But I grant, it doesn't work well in soundbites. But I am tempted. It'll have to do with degrees of certainty, though (none of which will be absolute).
How about answering the question instead of posturing? (And will you believe me when I say I'm surprised if you never answer the question?)
Well I look forward to reading! Make sure to cc my username if/when you get around to it.
:smile: Cool
Did you want me to move your fingers for you as you type "hylomorphism" into Google? :razz:
You are the one posturing with your claims of 45 years of "formal" philosophical training. And I have been explaining as we have been going along. So your problem if none of this rings a bell.
I like how you said what the difference between "substantial being" and "matter" is supposed to be. (And especially with respect to claims I'm supposedly making.) I can tell you have a firm grasp on a coherent distinction, and I'm impressed with your lucidity while presenting the explanation.
Why not type something about "constraints" now?
Lets not run before we can walk, eh.
I'm surprised you're responding without answering questions you've been asked.
(Did you believe that?)
On second thought ... Just in case you’re somewhat sincere, the “first principles” of the work can be found here: https://michaelwmoiceanu.com/2018/09/02/ch-1-first-principles-certainty-uncertainty-and-doubt/
Don’t know when I’ll get around to putting up more chapters online—it’ll likely be on a dedicated website. This first chapter, however, gives basic explanations of certainty, uncertainty, and doubt—which will then be used to establish conclusions of optimal certainty throughout the work. These topics are nevertheless standalone. I don’t want to seem like I’m BSing, so I’d thought I’d share.
You can PM me if you ever get around to reading it and care to comment.
But back to the thread’s discussion …
But I told you. Until we get to the bottom of how little you have learnt on the issue over these past 45 years, where could one even start?
Just briefly skimming some of that, it doesn't look like it addresses anything in the vein of "Materialism is self-contradictory to that which appraises its truth: the presence of awareness.". Although of course I'm not sure what you're saying in that quote, and I only skimmed the chapter you posted.
Which jibe was the answer in?
Hm, if you don’t know what the quote is saying, how would you know that the chapter doesn’t address it? You kind’s lost me with that one.
As it turns out, it doesn’t. It’s only a first chapter, whose topics set up the field, so to speak. I provided it not to derail the thread but to evidence, empirically, that I’m actually busy working on a philosophical shpeel. And not merely making stuff up about so doing.
Well, it didn't appear to be about materialism, for example. It appears to primarily be about certainty. And as far as I can tell the quote doesn't have anything to do with certainty.
OK, in your view, does physicalism explain the presence of awareness? Or, as it’s more commonly addressed, of consciousness.
I ask because tmk, according to those such as Dennett (cf., Consciousness Explained), physicalism entails that our “sense” of being an awareness/consciousness—which we label in the first person as “I”—is an illusion. Hence not in fact existing.
Here, the theory of physicalism is in contradiction with our so called sense of awareness being real. Yet, as I’ve argued in a recent thread on certainty of thought, in which you’ve posted, it is impossible to rationally doubt one’s own awareness while one is aware.
Hence, the presence of one’s own awareness while one is aware is an epistemic certainty for which one cannot discern any justifiable alternative.
Physicalism has plenty of justifiable alternatives, and is hence only a psychological certainty (for those who are certain of it).
So we have a contradiction between the epistemic certainty that we hold presence as an awareness while we are aware and a psychological certainty that we don’t (in the latter case, because our awareness is nothing but an illusion).
The contradiction then implies that at least one of these positions is false.
Assuming that you can understand what I’m saying, where do you disagree?
Well, first, don't equate physicalism or materialism with being a Dennettian. Dennett and that ilk (the Churchlands, for example) are often considered eliminative materialists. Not all materialists are eliminative materialists.
I think that consciousness, and all mental phenomena in general, are physical/material, and no, i don't at all think that consciousness, qualia, etc. are an illusion. (Not to mention that the very idea of an illusion obtaining while not involving consciousness is incoherent.)
Re "explanations," are you talking about verbal (or lets say mathematical etc.) accounts of phenomena?
I had causal explanations in mind. You have a brain; its alive; there's this very complex thing called awareness. How?
---------
I should clarify. How from a physicalist's point of view?
A causal explanation given in words? The reason I'm asking is because it's important when that's what we're talking about to realize that no explanation (in words) is going to resemble what it's explaining (we're not explaining words, at least not in the same words we might be explaining if we're explaining words per se), and it's important, if we're going to be making proclamations that this set of words counts as an explanation and that set of words does not, to state, at least roughly, our criteria for what counts and why. (So that it reasonably works as demarcation criteria.)
Re brains and awareness in my view there's not a causal relationship at play. It's rather an identity. I could say that an explanation is simply that consciousness is a property of brains functioning in particular ways, from the perspective of being the brain in question, or I could say that an explanation is that consciousness involves particular activations in the occipital, temporal, frontal cortices, etc., but you could just say, "That's not an explanation." Hence why we'd need to pin down the criteria for just what counts as an explanation and why, and the criteria would have to work for some examples or what you take to be sufficient explanations of something.
OK, a fair reply. You are right in that I don’t view identity to be in and of itself an explanation. We could go about saying “X is so because it is X” or “X is so just because it is” for pretty much anything. And in most all situations, so doing wouldn’t provide any intellectual satisfaction. On the other hand, pointing to parts of the brain as being responsible for awareness rather than the whole brain doesn’t quite address the issue—namely, one of how one goes from material interactions to awareness as we know it (which, after all, holds agency via its body).
BTW, I agree that it happens, but as of yet stand firm that materialism/physicalism can’t provide for how.
But embarking upon the issue of causation so as to more properly address causal explanations for this would be for me, currently, an issue too expansive to likely settle. For instance, I agree with a few others hereabout that such a thing as top-down causation takes place … and arguing this out would take a lot of time.
As it is, it’s getting a little late for me. It’s been good chatting with you.
Not that that's what I did above. But again, we'd need demarcation criteria re just what counts or doesn't count as an explanation for you and why.
Quoting javra
I really believe that's a misconceived way to look at it, because what makes the difference is the reference frame. Being the brain in question rather than looking at it from a third-person perspective.
Berkeley replaces Locke's material substrata with a spiritual substances - minds. and material objects with ideas supported by minds.Quoting Harry Hindu
How do you perceive a thinking object? My mind is the 'thinking end' and you cannot form an idea of a mind. You can develop a notion of minds and of God, but that's not the same as an idea. Berkeley is on sticky ground at this point. Like I said demolishing materialism is easier than supporting immaterialism.
Do you want to block my post?
Isn’t there a sense in which today’s ‘folk metaphysics’ hails back to Cartesian dualism? What I mean is that it was this model which neatly divided everything into extended dumb matter and immaterial mind. But then over the ensuing centuries, the notion of ‘res cogitans’ became unsustainable, mainly because there was no way to show how an immaterial spirit or mind could exert influence over a material body. The net effect of which was the abandonment of ‘the ghost in the machine’ and the subsequent adoption of ‘mechanism’ and ultimately matter alone (as one half of the duality) as the presiding metaphor of early modern science.
And I think the reason Aristotelian philosophy has made something of a comeback, is because the cartesian model, or what became of it, left out so much of obvious importance, that it really required going back and looking at the whole issue again. I think what was found was whilst many notions from Aristotelian physics were well and truly obsolete, the same couldn’t be said for every aspect of Aristotelian metaphysics - particularly the interesting doctrine of ‘hylomorphic dualism’.
Just if you look at it very superficially. The form of a cloud is very disputable, not even to speak of fog. And there are many things that look circular - but only if you do not measure too exactly...
Quoting apokrisis
The word "particle physics" as well as the plurals you use seem to indicate a contradiction here. Afaik there are transitions between energy and matter. One could ask the question if this is really the last word on those things though.
Quoting apokrisis
I guess the problem is of another nature. Materialists do not seem to start from the smallest particles there are. The reality of the smallest things is often discussed. Maybe they are just theoretical entities, maybe the theories are incomplete. After all qualities have been destroyed there will be only numbers left in the theories. That doesn't mean that matter is numbers.
Difficult question but I think that he probably did. I think that all objects also have Forms with Plato. I can base this on his banishment of artists in the republic. He does so on the grounds that we do not experience true Forms only copies of them, artists are then engaged in making copies of copies. This process just pushes us deeper into the cave. Well that's my interpretation of it and I remember in lectures talk about the ideal Form of a chair or a table, all chairs and tables are imperfect reflections of their perfect Forms out there in the parallel universe. If regular objects have Forms then it is not that much of a leap for their components to also have them.
As you know, I would take a process view of both the mind and the matter. So some kind of duality is inevitable. But a hylomorphic one gets so many things right in in fact being triadic. It is about the interaction in which the substantial emerges from formal constraints on material freedoms.
That rather nicely confounds modern folk metaphysics in making the material aspect of things as immaterial as possible - a naked freedom - and the formal aspect of things is then the most substantial in being the structure that puts a limit, and thus gives concrete shape, to those material freedoms.
It's tangential to this thread, but the question was raised about 'the form of clouds'. I don't think they're the kinds of 'things' - if they are indeed things - that Plato envisaged as implying a Form
.
:up:
I'm not talking about thinking what the case is. Thinking what the case is could be wrong.
What I am asking is if materialism or idealism were the case, then what would the actual difference be in the attributes of the primary substance? There should be some difference in how the primary substance actually is or functions if these two substances (matter and mind) are so different to cause this debate to go on for so long.
I would say the major difference being that material objects have no causal powers we can know in which case we do not know what causes them.
Ideas also have no causal substance but we do know that they are caused by spirits with the infinite spirit doing most of the causing.
Berkeley does not deny real objects and sees the real world like everyone else, he just denies that it is material.
I'll tell you what I told Apo, we don't sense just differences. We sense similarities as well. Have you ever held a piece of wood in your hand? Can you not notice the similarity between wood as it exists prior to being assembled into something like a chair, and the assembled product of a wooden chair?
Notice I'm using the term "wood", not "matter". It is the idealists and materialists that insist on using these other terms, "mind" and "matter". All they have done is create these new terms that no one really knows what they mean, and claimed that wood and chairs are either an "idea" or "matter".
Words are simply visual scribbles and sounds - something we access with our senses. So sensing what the chair is composed of is prior to having the goal of communicating what the chair is composed of. What are letters of the alphabet composed of? Would you know a letter of the alphabet without ever seeing one or hearing it's sound?
If we can't sense what the chair is made of, then how can we say that the chair is composed of ideas and not matter?
Is the chair composed of something? Does it matter what term we use to refer to that primary substance? What if we just simply used "primary substance?" If that is the case, then why did we have a debate for 1000s of years over what to call the primary substance (matter or mind)?
Quoting Jamesk
Of course I can form an idea of you mind. Every time you speak or submit a post, I form an idea of what is in your mind. I try to predict people's behavior and in doing so, I form an idea about the contents of their mind. Having ideas about other people's mind is one of the features that separates us from most other species.
Quoting Jamesk
That last part there - you lost me.
I think it's reasonable to say that one broad stroke of "folk metaphysics" is that it's dualist re mind/matter, but I don't think it's at all reasonable to say that either folk metaphysics wound up adopting eliminative materialism, that there was any folk metaphysics trend back to Aristotelianism, or that Aristotelianism in any way avoids dualism.
What would redefining matter (as the materialist defines it) as idea (as the idealist defines it) entail? If it doesn't matter what we call the primary substance, then why the debate for the past 1000 years?
It seems to me that the debate stems from our preliminary assumption of dualism and is solved through the realization of monism.
If we're talking about materialism, the mind is material stuff. That's not "another kind of stuff" in that regard.
Quoting apokrisis
"Both mind and matter are processes" doesn't imply dualism.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not convinced there's any coherent way to make "substance" different than "matter," and matter and form are not separable so that they could "interact."
Quoting apokrisis
Incoherent.
Which suggests that the whole idea of Platonic forms is so arbitrary that it's hardly worth bothering with whether Plato would say that clouds have forms. We might as well spend time wondering whether Captain America or Batman would win in a fight.
First, we shouldn't assume that there is a "primary substance." Among other things, that (exact term) is linked to ideas that are pretty incoherent a la the Aristotelianism that some folks are seduced by around here.
If we're contrasting idealism with materialism, we're implying that idealism is positing stuff that isn't material. So obviously the difference would be that we're talking about material/physical stuff in the one case, and we're talking about immaterial/nonphysical stuff in the other case.
I've yet to encounter a notion of nonphysical stuff that's coherent, so I can't tell you much about what the properties of nonphysical stuff are supposed to be or how nonphysical stuff is supposed to function, but people who aren't physicalists assure me that they're not (just) positing physical stuff, they're positing something else (in addition if not instead) that's different than physical stuff.
We actually should be better cleaving terms like idealism, materialism, realism, etc., by the way, and specifying the historical contexts we're focusing on, since the conventional connotations of those terms have shifted over the years.
Are you simply focusing on the Humean comments that amount to us not being able to be certain re causation?
You should make that explicit if so. The folly there is worrying about certainty or linking the idea of knowledge to it.
We know tons of info re causal powers of material objects. For example:
http://www.geo.mtu.edu/UPSeis/why.html
The reason why Aristotelian dualism is more advanced, and therefore more appealing, than Cartesian dualism is that it divides reality between the more evident categories of actual and potential, active and passive, or being and becoming, rather than mind and matter. In categorizing reality in this way, aspects of each of the two categories, actual and potential, may be present in both mind and matter. This avoids the ever-present problem of Cartesian dualism, which is the issue of how mind interacts with matter.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I notice this, but that's something apprehended by my mind, not my senses. I really don't think I can sense a similarity, because that requires an act of comparison, which is a mental activity. In your example there is a comparison with a prior time, and that requires memory. A difference on the other hand, is a relation between two things, so the difference itself, being a relation, is only one thing, and doesn't require a mental comparison to be perceived.
Spiritual substance and mental substance are the same thing.
Quoting Harry Hindu
You can form an idea of my body or bodies in general but not of minds. Brains yes but minds no. What does a mind look like? How big is it? what colour is it? Quoting Harry Hindu
How does a tree cause you to see a tree? The materialist provides an answer based in physics, light waves, atoms etc. Thinking so, you allow that objects have causal powers in themselves. This is far from proven, as Hume showed all we experience in causation is regularity. The immaterialist knows that God is the only cause of objects existing.
Hume is very certain about causation, it is not necessary connection but it is constant conjunction.The view that all we know about causation is regularity is still today the most widely held opinion among philosophers.
That doesn't avoid Cartesian dualism (in folk metaphysics especially), though.
Re an actual/potential distinction somehow solving how mind interacts with matter (where we're assuming Cartesian dualism), that is a good example of the subjectivity of explanations being sufficient. Somehow, to you, an actual/potential distinction helps solve that problem. If I assume Cartesian dualism (as much as I can try to make any sense of it, given that in my view the very idea of nonphysical existents is incoherent), I have no idea how actual/potential would solve the interaction problem, so that wouldn't be a sufficient explanation in my opinion. But what counts as a sufficient explanation is subjective.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't find it plausible that you'd say that differences can be sensed but not similarities. All the same things would go for both. For example, either you're attending to a similarity or difference at the same or at different times (so that you either have to rely on memory or not). They both require comparison, etc.
How would we know with certainty that it's not necessary connection?
Wait, first, "we don't know anything with certainty" doesn't gel well with "Hume is very certain about causation," does it?
He is certain that all we know about causation is regularity. I should have said that he is very clear about causation. Surely you can remember and employ the principle of charity when you are discussing philosophy.
First, we've dismissed Cartesian dualism, so there is no premise of "nonphysical existents". We have no division between physical and non-physical in that sense, so there is no division between mind and matter, therefore no interaction problem. Comprehend?
And knowledge-wise, what prohibits us from knowing necessary connection? A billard ball hits another at a particular velocity, etc., and the struck ball reacts with another particular velocity. The difference between knowing that that is a "regularity" and a "necessary connection" is?
Quoting Jamesk
Sure, are you capable of that when you read and respond to my comments?
Well, we didn't dismiss it in "folk metaphysics,"
If you mean outside of that, who are we talking about, where was the dismissal, what exactly was it, etc.?
Can you give an example of something that is metaphysically necessary? Something that 'must' be the case in all possible worlds? Or something that absolutely could not be the case?
Are you going to answer my question after I answer yours? (And in a way that I consider an answer to it, unless you're fine considering this question an answer to your questions, since I do.)
If so, I'll answer your questions in another way, too.
Did you reply to my post without reading it? As I said in that post:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
To accept Aristotelian dualism rather than Cartesian dualism, is to dismiss the latter. For various reasons, the two are incompatible.
How are you seeing those as incompatible?
Let's say we divide the world into matter and mind.
Why can't there be actual and potential with respect to both matter and mind, active and passive with respect to both matter and mind, being and becoming with respect to both matter and mind?
You can invoke Newton's laws of physics all you want but Newton himself said that all he is doing is telling us what is happening, not why it is happening. We can understand what gravity does but we don't know how it works or why.
So we're saying, without proof, that maybe it could be otherwise--maybe when A happens, B wouldn't have to happen, right?
Or if that's not right, we can clarify the distinction better.
We start with one whole, "reality". We either divide this whole according to the two categories of mind and matter, or we divide this whole according to the two categories of passive and active. The two ways of dividing are incompatible unless we equate mind with passive or active, and matter with the other. But, as I explained, this equation cannot be made in Aristotle's dualism. Therefore the two are incompatible.
What's the reason you couldn't logically have passive or active mind, as well as passive or active matter?
So In Aristotle, there is passive and active intellect (which someone could easily parse as mind in a nonphysical sense) and passive and active material states (which someone could easily parse as material/physical stuff in the contemporary sense).
Not that you have to agree with the above, by the way, but let's get into why, on your view, you couldn't logically have passive or active mind, as well as passive or active matter?
If there is even the slightest possibility of there being another outcome then the outcome was not necessary.
Sure. Do we know if there was a possibility of there being another outcome?
I can agree that "substance" itself is a questionable term.
I guess what I'm looking for is the the term we should use to refer to that constant that allows everything to interact and establish causal relationships between what we call "mind" and "matter". In this sense "mind" and "matter" are not the "primary substance", rather they are arrangements of the "primary substance".
Quoting Terrapin Station
Exactly! Does this not imply that process is the "primary substance" (monism) and that matter and mind are simply different types of processes? Matter and mind are simply different arrangements of the "primary substance". "Process" and "information" are two terms I find useful in referring to that constant I just wrote about.
I don't understand. Your mind is composed of your sensory representations. What is your mind without them? Ideas, knowledge, beliefs, language - all are composed of sensory representations. What use is a mind without senses? Starfish and jellyfish seem to have senses without mind (no central nervous system). Can mind exist without senses?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Everything you experience is in the past. Your mind is in the past. Your mind is always a process of memory (working memory). I think your notion of "mind" is incorrect and incoherent and is what is leading to your misunderstanding.
Well, I'm a physicalist/materialist. I don't believe that mind is anything other than matter/processes and relations of matter--just like everything else is. In my view, the only thing mysterious about this is that some people think it's mysterious.
I don't at all agree with that. What would be the support of it?
I meant metaphysically possible. That means possible in at least one possible world. I am not saying that I agree with this or the use of possible worlds for thought experiments. But in philosophy for some thing to be metaphysically necessary it must be so in all possible worlds. Seeing as we can only imagine these other worlds all we have as a tool is our conceptions.
Okay, but I think all of that has problems. Being able to conceive something simply means being able to imagine it, at least "kinda"--often those imaginings have pretty fuzzy or fudged or sloppy details. We can imagine everything we come up with in fictions, for example. But I don't at all believe that a lot of that stuff is really possible. The Invisible Man and Godzilla and vampires and zombies and Superman and wise-cracking bunnies and Jupiter like it is at the end of 2001 etc. etc.--that stuff is just fantasy. Would it all be impossible? I don't know, but certainly the fact that we can imagine it doesn't imply that it would be possible. (And frankly, I think the treatment of it as being possible just because we can imagine it is simply another sympton of philosophy having a bizarre blind spot when it comes to dealing with fictions. Fictions are pretty simple, but philosophy insists on treating fictions as if they're something other than just "things we can imagine.")
I think that "possible world" talk is problematic in general, by the way. It's certainly worth trying to get down to brass tacks re just what it amounts to for something to be possible but not actualized, assuming that's not just a fantasy, period, but "possible world" talk tends to go off track very quickly in my view.
I also think it's very problematic to say that "what it is for something to be metaphysically necessary is that it's so in all possible worlds." That's problematic due to the nature of possible world talk in general--including the above, that simply being able to imagine or fantasize about something in no way entails that what we're imagining is possible (in any way other than being possible to imagine as we are)--but also because it seems to me, intuitively, that "metaphyiscally necessary" should be able to peg that something was necessary in the given "possible world" that it occurred in.
"Sensory representations" is only a part of what's in the mind. There are also memories and anticipations. I agree that it doesn't make sense to talk about a mind existing without senses, but it also doesn't make sense to say that a "mind is composed of sensory representations".
Quoting Harry Hindu
This is most obviously wrong. Things anticipated are in your mind, and not in your past. So it is incorrect to reduce the mind to memory as you do here. And if this is really the basis of your judgement that my notion of "mind" is incorrect and incoherent, it appears like you have things reversed, because your notion of mind is obviously incorrect.
I'm a physicalist/materialist, but my view isn't a "belief in physics" per se.
Among the big problems for me with the "God" side of things is that in my view the idea of a nonphysical existent can't even be made coherent, and I find pretty much all of the metaphysical aspects of religious beliefs--the details re various religions, to be absurd. That was only exacerbated by the fact that I wasn't at all socialized into any religious beliefs. I wasn't aware of that stuff at all, really, until I was well into my teens. By that point it was if I had learned that the Star Wars films are in fact meant as historical dramas about extremely long-living aliens, with one of them creating us as their ongoing doctoral dissertation on the social effects of a particular mutation of midichlorians. Imagine suddenly learning that a lot of people believe that. You'd think they were bonkers. That's just how I parse religious beliefs. It's just as much a "You believe what?!? You can't be serious" affair for me.
And the other, crucial, ingredient, is reason.
[quote=Edward Feser]As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, intellect is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal). It is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images (such as a visual mental image of what your mother looks like, an auditory mental image of what your favorite song sounds like, a gustatory mental image of what pizza tastes like, and so forth); and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body (such as a visual experience of the computer in front of you, the auditory experience of the cars passing by on the street outside your window, the awareness you have of the position of your legs, etc.).[/quote]
From here.
Reason, logical inference, and the like, cannot be understood in terms of physical interactions or things. It inheres solely in the relationship of ideas. Even to argue about or define what the physical is requires the appeal to logic and rational inference. And the intellect is the faculty which grasps those relationships, which are universal in nature; which is why they can’t be material things, because material things are particular, unless they’re a type; but it is their very belonging to a type, which enables the intellect to understand them.
Oh yeah, forgot about that one. Ha, ha, Harry had me so focused on the things within the mind, that I forgot about the most important thing, the thing which makes it possible for there to be things in the mind in the first place.
The debate here is really whether substance is primary or emergent. I am saying monism doesn't work, and neither does dualism. The simplest possible workable metaphysics is triadic - the kind in which substantial being, or actuality, is emergent from a developmental process of becoming.
And this kind of self-organising systems approach is what we find as our best current scientific answer. Aristotle got it early on. Peirce picked up the threads in a modern way. And science makes sense of both mind and matter in terms of self-organising systems these days.
Quoting Harry Hindu
You are trying hard to make monism work. And it kind of does work if the "one thing" is the idea of a developmental process in which a fundamental instability becomes emergently self-regulating so as to produce comparatively stable being.
So there is one basic thing. Nature. The cosmos. Physical existence. But it is a systemic process. A logic of development and emergent order. And it thus has an irreducible complexity that can be most simply described in terms of three moving parts. In other words, the form of a hierarchy.
Jumping ahead to the physics, this is exactly how the science has panned out. You can see it everywhere. The Planck scale is defined by just three constants - c, G and h - bound in reciprocal relations to breath measurable existence into space, time and energy. The cosmos is described in terms of its triadic hierarchical structure - a quantum microscale, a relativistic macroscale, and then the good old solid and substantial classical scale that emerges between these two systematic limits.
The very shape of physics expresses a triadic metaphysics.
So the big mistake is to look for a monism without internal complexity. The simplest possible metaphysics that makes sense in actual descriptions of the world is a monism - a presumption of a closed system with all its causality bound up within itself - in which there are enough internal parts in play to explain the emergence of complex stable structure. And hierarchical organisation is the simplest model of a complex system.
Once you can count to three in metaphysical terms, then dualism or twoness becomes a lot less psychologically threatening to your worldview. You get to have your monism - a monism of one world - but a monism with the necessary complexity to describe a world with internal systematic order and a history of growth and development. Ie: The story modern science again tells since the discovery of the Big Bang~Heat Death developmental arc of our own universe.
So as Peirce laid it out so nicely, existence is a tale of three developmental stages.
You have the primacy of a Firstness or Vagueness - the chaotic initial conditions that is a realm of fluctuations without order or dimension, and thus a state of maximum possible symmetry (or sameness, or indifference - the two being synonymous).
Then if you have a symmetry which is a state of maximal disorder, then you can have the symmetry-breaking which is the phase transition to some new state of regulating order. You have Secondness or duality in which an asymmetry breaks out, allowing the new thing of relationships. You have the emergence of a globally regular difference between parts and wholes, figures and grounds, events and contexts.
Or in terms of Big Bang physics, you get the symmetry-breaking in which local microscopic particles are reacting energetically with each other within the background of a relatively thermally empty spacetime vacuum. You get that vital distinction between events and contexts which yield the further thing of some actual possibility of a history. The past becomes a thing as an accumulation of all the little accidents that define the present. The future also becomes a thing as all the little accidents or degrees of freedom that remain unconstrained and so living possibilities - actions to be dissipated.
In short, from the total disorder of a vagueness, we get the emergence of a dualistic difference between the many aspects of being. There is the concrete difference between the past and the future, the void and its events, the laws of physics and the accidents provided by degrees of freedom.
And because all these "dualities" are actually asymmetries - the product of taking possibilities to their opposing or reciprocal limits - they are really nascent hierarchical structure. As the universe expands and cools, it becomes ever more cleanly separated into its local play of hot events against an empty and inactive void. The bland radiation bath of the Big Bang clears to become a structure of moving particles in a spacetime vacuum.
The classical realm that we then see as substantial is the bit that emerges right in the middle - where enough crud gets lumped together in a shared inertial frame to lose its quantum indeterminacy and behave how we expect canonical substance to behave. Gas clouds can gravitationally clump to form fusion stars. Stars become factories of heavy atoms. Crud at a higher level of self-stable organisation, which eventually gets clumped into planets and spawns further developmental possibilities like symbolically structured life and mind.
So monism - if it is understood in the usual reductionist fashion of finding something primary, a material root to existence - is always going to fail. It didn't ever work as metaphysics. And science has proved it fails as an approach to modelling nature.
The first step out of monism was always dualistic in being some kind of ur-story of reciprocality or symmetry breaking. You need two to tango. And that is why metaphysics was born out of the logic of dialectical reasoning. The modern scientific understanding of existence got going once metaphysics had nutted out all the useful dialectical distinctions - the unities of opposites - like atom~void, discrete~continuous, matter~form, flux~stasis, chance~necessity, one~many, mind~world, and so on.
The mistake then is get stuck with this oppositional stage of metaphysical thought - to do what these kinds of threads always do and obsess about "fixing things" by getting back to some kind of monism. Or worse yet, to enshrine a dualism of substances.
So if the metaphysics winds up in an opposition of the ideal and the material, then the choices are a) argue for materialism, b) argue for idealism, c) argue for the separate and disjoint reality of both of these realms of being.
But all this is standard issue "theology". A legacy of the scientific revolution colliding with the Church. Folk took sides on something 600 years ago and have not escaped the confines of that debate ever since.
There was always another alternative - the one that the Ancient Greeks already expressed and which modern science has again arrived at. And this is the triadic or hierarchical systems view. Existence is a process. Systematic order is what naturally develops from unbound chaos. We now have testable mathematical models of this kind of reality creating organisation. The emergence of substantial being via phase transitions or symmetry-breaking is just a routine thing for scientific theory these days.
So maybe we have the odd thing of modern science - as a systems view - clashing culturally with the received "classical materialist" physics that has become the new folk orthodoxy. Materialism has become the secular theology. Everyone then wants to show they are on the right side by "eliminating" anything that questions their ardent monism. It becomes impossible to understand the scientific revolution that took place in the 20th century because they are still locked in mental combat with 16th century theological doctrine.
I think mind or spirit is usually imagined (to reverse Peirce's metaphor) as a kind of effete matter, an attenuated ineffectual matter that, because it is not governed by physical laws, cannot have physical effects. So it must, rather than interacting with matter, run parallel with matter, per Spinoza.
So such a notion is coherent, insofar as it is logically possible and imaginable. But this leaves us with the notorious interaction problem. That it leaves us with this problem is itself a problem, and also it can be criticized on the grounds that it does not, in fact cannot, provide us with any cogent explanation of anything ( which of course is a corollary of the interaction problem).
The only thing in its favour is that it appeals to our feelings, imagination and intuition. It is (or at least may be) an eminently poetic, that is to say affective, idea. People may be divided into two primary groups; those who have (or allow themselves to have) such feelings, imaginations and intuitions and those who don't. Those who do can then be further divided into those whose discursive thinking about the nature of nature is affected by those feelings, imaginations and intuitions, and those whose thinking about the nature of nature is not.
It's all pretty subjective really!
Re the idea of it being coherent, it just seems like a set of words to me. What would "matter not subject to physical laws" be, exactly? Where would we find it? Why wouldn't it be subject to physical laws?
I have no difficulty imagining it, and since it, as imagined, does not interact with physical matter (or at least its interaction is unimaginable) I wouldn't expect to "find it" anywhere. It wouldn't be subject to physical laws because that is how it has been imagined.
Think of the popular idea of ghosts that, for example, simply pass through physical matter. Of course imagining them as being seen is inconsistent, unless you posit that seeing itself is (or at least some kinds of seeing are) something more than a merely physical interaction.
What about those of us who believe that it being so subjective is the reason why the freedoms of the imagination must be regulated by the discipline of acts of measurement?
Peirce, after all, was the founder of Pragmatism. We conjecture and then we test. It works out pretty well as history has shown.
Quoting Janus
That's exactly what you want to avoid. You must arrive at a duality that retains an interaction - which is indeed being generated from the start by that interaction.
So if you employ any form of words that arrives at a conclusion of two disconnected realms, you already know you took a wrong turn. You have managed to trip yourself up along the way.
The right approach is always a reciprocal relation, and hence dialectical or dichotomistic. The weakening of the one aspect is by definition the strengthening of the other.
You could argue that the discrete is "maximally effete continuity". But then also that continuity is "maximally attentuated discreteness". Thus each pole is linked to the other by the third thing of a spectrum. You can have strong continuity to the degree you can have weak discreteness, and vice versa.
This makes perfect sense for robust metaphysical dichotomies, like discrete~continuous, flux~stasis, chance~necessity, matter~form, and so on.
But it fails for mind~matter. And that is telling. It means a wrong turn got made and we should simply give up a dichotomy that doesn't actually work as a dichotomy should.
Now self~world can work as a dichotomy - one describing the epistemology of neurocognition, for example. We experience the world as "other" to precisely the degree that we also experience "being a self". All day long, we can be so engrossed in the flow of the habitual that the distinction is highly situated an enactive. We can chew our food, not bite off our tongue, and never see any big deal. While at other times we can step back and think about ourselves as "conscious beings" in a "material world", or some similar culturally-useful, socially-pragmatic, dichotomy.
But standard issue dualism - the theistic kind - has just failed as metaphysics because it made a very wrong step and wound up with a disconnected pair of parallel realms.
This doesn't say there is some actual hard problem that must confound science and everyone else. It just says you guys did some bad metaphysical modelling. For social reasons, you pushed a line that broke the sound rules of systems thinking. Go back and start again. Look for the triadic complexity which allows two poles to be each others' "other" in transparent and obvious fashion.
But see that's not coherent to me. I don't think that the idea of existents with no location makes any sense really.
With ghosts, yeah, they'd need to have a location, too, and then we have to just kind of go, "Well, they're a bit like invisible people that can pass through items that normally we can't pass through" without thinking about the details of how that would work very much, where we pretend that somehow being able to see and hear and think doesn't inherently depend on having particular body parts, etc.
In regards to De Anima, that parsing would be incorrect as the "mind" is on both sides of the intellectual perception. That is why understanding is "the being becoming what it is" before the one who understands.
Cartesian duality only has the mind on one side; There is the one who knows and the known thing that is not the one who knows.
Well, I should have said I wouldn't expect to find it anywhere but in the imagination.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Sure, but the thing is we don't know for sure that being able to see, hear and think depends inherently on having certain body parts. We can't imagine how it would be possible to see or hear physical phenomena without possessing physical senses, but if to see something non-physical were just like thinking (which we can at least imagine to be independent of physicality) then there would be no problem involved in seeing or hearing ghosts or any non-physical phenomena.
Of course, none of this supposed non-physical stuff can be modeled because all our modeling is in terms of physicality, of mechanical processes. That doesn't mean any of this is impossible; it might be but we can't know. All we do know is that it is not logically (which is to say "imaginatively") impossible.
"Must be regulated" for what or whose purpose?
So as to close the loop of reason and stop the endless torrent of bullshit that otherwise tends to flow.
There is no doubt there are a lot of disputes about what Aristotle is exactly saying but the writer is being a poor reader by not putting the question in the context of what Aristotle said quite clearly elsewhere in the book:
431b20. "Now summing up what has been said about the soul, let us say again that the soul is in a way all existing things; for existing things are either objects of perception or objects of thoughts, and knowledge is in a way the objects of knowlege and perception the objects of perception. How this is so we must inquire."
431b24. "Knowledge and perception are divided to correspond to their objects, the potential to the potential, the actual to the actual. In the soul that which can perceive and that which can know are potentially these things, the one the object of knowledge, the other the object of perception. These must be either the things in themselves or their forms. Not the things in themselves; for it is not the stone which is in the soul, but its form. Hence the soul is as the hand is; for the hand is a tool of tools, and the intellect is a form of forms and sense a form of objects of perception."
De Anima, Chapter 8, translated by D.W. Hamlyn.
No such unambivalent definition of what constitutes doing philosophy is universally accepted; the minimum requirement is that you provide argument or explanation for what you want to assert or even what you merely want to allow as a possibility, and that your argument or explanation not be self-contradictory.
You could have these, but this implies that your primary division is passive/active rather than mind/matter. Analysis will indicate that you have no division between mind and matter. See, mind and matter are each divided by passive/active. This means that mind and matter have commonality, they both partake in passive, and they both partake in active, active/passive being the primary division. This implies that mind and matter are not actually divided, they are together in the passive and together in the active. Therefore you do not have a primary division between mind and matter. if you start with a primary division of mind and matter, and say that they are each passive and each active, you simply negate your division of mind/matter when you attempt to uphold the passive/active division.
Hence the wisdom of collective rationality as epistemic best practice. If we agree how to measure something, then we can lift ourselves out of our individual ignorance.
Quoting Janus
Sure. Philosophy would appear more tolerant. And having been pushed to the sidelines by the overwhelming success of scientific/pragmatic rationalism, it may indeed have turned to celebrating whatever social kudos it can cling on to. Flirting with irrationality and romanticism is a traditionally approved alternative. Academics can wander off and play that game too.
But when it comes to metaphysics, anything else but a pragmatic systems approach is going to be a waste of time.
Quoting Janus
But this is just aping the form of reasoned thought. By failing to agree on acts of measurement, you are just going to risk producing theories that are "not even wrong".
You seem happy with dualism and so you won't be too troubled that you are arguing for an epistemology that holds up a lack of interaction between the self and the world as an acceptable thing. It seems fine that a mind would invent a few syntactical rules and spin out the resulting logical patterns in "non self-contradicting" fashion. That's all minds do. Noodle away without a worldly purpose.
But consistent with my own meta-metaphysics, I insist on the primacy of there being some damn global point to the exercise. And acts of measurement - the ability to read the truths of the world in terms of a rational language of signs - is that bridge of interaction that connects our minds to reality.
The specificity of the measurement is what anchors the generality of the conception. Anything else is mindless free-wheeling.
Of course, metaphysics has its sacred spot at the centre of knowledge as it is focused on rational generalisation. It is always seeking to broaden the space of our conceptions. And thus metaphysics is still valuable to the degree it can be applied to the current frontiers of scientific thought. Especially in terms of mathematical explorations, we can hope to free-form our way beyond what we currently can conceive to measure.
Scientific advance is sold as working the other way round. First the troubling data, then the sweeping theoretical insight. But philosophy of science has exposed how much it is the other way around. A lot of practical difficulties with current theory has to accumulate. Then we notice that the facts never did exactly fit. And we are able to notice this having some even more general conception ... together with the even more highly specified measurements that the conception entails.
These days physics has boiled down to the measurement of entropy. And even information.
What we think we are measuring says everything about how we are conceiving reality. And this rolling revolution of thought is being advanced by scientists. When it comes to free-wheeling metaphysics, they are the least constrained by traditional thinking.
Lovers of the poetic can moan all they like, but metaphysics just ain't their strength. That kind of creativity is about the social and cultural sphere. And to the degree it can express concrete theories of how to live, then it gets tested by folk who try to live that way.
Does thinking like hippy, for instance, work as a social formula, a self-organising and self-perpetuating form of life? Does thinking like an existentialist, a romantic, a punk, or whatever? It does all come back to pragmatics even there.
Quoting Wayfarer
Memories and anticipations, AND the process of reasoning, are composed of colors, shapes, sounds, feelings, etc. ie sensory representations. What form does your anticipation take if not a visual of some future event? How do you know that you're reasoning at all if your reasoning doesn't take some form? What would you be reasoning about?
There is nothing about memory that restricts it to being in, or about, the past. Memory is simply information storage. There are different types of memory. Computers also have memory and are capable of making predictions/simulations/anticipations (they're the same thing) within their working memory. Memory can contain information about the past, near-present, or future. Is your mind presently attending the sunset as it happens in the near-past, or attending a more distant past sunset when you kissed your girlfriend, or attending a future sunset when you ask her to marry you? Memory can never contain information about the present as a result of how causation works. Effects are not their causes just as sensory representations are not the things they represent. The present will always be a prediction/anticipation/simulation.
Reasoning is simply following logical rules for thinking (processing information). Computers can do that to.
Yeah, except I am not a dualist. I don't have a settled metaphysical position at all. I get that you do and that's fine...for you; so I can also agree that all your explanations are fine and dandy...for you (and anyone else who feels convinced by them).
For me philosophy is about explicating the possibilities and finding out where the inconsistencies are, what the presuppositions in any position are and identifying the purely affective motivations in thought and acknowledging them as such while not rejecting their importance.
Materialism doesn't leave much room for God. Dualism creates a problem of coherence. Idealism however makes sense because it allows you to keep God and be scientific at the same time.
My conviction is that ‘the real’ as pursued or understood by philosophy proper cannot be something known to science. And it’s also not something captured in the net of religious dogma, although it has a religious dimension. (It’s precisely on account of this that moderns will generally react against it.)
In any case, the reason why the truth pursued by philosophy cannot be known to science, as now understood, is precisely because science deals only in terms of the measurable, and mathematical predictions which start from and terminate in that. Whereas, all classical philosophies accomodate the immeasurable (Buddhism has four.) Such philosophies don’t necessarily, again, try and clothe the immeasurable in dogma (I suppose the image of throwing a cloth over a spectre comes to mind!) But they sense that which is ‘beyond measure’ and orient us with respect to it, in their different ways. And the reason why this can’t be matter for science, is because it - although there really is no ‘it’ - is ever-changing. It’s as if we, as human organisms, are uniquely able to intuit that truth, in a particular state of being - and indeed that ‘intuition of being’ is the consummation of philosophy.
[quote=Aristotle]1. [1177a11] But if happiness [??????????] consists in activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be activity in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be the virtue of the best part of us. Whether then this be the Intellect [????], or whatever else it be that is thought to rule and lead us by nature, and to have cognizance of what is noble and divine, either as being itself also actually divine, or as being relatively the divinest part of us, it is the activity of this part of us in accordance with the virtue proper to it that will constitute perfect happiness; and it has been stated already* that this activity is the activity of contemplation [?????????].[/quote]
The Nicomachean Ethics.
Silly post. If the device on which this is being written depends on the existence of numbers then numbers must be in the device for which it depends, just as this same device depends on electricity and wouldn't function without it, even with the existence of numbers (a program). You also wouldn't function without electricity.
If numbers are real, then they have causal powers. If they have causal powers then they have a location. From where and when was the cause - your mind, my mind, someone else's mind?
Oh, and philosophy is a science. The conclusions of one domain of investigation should not contradict those of another. ALL knowledge must be integrated.
No, these things are not "composed" of sensory representations. In fact, my anticipation is more like a void of such, a nothingness, where I feel there should be something. It's this feeling that something is going to occur, but not knowing exactly how to picture it which causes anxiety. When I have anxiety, and no idea why, it's like a hole, a void within, which leads to this nagging feeling that something bad is about to happen.
Furthermore, with respect to reasoning, it is impossible to reduce the act of reasoning to the things reasoned about. One is the activity, the other, the things which are active. Consider shuffling a deck of cards. You cannot describe the act of shuffling, as "composed" of the cards themselves. This would be a complete misunderstand of the act of shuffling, which is carried out by the hands which shuffle, rather than the cards themselves. The cards are what is shuffled.
Quoting Harry Hindu
This is completely wrong. Memory is restricted to being about the past, that's what the word means, it relates to things remembered. If you are using "memory" in some other way, then it's a foreign word to us. When a computer makes a prediction, it is not the memory which is making the prediction. This paragraph is all wrong.
Idealism that's not positing non-physical existents?
No idea how what you quoted beneath this should have been reflected, in your opinion, in the Wikipedia excerpt I quoted.
And "quite clearly" is not a description I'd use. :razz:
"For sure" isn't something I ever worry about. I think it's very misconceived to worry about certainty. I think we know that being able to see, hear, etc. depends inherently on having certain body parts as much as we can know anything. That's good enough.
Quoting Janus
If anyone can imagine that so that it's coherent, they sure aren't able to express what they're imagining to me so that it makes any sense at all.
Quoting Janus
All that tells us is that per the rules of the logic game as we've set those rules up, it doesn't entail a contradiction. But that doesn't actually tell us much at all.
But that's what I was saying. In other words someone could parse "intellect" as "mind"
I'm not saying we have any good intersubjectively shareable reason to believe otherwise, but that we should recognize the belief for what it is; something we simply cant help taking for granted given our everyday experience.
Quoting Terrapin Station
The existence of and widespread adherence to idealism shows that many folk have had no problem coherently imagining it.
Quoting Terrapin Station
The " rules of the logic game" are determined by what we can coherently imagine; what else? So that's what they tell us; what the limits of the human imagination are.
I've certainly run into people who have claimed that the notion of "obtaining contradictories" makes sense to them, and they seemed to be talking about the idea of contradictions in the standard conception of them, but I never could figure out myself how it made sense to them. Of course, I can't figure out how idealism or many other things make sense to anyone either.
It seems contradictory to say that "obtaining contradictories" make sense; the very idea of 'contradictory' seems to mean something like 'doesn't make sense'. So maybe those people you refer to have a strange and different definition of 'contradictory'.
Also how could a contradictory "obtain'; has anyone given you an example of one of those? Something like 'it was both day and night at the same location at the same time the other day'; would that be an "obtaining contradictory"?
So, you might not be able to figure out how idealism makes sense to anyone, but you should at least be able to see that it involves no "obtaining contradictories" and is thus in a quite different category than your friends' strange claims.
They didn't seem to be using "contradictory" any differently. The point is simply that just because something seems coherent to someone else, that doesn't imply that it's going to seem coherent to you. They'd have to do work to make it seem coherent to you.
Do you acknowledge that 'contradictory' means 'doesn't make sense'? If they are using that definition then they are saying that something that doesn't make sense makes sense; but how could that make sense?
Of course, people can say whatever they like. I could tell you I saw a square circle the other day in the park. You can make sense of the words at least.
No, I'm not referring to "doesn't make sense" for "contradictory.". I'm simply referring to unequivocal assertion and negation: p & ~p. "The cat is on the mat" and "The cat is not on the mat," without equivocating.
Nonsense; you can for example memorize formulae.
It's a contradiction and incoherent on my view to say that both x and not-x could obtain unequivocally.
But you haven't said why it is "a contradiction and incoherent". Also, what does it mean to say that something is a contradiction and/or incoherent beyond saying it doesn't make sense? What's the difference, in other words?
Right, and when you have them memorized, and are capable of recalling them, weren't they necessarily given to you in the past. Therefore the memory of them is about the past, when they were given to you and you memorized them.
No, the ability to memorize a formula may have been acquired in the past, but it does not follow from that that the memory of the formula is about the past. From the past, not about the past: see the difference?
It's a contradiction because that's the standard definition of contradiction:
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contradiction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_noncontradiction
And yeah, incoherent--it doesn't make sense, it's unintelligible
I wasn't asking for the standard dictionary definition of contradiction, but asking you to consider why you believe that contradictions cannot obtain. Isn't it because you cannot imagine a contradiction obtaining, and isn't that same as to say that a contradiction obtaining doesn't make sense. Isn't 'making sense' about the senses (the visual in particular) and what can be visualized? You say the cat both on and not on the mat makes no sense, is a contradiction and is incoherent because you cannot visualize such a state of affairs, wouldn't you agree?
Okay--you had said, "Do you acknowledge that 'contradictory' means 'doesn't make sense'?" and then you asked, "Why is it a contradiction."
I answered, no, contradiction in the connotation I'm talking about doesn't mean "doesn't make sense," and then I gave you the definition I'm using, since you asked "Why is it a contradiction" after I gave you an example. (It's a contradiction because that's the definition of contradiction--"p & ~p")
And yeah, I believe that contradictions can't obtain for the same reason that I believe that nonphysical existents and God and the like can't obtain. They're incoherent/don't make sense/are unintelligible/etc.
And sure, that has to do with "visualizing" if we're using that term broadly/figuratively (in addition to literally).
Yes, that's what it comes down to. So do you believe people when they tell you they can visualize contradictories obtaining? Would you believe me if i told you I could visualize a square circle, or the cat both on and not on the mat? It's not merely a difference of opinion at all, is it?
If it's from the past, then it relates to the past, and is therefore "about", meaning "concerning" the past. Consider that at that time in the past, you may have memorized the correct formula, or you may have memorized the incorrect formula. So whether the formula you remember is correct or incorrect is related to that past activity. And, whether the formula you remember is correct or incorrect is something "about" that memory.
No. And likewise, I don't believe people when they tell me that they can visualize nonphysical existents, either.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I was responding to the discussion of whether the Cartesian duality of mind/body was the same or not as the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter. So, yes "intellect" can be parsed as "mind" but the difference between usages is important regarding how perception is said to happen. I quoted from Aristotle in response to the wiki article to make the difference sharper.
Aristotle is closer to your statement that physical things are "directly" perceived than Descartes in that the difference between the one who perceives and the object perceived are not presented as fundamentally different kinds of beings. While it is noted that "it is not the stone which is in the soul, but its form", the stone is not less real as a consequence.
In regards to your position of "direct perception", I don't see it framed as a difference between ideas and matter but conflicting models of causality. The model for the mind and the model for the rocks have to converge in this direct perception that you refer to. How does that work now that you have thrown out previous attempts at the question? I am not asking a rhetorical question. It is what I cannot understand when you present your position to be a physicalist and a nominalist.
But I think the question is much more interesting when you ask whether such things as numbers, logical laws, and scientific principles exist. In one sense, they obviously do – anyone who can count knows what numerical symbols stand for, and also what scientific principles such as the laws of motion, f=ma, for example, mean.
But the question can be asked, in what sense do numbers, principles, and the like exist? I mean, you can’t really point to a number – if you point to ‘7’, what you’re pointing at is a symbol, not a number per se, which could just as easily be represented by another symbol, such as VII or ‘seven’. And while the symbol is physical, the actual number is an idea, that can only be grasped by a mind capable of counting. Or in the case of a scientific principle, it can only be demonstrated by measurement and observation, but again relying on reasoned inference and language in order to either demonstrate or understand.
And the same can be said of all manner of logical and syntactical relationships which thought continually employs to ‘make sense’ of the environment. What is the nature of those types of things? In what sense do they exist? Are they physically existent in the same way that phenomena are?
I think the case can be made that they’re not; that they inhere wholly and solely in the form of the relationships of ideas. You might say that they’re therefore dependent on the physical brain, but that relationship between idea and brain is analogous to that between numbers and their symbolic representation. We will say that ideas are ‘in here’, pointing to our head, but that is surely metaphorical, as you don’t literally find ideas in brains; they belong to a different order to the neurological.
The sophisticated hominid forebrain is certainly necessary to grasp abstract ideas, but it’s another matter to say that this implies a relationship of ontological dependence of ideas on neurons. After all, if the brain is injured, it will sometimes reconfigure itself so as to compensate for the injury by re-purposing other areas of the brain to process language or perform some other task than what is usually associated with that region. And that is suggestive of a ‘top-down’ relationship between mind and brain (rather than the ‘bottom up’ causal chain that is implied by the strictly physicalist account).
My view is that the way that we think about what is physical, what is real, and what exists, has become confused in modern philosophy, mainly as a result of the aftermath of Cartesian philosophy married to physical reductionism. It forces us to think through particular kinds of metaphors or tropes which only encompass certain kinds of sensibility. As a consequence, many will believe that only physical things are real, but quite what ‘physical’ means is still an open question. It is the expression of a cultural mind-set. (This is one of the themes of Jacques Maritain’s essay, The Cultural Impact of Empiricism, an Aristotelian critique of empiricism.)
The Aristotelian position is that all physical things, animate and inanimate, consist of the dual aspects, matter and form. So unless you equate form with mind, and get into some type of panpsychism, Cartesian duality and Aristotelian duality are quite distinct.
Yes, that is what I am trying to argue.
But I had not thought of panpsychism as something that could further muddy the waters.
What a tangled web we weave.
I don't understand what you mean by "void". There is a void when you're unconscious. You only anticipate when you are unconscious?
The fact that you can even describe what it is like to anticipate means that your anticipation takes some form. You say that you have anxiety, which is a feeling - a form. Can you ever anticipate something good? What would it feel like to anticipate something good? How would you be able to distinguish between anticipating something bad and something good?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
MU, can you shuffle with just your hands? You would be shuffling your hands, and in that case, would it be your arms doing the shuffling of your hands? Your hands are doing the action to the object. It just so happens that your hands are an object to. Your mind is processing the information. No information - no processing. How would you describe the process of reasoning without reasoning taking some form? How do you know that you are reasoning?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Now you are just speaking from total ignorance. You need to educate yourself on all the different types of memory. Here's a start:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/working%20memory
Working memory: memory that involves storing, focusing attention on, and manipulating information for a relatively short period of time (such as a few seconds).
The prediction happens in memory. Information has to be stored in working memory to be worked with. A computer or a human being can't work with long-term memory. Information is recalled from long-term memory to work on in working memory. This is how you can recall the past and think (process information) about the past in the present moment. This isn't much different than loading a video from your hard drive into RAM so that you can watch it. If you don't know much about computers, it seems like you are watching the video from your hard drive, but the hard drive is just another type of memory - long-term. Everything that happens on your computer screen is happening in working memory (RAM).
If you don't have a basic understanding of how a computer works, then you aren't going to understand. The computer is the best metaphor for the mind that we've had since we've started thinking about what the mind is.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm an identity theorist. I don't think it's that ideas are just dependent on the brain. I think they're identical to (subsets of processes of) it. That's not metaphorical. It's an identity.
The divide is a perspectival or reference frame divide. It's the difference of being x versus being y and observing x (or being y and having a unique set of particular relations with x due to differences in how x and y are spatiotemporally located).
That divide is not at all unique to mind, by the way--it occurs with everything. What makes the difference there is that the divide with respect to mind is the only one in which we are in the reference frame of being x. When we're talking about bicycles and rivers and so on, we are only in the reference frame of being y and observing x. It needs to be stressed that this is an individual thing and a spatiotemporal thing. "Being x" is being a particular item, in a particular location, at a particular time.
In my view, nothing about this is at all mysterious. We don't have a blueprint of all of it, but that's not unusual. I don't know if we have a blueprint of "all of" anything, but noncontroversially, we also don't have a blueprint of all of how earthquakes work, for example--hence why it's so difficult to predict them. Not having a blueprint of all of how earthquakes work doesn't suggest to anyone that there must be something metaphysically mysterious about earthquakes, that maybe there's something nonphysical to them, whatever that would amount to. The only reason people think that sort of stuff about mind is that it's so different being x versus being y and observing x.
Physicalism implies nothing at all about "top down" or "bottom up" by the way. I'm not at all convinced that that distinction even makes any sense in this context.
Quoting Wayfarer
Not an open question on my view: it's simply referring to matter/material stuff, plus processes and relations of material stuff.
Re Aristotle, he got anything right about as often as a broken clock, and he was a horrible writer to boot.
I mean an emptiness within, a hole. Have you never experienced anxiety?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Sure, anticipation takes a form, but there are physical forms and non-physical forms, that's where dualism comes into play. A future thing, anticipated, has a form, but it's not a physical form, it's a form in the mind. The problem is that the form of the thing future is incomplete. I do not know exactly how the thing will come to be in the future, there are unknown factors, and the unknowns are the holes, the emptiness which is the root of the anxiety. Sure I anticipate many good things, and that is the root of my anticipation, looking forward to something good, but the good thing is not ensured until it actually happens. There are always imperfections in the plan, the formula, to bring it about, and these are the unknowns, the holes of anxiety. So the formula which is meant to ensure that the good thing actually happens according to plan is imperfect, it has holes, circumstances beyond my control, and this is the root of anxiety.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't see how this is relevant. The mind reasons, what you call "processing". Reasoning is not composed of "the information", as you have suggested, it simply uses information, as a tool. The information is incidental. It is even possible that the mind creates the information through observation, as is the case with AI. So information is not necessary for the existence of a mind, a mind can create its own information to reason with.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Past by "a few seconds", is past. As it is clearly the case that things sensed are in the past by the time they are acted on by the mind, even "working memory" is involved with things past. Things sensed are things past.
Yes, but I wouldn't describe it as a hole. It is something, not nothing. I would describe it as a warm feeling all around (because I start to sweat), with some tingling in the extremities and a heavy weight in my gut.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover No, no, no. Let's not go there with that physical vs. non-physical stuff. There is just a form your memories, beliefs, knowledge, language, and the way you see the world, takes. Let's just go with that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But the future can be indifferent, or neutral - neither bad or good. Anxiety occurs as a result of what future you are presently predicting. To just say, "I am anxious about bad things that can happen" is to say that you are anxious about a category. "Bad" and "good" are categories of events with each category containing specific events that are bad or good. If you are anxious about a category, then it is just a matter of changing your thinking. Put other things in your mind, like what is happening now. Be aware that good things happen as well, and that that is life - a roller coaster. Enjoy the ride of anxiety and exhilaration.
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverOf course reasoning is composed of the information. Again, what would you be reasoning about?
You have it backwards. Reasoning, just as logic, is the tool for thinking (processing information). We don't always reason. Sometimes, we are unreasonable.
How does AI "create" information? From nothing? Of course not. It doesn't create information. It processes it. "Process" is another word for "change". AI processes sensory information in order to complete some goal.
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverIn other words, the mind needs information to reason with.
An actuality that is constantly becoming never becomes and actuality. More word salad. There would just be a process of becoming. Everything collapses into monism - the simplest - naturally.
isn't that what this thread is about, that physical vs. non-physical stuff. The point is, that when I consider a form which I remember, I believe that that form had a real physical existence, in the past. But when I consider a form which I anticipate in the future, I believe that this form does not have any real physical existence. So I need a separation in my mind, a distinction between these two types of forms, the ones that I believe are directly related to physical existence, as having actual existence, and the ones that I believe are not directly related to physical existence, as having possible existence. The former are forms of actual things, and the latter are forms of possible things.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't see how that's possible. I, as a being with choice, am capable of influencing what occurs in the future. Therefore to the extend of my powers I will make sure that what occurs is good. However, due to things beyond my control bad things will happen. Bad things and good things will happen, therefore it is impossible that the future is neutral.
Quoting Harry Hindu
This is wrong. Reasoning is thinking. Therefore it is you who has things backward, not me.
Quoting Harry Hindu
AI has no "senses", therefore it has no sensations, nor sensory information. Information is patterns and AI creates patterns, therefore it creates information. Changes to patterns are a creation or destruction of information.
The problem I see is that ‘identical to’ is itself a judgement. If it were not metaphorical, you could could actually find an idea in a brain, But you would never be able to do that. Likewise you couldn’t find an idea in a book. You will find combinations of symbols, which are interpreted to mean something. But until they’re interpreted, there’s nothing meaningful in it. It doesn’t mean anything to someone who can’t read it or doesn’t understand it.
‘Identity theory’ is an example of what Maritain describes: ‘what the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients -- sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it.’ When you assert the identity of brain processes and ideas, that is what is being done - it asserts that two completely different categories of being are the same, which is a judgement, but that judgement cannot be validated with reference to anything physical.
This is empty word play being used to deny a perfectly valid distinction between memories which are of or about past events, and memories which are of things such as, for example, formulae, artworks or poems which have nothing to do with the past other than that they were encountered, and the memory of them acquired, in the past (which is no distinction at all since it is trivially true that every presently held memeory was acquired in the past).
I didn't say "You can't find an idea in a brain" though. You can find an idea in a brain, but from a third person perspective, it's not going to be the same as it is from a first-person perspective. Again, this isn't something special to brains/minds. It's a truism about every single thing there is. Everything in the world is different from a reference frame that's not identical to the reference frame of being the thing itself, and everything is different from every different spatiotemporal reference frame.
Quoting Wayfarer
That part we agree on.
Quoting Wayfarer
Identity theory doesn't necessarily have anything to do with empiricism at all, so I'm not sure why you're bringing that up. It certainly doesn't have anything to do with any sort of "pure" empiricism, which is what that seems to be arguing against.
Quoting Wayfarer
One can assert that they're different categories or that they're the same category. Obviously we're doing two different things there. Not sure why you're pointing that out.
Quoting Wayfarer
Re that comment, I have no idea what it's saying. I don't have any idea what "validating with reference to something physical" would even be referring to.
I wouldn't say that that way, actually. I wouldn't speak for everyone else like that. But I'd say that I don't believe that nonphysicals are coherent for anyone--I'd be rather agnostic about that--unless they can plausibly demonstrate to me how to make them coherent.
Re "physical" I've defined it a number of times (and I thought I did that for you earlier, but my memory sucks sometimes). At any rate, "physical" is matter a la material stuff (not the Aristotelian sense of matter--the conventional scientific sense rather), processes of matter and relations of matter.
Quoting Janus
I don't think there needs to be a logical contradiction for something to be incoherent. It can just be hopelessly vague, nonsensical, etc.
Seeing as you have to qualify your claim that these memories have nothing to do with the past with "other than that...", and you actually recognize that it is "trivially true", that all memories were acquired in the past, your so-called "valid distinction" isn't valid at all.
Here you go again with your usual tactic of dismissing the obvious as irrelevant because it is "trivial". Once you have dismissed the obvious as irrelevant, under the false assumption that "trivial" implies "irrelevant", you then claim a principle which is contrary to the obvious, as a "valid" principle. Shame on you!
I think this is the nub. The idea of a non-physical entity is not contradictory, and impossible to visualize as a square circle is impossible to visualize; so if it is incoherent it is not incoherent in a like sense.
You say it is incoherent because it is vague or nonsensical. I can accept the 'vague" but the "nonsensical" doesn't make sense to me. I can visualize a non-physical entity as a kind of pervasive invisible presence that cannot be detected by any of the senses. The air, the atmosphere, probably used to be imagined as something like this kind of presence prior to the modern scientific understanding of it as being composed of physical particles.
Of course all present memories have been laid down in the past and future memories may be laid down in the present or in the future. The present very quickly becomes the past. All this is obvious.
The distinction between a memory which is of the past and one which is not is a perfectly valid one, and you have provided no argument to convince me otherwise. (Crying "Shame on you" is not an argument).
Well, some of that might be contradictory. You're giving just three descriptive terms there:
"pervasive"--so it's located . . . everywhere? most places? just a really wide variety of places? but per the usual doctrine, it's also not located anywhere?
"invisible"--presumably this is just saying that it's not detectable via any of the normal means, including literally visible, including our other senses, including various scientific instruments, etc.? If so, this is only a "negative" property--it's merely telling me something that nonphysical stuff is not--it's not really telling me something about what it is
and the third term is "not detected by any of the senses"--so that's maybe the same as the above, which means you're just giving two terms with respect to your conception. A negative property, which doesn't say anything about what nonphysicals actually are, and a property that seems contradictory--it's both everywhere and nowhere.
What things are in a positive sense is always given in tangible terms; in terms of what the senses can grasp. So, it is no surprise that the idea of the non-physical cannot be given is such terms; if it could it would not be an idea of a non-physical thing.
Quoting Terrapin Station
A non-physical thing might be everywhere or not, only not in a physical sense (i.e. interacting physically with physical things) which also means not in any determinate sense. But it could not be nowhere because then it could not be at all.
I'm not saying I believe in non-physical things, by the way; I have no settled opinion on the matter, as I said before.
So that's a big part of why it's incoherent. If we can't say anything about what a thing is, then it's hopelessly vague.
Quoting Janus
So that really pins it down. lol
A non-physical thing, for example an individual soul, would not be everywhere; whereas as an infinitely great non-physical thing, for example God, would be. I don't personally believe in God or individual souls, but I can see that the ideas are not incoherent, even though they must necessarily be vague.
To say something is vague is not the same as to say it is incoherent; but you don't want to acknowledge that, obviously. You acknowledge that it is only your opinion that such notions are incoherent; and that it is so on account of the fact that they are incoherent to you.
It should be no surprise then that you will not be convinced that they could be coherent for others, even though your subjectivist position demands that you acknowledge that they could be. So, I guess you'll never know.
Anyway, I've said what I have to say about it, so I won't repeat myself.
This is all irrelevant to the point I was making to Harry, which was that memories are of things past, and anticipation is of things future. Harry wanted to deny this distinction saying that some memories are not of things past. It appeared like you were supporting Harry's claim that not all memories are of the past, with the division you were making, and your claim that some memories are only "trivially" of the past.
So, the fact that we can classify memories into all different sorts, all of them of the past, is irrelevant to the point I was making. Why bring it up?
identity theory says the physical and the semantic are identical. Otherwise, what is identical to what?
I was supporting Harry's claim that not all memories are of the past. I wasn't, however, claiming that any memories are "trivially of the past", but rather that it is trivially true that all present memories have been acquired in the past, and that this does not entail that all memories are of the past.
The terminology used was "about the past", not "of the past". and I explained to you why all such memories are "about" the past here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/233608
Of course, if you now want to use "of the past", it makes little difference. "Of" means from, so if it's trivially true that all memories have been acquired in the past, then it is also trivially true that they are "of the past".
Sure, accuse me of "empty word play" again, but you are the one going around in circles, changing your terms attempting to find a way to deny the truth of what is obvious.
That's because if something isn't constantly changing/becoming, then they stop changing. There are no more change of thoughts, movement, etc. In other words, it ceases to exist. Your actuality (what it finally becomes) would actually be nothingness (non-existence).
Things that change, exist. Things that don't change, don't exist. In other words, everything that exists, exists in time.
You're confusing your forms (your sensory symbols) with what they represent. Your forms are neither physical nor non-physical. My point in this thread is that the non-physical vs. physical dichotomy is false. I've been explaining myself without using those terms. You should try it. Just talk about forms, not whether or not they are physical or not. You're making things more complicated than they need to be.
Your mother takes the same form in your memories of the past and in your predictions of the future, or else how could you say that you are remembering your mother, or predicting what your mother will do? You recognize your mother by the consistent forms you have for her (her appearance, her voice, her warm touch, her smell, etc.).
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverThe distinction comes in the action of recalling vs. not recalling. I know the difference between past and future, because I recall the past, not the future. The past is familiar. The future isn't. That is the distinction.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Come on, MU. There are countless events occurring right now that have no bearing on your happiness or suffering. Get over yourself.
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverSo then when people are unreasonable, they aren't thinking - there aren't any thoughts in their head?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A robot has senses. That is what I was talking about. If it has no senses, then information was programmed into the computer. The program is information. Our senses allow us to reprogram ourselves (learn).
Glad to be of service.
That's a hard question to answer. The non-physical existential claim. Idealism posits a non-material / mind dependency claim. Berkeley does struggle to justify spiritual substance- his equivalent to matter, as well as justifying spirits and God - his version of a substratum. He flip flops towards a position which he support with the same grounds he used to refute Locke's materialist thesis.
In his favour he never denies doing this and even points out hypocrisy just in case you missed it. The grounds he gives however are nowhere near as strong as his argument for refuting matter are.
Because he cannot explain the metaphysics of God any better than Locke can explain the metaphysics of materialism his foundation seems no stronger than Locke's.
I still think that for a true believer in an active God who also seeks scientific explanations for the world then Idealism has a certain appeal. Even for non-believers who are worried about science's unanswered questions it is very interesting.
No. It reaches an equilibrium state where the continuing dynamic change ceases to make a general difference.
You would still call yourself actually you each morning even though, for instance, all your microtubules creating the cytoskeleton of your cells will have fallen apart and rebuilt a few times during the night.
I’m taking a step back from your last post to me.
This isn’t so much to convince as it is an attempt to help you understand why physicalism can be incoherent to certain people, myself included.
Matter—hence, physical stuff—is commonly understood to be devoid of agency. By “agency” I intend the term’s commonly understood meaning of “ability to act on one’s own volition”. Metaphysically speaking, agency is neither randomness nor determinism. A billiard ball hit by another is, for example, therefore commonly understood to not have agency in how it behaves; it doesn’t decide where to go on account of its own volition but, instead, acts in deterministic manners. (By comparison, when humans and other animals are hit they will exhibit agency in their behaviors.) Matter, then, is commonly understood to be inanimate at all times—for it is devoid of agency.
If, on the other hand, one ascribes agency to matter, I then fail to see any metaphysical difference between the physicalism thus defined and the metaphysical position of animism—the latter being somewhat similar to panpsychism, an anima mundi, and so forth. But then, tmk, this would no longer be physicalism as it’s universally understood.
To sum up: Since physicalism proposes that everything is matter, and since matter is understood be devoid of agency, physicalism then upholds the complete absence of agency in the universe.
If physicalism is true, then all our awareness of agency—both personal and as it pertains to others—can only be considered an epiphenomenal illusion resulting from agency-devoid matter; more specifically, from agency-devoid brains.
Yet awareness is of itself inextricably converged with what we deem to be agency. It’s why we term living beings animate rather than inanimate—or a living brain animate and a dead brain inanimate.
As some in fact do argue, if everything is agency-devoid matter, then awareness itself can only be an illusion of animate being produced by inanimate matter—and would in truth not actually exist. This is argued not on grounds of what one is aware of but as an entailment of causal reasoning wherein the premise is that no agency can exist.
Top-down causation, after all, is a succinct means of addressing the agency of the whole over its parts. In this case, awareness’s agency over the structures of its brain; e.g., think in a certain way and one’s synapses will simultaneously, and in due measure, strengthen and become reinforced or decay and eventually vanish—this, obviously, within limits. Compliment this with awareness being itself resultant from bottom-up causation of neural interactions resulting in mind, and one does obtain a rough picture of awareness’s identity to its physical “substrata” of brain, for lack of better terms. Yet, because physicalism precludes the presence of agency, this very bottom-up + top-down approach to brain-mind relations would contradict the position of physicalism—for the bottom-up + top-down approach entails the presence of agency, i.e. of animate being, this rather than of strictly inanimate matter.
I venture that most would agree that it is awareness which ascribes truth values to all these conceptualizations and inferences. In other words, it is awareness that deems one conceptualization to be true and another one false. The faculty of so judging what is true and what is false being itself entwined with the agency of awareness.
Now, if the presence of awareness is an epistemic certainty, and if awareness entails agency (which—while intuitively true—is not that easy to philosophically evidence), this to me indicates that physicalism as just addressed is an erroneous conceptualization of reality.
So the issue here is not one of whether or not the earth beneath our feet is solid/material/physical on account of us perceiving it to so be, but one of how agency (or at least the illusion of agency) can come about if everything were to be agency-devoid matter, this as physicalism upholds.
Otherwise, without the presence of agency, one is for example left with the reality that all animate beings are actually inanimate.
This difference is why theories of perception and understanding ever appeared. However much it can or cannot be said that things ultimately are one kind of thing or another, the ontology is only helpful as a way to understand the difference. Making it all physical is interesting but will that lead to a theory where the difference between first and third person is illuminated? To say nothing about that tricky second person.
Another reason that Berkeley gives for disagreeing with Locke is that the two classes of qualities, primary and secondary, are intertwined and cannot be separated. Berkeley (1710) puts this claim well saying, “In short, extension, figure, and motion, abstracted from all other qualities, are inconceivable. Where therefore the other sensible qualities are, there must these be also, to wit, in the mind and nowhere else.” (p.14) One could not imagine a colorless strawberry or feel a textureless banana, therefore, to assert that primary qualities such as extension, solidity, and number could exist externally without secondary qualities also being present are preposterous in Berkeley’s opinion. Berkeley designates both primary and secondary qualities as ideas, and asserts that ideas can only be like other ideas, that is only existing in the mind and not externally. Through this new classification of primary qualities, Berkeley fixes Locke’s logical discrepancy and presents an instrumentally better theory than Locke.
Berkeley’s view originates from the same empiricism that Locke’s does, but he does not rely on the same arguments he uses to refute Locke. Locke’s view is affected by these worries due to his inaction in taking his arguments to their furthest claims. Locke embraced empiricism, which is the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience, yet Locke still thought of external objects as something whose existence could be known. The problem with this view, that Berkeley goes after, is that, if you cannot use any of the five human senses to detect matter, as those are mind-dependent secondary qualities, and you cannot use primary qualities to detect material objects, as Berkeley showed that those are also mind-dependent, then why would an empiricist believe anything exists? Considering that in the empiricist view the only way they believe knowledge is derived is through their senses, if they cannot obtain any sense-data about external objects, then they have no viable reasons to believe in these objects’ existence.
Berkeley’s attack on abstract objects does put a lot of pressure on materialism, as materialism relies heavily on human’s ability of abstraction and the stipulation that material objects are mind-independent. These are both claims that Berkeley attacks heavily. Though I will concede that Berkeley offers some persuasive arguments against materialism, I would claim that an exploration of the objections to idealism leads to the conclusion that Berkeley’s attack on materialism is not enough to utterly undermine it. Berkeley’s views as a whole overcomes Locke’s, but Berkeley’s overall argument faces powerful issues such as allusions to solipsism, his failure to show that objects are mental because they are known, and his misconception of the contradiction of perceived unperceived items are all major concerns for his argument as whole. Due to all of these issues I would claim that Berkeley’s argument is not sound and therefore does not undermine materialism.
I don't know, but in my view, the goal isn't to lead to a theory. The goal is to have accurate views about what is. If an accurate view about what is doesn't lead to a theory, but an inaccurate view does, that doesn't make the inaccurate view better.
That's not to deny the utility of instrumentalism. But it doesn't make the instrumental approach better for anything other than making successful predictions or for applications for practical matters, just in case the instrumental approach in question can do this. It's important in those cases not to reify the instrumental theory, and it's important to not theory worship. Both of those things are big dangers, because there are personality types that are both attracted to instrumental theories and that tend to reify and worship them. (The personality type best suited to being an engineer is one of the prime examples.)
Quoting apokrisis
You have a "Ship of Theseus" problem there.
Apo, my friend, there are no actualities. Change is the only constant. Change is what allows you to know you exist (I think therefore I am). Thinking is change in your mind. If there were no change, there would be no thinking - no existing.
Locke as you rightly point out is afflicted by worries over this problem, Berkeley uses it to trip him up and yet Berkeley has no worries about the metaphysics of spiritual substance and minds. He apparently doesn't need the explain what they are and how they exist, merely what they do.
He argues that our relation to minds and God is more intimate and accessible that it is with matter. We can have notions of these things without ideas of them, but come on George, you do not justify this.
Instrumentalism makes a heavy claim on Okham's razor and for sure to a strong believer God is a simpler theory than materialism, but only if you leave out any metaphysics of God.
Another problem is his reverting back to the Cartesian methods which caused the impasse that Locke was trying to overcome.
This essentially equates to solipsism - that mind is all there is, or that mind is really the world. All idealism does is redefine what the world is. Why continue to use the term, "mind"?
No I'm not confusing these, I simply believe that there are physical forms which I sense. I also believe that the physical vs. non-physical dichotomy is not a good one. That's what I was arguing when you engaged me.
Quoting Harry Hindu
This is not true. I'm going to see my mother today, and I think about how she was last time I saw her, and I think about how she will be this time. My mother does not have the same form in my memories and anticipations, because I know she will not be the same. You say that I am over complicating things, but I am not, you are over simplifying. Reality is such that things change. And, they change at the present as time passes. Therefore I must respect this in my thoughts about things like my mother, she will not be the same as the last time I saw her. You, in your desire to simplify things, appear to have no respect for this aspect of reality. Representing a complex reality as simple, is a mistake, it's misunderstanding.
Quoting Harry Hindu
"Reasoning is thinking" does not mean that all thinking is reasoning. I hate it when people make ludicrous conclusions from my statements like that, it makes me think that I am talking to an imbecile.
Quoting Harry Hindu
A robot is not a sentient being, so you are using "sense" in a different way, and arguing by equivocation.
The whole problem there is the ridiculousness of for some reason taking matter (or substance) to somehow "underlie" things like roof tiles and trees, but to not itself be properties, forms (not in the platonic sense--in the sense of things like shape/extension), etc.
Yeah, that's a very good question, actually. It's not clear why an idealist would parse something like a tree as mind/an idea in the first place rather than just being "a tree" as its own ontic whatever-it-is (which maybe they'd prefer to just leave unanalyzed). It seems like saying that a tree is an idea, is something mental, or anything like that makes a lot of assumptions that would be difficult to support without implying realism.
Then why do you continue to use the terms if they aren't "good"? What do YOU mean by the term, "physical"? I think it would be more useful to me, because it would be easier for me to understand, if you made the distinction between things in your mind as opposed to things outside of your mind when you write your posts. Remember though, that both types of things have causal influences on each other. They interact.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Then how do you know you're thinking about your mother in the past or future, or even seeing her in the near-present? Of course she's not wearing the same clothes and may have her hair different and be wearing different perfume, etc. But there obviously is a constant there, or else you'd never be able to recognize her. That is what I'm talking about. Those constant forms that allow you to recognize things (compare forms for similarities).
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverI think we already came to an agreement here anyway. Information is needed to reason, or think, or else what would you be thinking or reasoning about?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover What do you mean by "sentient"? Are you a direct or an indirect realist?
Sometimes I wonder if it's not kind of a consequence of people who "think too much" in this regard: maybe there are some people who never are simply aware of a tree, say, but instead they always think about it--they think about what it is (including the name "tree"), they think about how they parse the color, the shape, etc. And so on. They never basically have an "empty mind" where they just experience things. If that were the case, then it would make more sense how maybe everything would seem like an idea to those folks, because they can't experience anything without having ideas about it.
If you experience things without having any ideas about them, AND you don't buy the realist picture of there being things in the world that are independent of you, with you being a human body situated in that realist world etc., then it wouldn't make any sense to think of the phenomenally appearing tree that it's an idea, something mental, etc. rather than "just being a tree" (not with the term attached (or any terms), etc.--but I have to type it somehow)
In philosophy we need to be amazed by all of our ideas. The vulgar take matter to be properties in its self, as philosophers we want to know why this is the case.
Haha--why would you need to be "amazed" by all of your ideas?
Re "why something is the case," you can never answer that, ultimately, because you just need to ask it for all of your answers, too. You'd just keep pushing the questions back until you give up and say something like "it just is," or "it's a brute fact," etc.
That fact is that it's obviously incoherent and wrong to try to separate matter from form and properties.
I thought I was making that distinction clear. I think your apparent obfuscation was pretense.
Quoting Harry Hindu
We've been through this, one is memory, the other anticipation. I remember how my mother was, and I anticipate how she will be. Where's the problem? If you have difficulty distinguishing between your memories of something, and your anticipations concerning that thing, then I think you have some serious issues as a human being.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, there is a constant. But the constant is distinct from the memories, and distinct from the anticipations. It appears to have been created within my mind as a means of relating the memories to the anticipations. I don't really understand the constant, do you? To me, it doesn't seem to be a form at all, it's material. That's how I understand matter, under the Aristotelian conception, it's the constant, the thing which does not change. It's not a form though, it's matter.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Well, I don't think we really agreed. You seem to think that there can be no mind without information. I think that the mind creates information, and can therefore be prior to information, creating its own information.
Science still lacks perfect explanations for form and properties, science itself holds the ridiculous notion that matter is supported by a substratum even today. So your complaint is justified but not only against philosophy.
What would you say is an example of science positing matter that has no properties or form?
I am suspicious of any form of knowledge that can only be understood by a select few and science is one of those. The more we discover the fewer can actually fully understand it, we are then left with new high priests to translate, interpret, simplify and feed to us of lower than very high I.Q's.
Thanks. I was just wondering if you had any specific examples in mind.
Which would just be another assumption made by someone (Berkeley's word is not the final word) who is being skeptical of others' assumptions. What's new? One unfalsifiable claim is just as good as any other. Where's the evidence, not just of other minds, but of spiritual stuff vs. physical stuff, God, etc.?
Quoting Terrapin Station
That would be direct realism - that the tree that is experienced is the one and only tree, it's not a representation of an external tree. Solipsism is a form of direct realism.
But that would be how it is for idealism, too. Idealism is no different than direct realism in that idealists believe that they experience things as they actually are - as ideas. This contributes to my point that there is no difference between idealism and realism that is coherent.
Okay, so the only difference between "physical" vs. "non-physical" is difference in location - "physical" being outside the mind and "non-physical" being inside the mind?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't see how that answers my question.
How do you recognize things, MU?
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverWhat is "matter"?
Are you open to the concept that there is change that happens so quickly or so slowly that we don't notice it?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Then you're a solipsist.
"Experience things as they are" yes, but the difference between realism and idealism is (a) in what each believes the tree is, exactly, and (b) what each believes is the relationship between themselves and the tree.
(a) I thought we established that the tree is a tree. Why would it be something else?
(b) We need the answer to (a) first.
No--I wasn't "establishing anyting." I was talking about different ways of experiencing the world and/or parsing that experience.
It's fine to say that both direct realists and idealists think that they're experiencing the tree as it is. That's a similarity between the two.
But there are differences, too. One difference is that idealists think that what they're experiencing is an idea. Realists think that what they're experiencing as it is is an external-to-themselves, physical thing.
Hmmm. It sounds like we need to come up with a coherent definition of "experiencing" to make any sense of what you said.
No evidence really just inference from induction which is the same with science. Starting from the first person inquiry can only be justified by saying there really is no better place to start. If there is one thing we can know it is our own minds and thoughts. Not infallible knowledge of of how they work but at least of their existence.
Yes! Philosophy is a science.
The rest is spoken just a like a true realist.
So you're not sure what we're talking about when we talk about experiencing something? That would be interesting, but I'm just curious if it's what you're really saying.
For the idealist and the realist, "experiencing" must mean completely different things. How would they define it?
Does that mean that you have any idea what "experience" refers to or not? A simple definition would be something like "Awareness of facts or events."
Physics is the only science.
Who was it that said something like, "The wise man questions the simple things, while the fool takes them for granted." I think is was some old Chinese philosopher - and no I'm not getting it from a fortune cookie :grin:
I don't understand why you can't understand that ideas and external-to-me physical stuff are not identical.
Could you explain how, in your view, ideas and external-to-me physical stuff are identical?
Our ideas are impressions of external-to-me physical stuff. Forget about identical, ideas cannot even be similar that stuff, ideas can only be similar to other ideas, that is one of Berkeley's points.
To the emergent macroproperties.
Apparently Harry Hindu can see no difference between the two, though. Hopefully when he gets back to the board we can try to figure this out.
I never said they were identical. I said the differences between physical and non-physical are incoherent. It's up to the person making the claim that the physical and nonphysical exist to explain what they are and what their differences are.
So far the only difference you seem to imply is location - external vs. internal. Is that the only difference?
First, if you think that ideas and external-to-me physical stuff aren't identical, there's a difference for you between idealism versus realism.
I don't personally posit that at least some things are nonphysical, but idealists do. So that's part of the difference, to them, between idealism and realism. An idealist isn't going to say that the difference has anything to do with location, most likely, at least not via anything like the realist picture, because of course they don't buy the realist picture of things.
If there is more to the physical vs. Non-physical dichotomy than a difference in location, then what is it? If this distinction is so easy to understand then why hasn't anyone been able to explain it?
Well, personally I think that the idea of nonphysicals is incoherent, so I can't explain that end.
Re matter, it's simply saying that a tree, for example, is the relatively hard-to-us stuff it seems to be, with a location, extension, mass, etc. Maybe all of that is incoherent to you, and we'd have to try to figure out why, but also I think it would be difficult to be capable of interacting with the world at all while that's incoherent to you--that is if you don't understand location, shape, or if you'd not understand object manipulation so that you'd be familiar with things like weight, density, pliability, etc.
I'm not saying you'd have to agree with it, by the way, but it would be weird if the notion of it doesn't make any sense at all to you.
Re nonphysical stuff, well, supposedly it doesn't have a location, it's not some sort of material or substance phenomenally, it doesn't have a shape or extension, etc.--all I can say about it is what it's not, unfortunately, because no one ever tries to pin down any properties nonphysicals have to make any sense of them. In fact, people sometimgs say that the whole idea that nonphysical would have properties is misconceived. But I just can't make any sense out of the idea that there would be something somehow with no properties.
Which is why you gave up when I asked you to define "awareness" as a idealist would define it. The problem is that "awareness" has no meaning in an idealist "universe" - the same for "experience".
Remember that I also pointed out that idealists are really just direct realists.
Exactly. What is "matter"? What are "ideas"? How do they differ if not just by location (Ideas are in a mind. Matter is everywhere else)?
Sigh. but they're not, because you've already said that ideas and external-to-me physical stuff are different.
For an answer how idealists think of ideas, etc., it's best to ask an idealist. I wouldn't want to try to speak for them, because the notion of nonphysical existents makes no sense to me. That doesn't lead to me believing that they're just direct realists, because they're not. I'm a direct realist. They don't agree with me.
You keep side-stepping the issue. Define "physical" and "non-physical".
There are people who think that some things are nonphysical. Hence the utility of the distinction.
See my post above (from 17-18 minutes ago) to Jamesk (re definitions)
It's a useful distinction once there are people who believe that some things aren't physical. We want to be able to have ontology discussions with them.
That's great but can we leave your personal position aside and focus on the argument between Berkeley and Locke?
Nope. A fortiori because it's not even possible to have a discussion where we're not giving personal positions. You'd be giving your personal perspective on Berkeley and Locke for example if you were to saying anything whatsoever about Berkeley and Locke. The only way you could avoid that is by simply quoting them (although you still might imply something personal by what you're choosing to quote in context).
Aside from that, I'm not about to start commenting where I feel I need to self-police certain things and not express them just because someone might not be interested, just because they might not want to pursue some particular tangent, etc. That's completely against my disposition, completely contrary to how I want people to communicate with and interact with each other.
If you're not interested in the people you're interacting with on the site for their own sake, I see that as your problem.
According to Berkeley matter is an incoherent idea that we arrive at by an abuse of language. Ideas are by definition non material unless you follow Descartes dualist approach that there are two types of substance. Locke denies Descartes spiritual substance and Berkeley denies Descartes material substance.
Idealism states that there is no matter at all, only ideas and minds. Descartes employs a two prong retreat (mind and matter) from solipsism but is left with the mind-body problem as well as a few others. Berkeley makes an even stronger commitment to God and uses him solely in his retreat from solipsism but is left with the problem of seeming ridiculous..
I am very interested in your opinion of that, less as to your opinion about the subject in general.
I am trying to examine both arguments from a neutral position which is not easy as I am just as much a product of Locke-Mills-Ramsey scientific view of the world as you are. I assure you that immaterialism seems as dumb to me as it does to you however I have a strong desire to understand the theory fully before writing off as incoherent as you have.
Okay, but I wouldn't have much of an opinion about that without rereading both. It's been two or three decades since I last read much of either. Maybe some folks' memories are that good, but mine has never been. Heck, I'd already need to reread some of the beginning of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations that I just reread and commented on a couple weeks ago in the reading group thread about that book.
I think it's worthwhile being familiar with Berkeley and Locke because they were major historical figures in the field, and philosophy values its historical figures in a way that science doesn't (science students aren't normally required to read even Newton's works, much less someone like Gassendi), but really, the majority of what both said (and many others throughout the history of philosophy) is wrong, misconceived, etc. So unless we're just interested in historical figures for their own sake, or maybe we want to be amused by how wrong they were, or unless we're required to do so for class or something, I don't see what the merit is to focusing on them for something like this. I'd rather focus on getting things right. And with respect to reading, I'd much rather read current or very recent stuff.
Ah--we're helping you do your homework. :razz:
I can understand that, but I'd need to reread them to be able to help. As I said it's been at least a couple decades since I read much of either. My first year at university was 1980. :nerd: I didn't get my final degree until a bit over 20 years ago (I did multiple degrees in a couple different fields), but still, that was over 20 years ago, and a lot of my philosophy work at university was 25-30 years ago.
Your instinctive objections were all anticipated by Berkeley and he also anticipated Hume on causation which is what makes him so fascinating to me. If you can accept his Christianity then his arguments are really very solid. The same objection he has of Locke basing theories on incomplete knowledge is still highly relevant today.
The vast majority of what Berkeley said--and Locke, too--was wrong. I could go sentence by sentence through Three Dialogues or whatever and explain what he's getting wrong, the argumentative mistakes he's making, etc., although we're already doing that with a couple other books at the moment.
It's not that the "last time I studied anything" was decades ago. The last time I read much Berkeley or Locke was decades ago. I've never been of the opinion that they were worth much of my time, aside from knowing something about their place historically, including in the history of ideas, of course.
I've been talking/doing and publishing philosophy for decades.
Stylistically, at least, I'm analytic, yes.
Are you taking classes at a continental-oriented university? Just curious which university if so (if you don't mind saying).
Thanks.
So, the difference between matter and ideas is that matter is incoherent and ideas are not, unless you follow Descartes dualist approach where the difference between the two is that they are different "substances".
What are ideas and how are they coherent where matter is not? What is a "substance"?
Quoting Jamesk
I deny them both.
Quoting Jamesk
How is that more coherent than saying there's no ideas at all, only matter and processes of matter?
You cannot really deny that ideas exist, in fact the existence of ideas is the only thing you can know without doubt. Matter on the other hand is something that you can only have an idea of.
And materialists say that ideas are material states caused by something outside of us.
Why wouldn't material objects have causal power where ideas do?
Whatever it is outside of you you can't say, so why say that it's ideas outside of us and not matter?
If matter and ideas are substances, then why not just say that the tree is composed of substance instead of ideas or matter?
All we are doing is disagreeing on the term we use to refer to the substance, not on the nature of the substance. Both ideas and matter have causal powers because they are the same substance.
So the distinction is in what certain people think, and not a distinction between the nature of "physical" or "non-physical" things.
I'm asking about the nature of "physical" and "non-physical", not about what other people think.
I pity someone who has put so much time and effort into philosophy yet can't answer as straight up question that you should have probably asked yourself decades ago.
When dealing with non-physical entities the mind knows itself in it's for-itself.
In my view, yes, since I don't believe there are any nonphysical things.
We can't say something about the "objective nature of nonphysical things" if there are no nonphysical things.
Both materialists and idealists claim that "matter" and "ideas" are substances, but can't explain the nature of the substance, much less any distinction between them, so there really isn't any difference between what they are claiming or thinking.
One of the more critical points:
A good example of "Consciousness determines Being" vs "Being determines consciousness"
So how do you explain ideas, thoughts and mental processes? Is an idea physical?
I'm a physicalist/identity theorist re the mind-body issue. So yes, ideas are physical, as is everything else.
Physical things aren't limited to things you can weigh. You don't think that you can weigh wind, do you? But hopefully you also do not think that wind isn't physical.
It's weird that people have these toddler-caliber understandings of things that they use to frame arguments on, especially when they're otherwise supposed to be working at the apex of intellectualism a la philosophy.
The theory of relativity is located at the brains of the individuals who are thinking about it.
Of course you can. Wind has velocity, it exerts force, You measure it with a meter. Name me a 'physical thing' which has no location and no mass.
Quoting Terrapin Station
But that's a category error. Such things as numbers, theories, and so on, only exist as ideas. Sure they're represented physically, but the sign is not the same as what is signified. A theory, a number, an idea, the plot for a book, isn't literally 'located in the brain', any more than the characters in movies are 'located inside' the film or television shows 'located inside' television.
Quoting Terrapin Station
No matter how often it is pointed out to you! :razz:
Is that really such an impressive feat in light of the consideration that Berkeley was the puppet master pulling all the strings behind the scenes? He wasn't exactly going to refute his own arguments, was he?
Ha! Classic. How many years have passed by since the old days, and people are still making the same unintentionally hilarious claims. If you're talking about a notion, then yes, it doesn't matter about the particulars, by definition, whatever you're talking about, from matter to meringue pie, it's going to be an idea created by the mind. That's what a notion is, for Pete's sake! :lol:
Oh, is it? I did not know that. I thought that Plato was a Pokémon or something.
Quoting Wayfarer
Although, that Berkeley must be wrong is a good place to start, in my opinion. I mean, he [i]is[/I] wrong, after all. And when it comes down to it, being right tops having an impressive argument, at least in my book.
Some people just don't seem to be able to grasp the obvious. Because it's obvious they dismiss it as if it's irrelevant to any serious discussion about the nature of reality.
Actually no, but I do think that his response was not only humorous, but effective on a level that the likes of Berkeley could not have come close to reaching with his philosophy.
What I quoted of you is both: obvious and irrelevant. And I doubt that many others will have failed to grasp this. Do you disagree? Because it's not much different to saying something like, say, "The feeling of anger is an emotion". You do see the problem, right? We already know that a feeling is an emotion. Statements like that don't [i]do[/I] anything. And, what's worse, it misses the point, namely that the aim of the game is to score a goal without cheating, so to speak. If you start by speaking about a notion, then that's cheating, because it's setting yourself up so that you can't possibly lose. But as a result of your cheating, your attempt can be rightly dismissed.
This is the type of mistake in thinking that dualism causes.
This is like asking what duration is water? You're asking for an improper measurement of a thing.
Measurements are comparisons between like things. Time is a comparison between the movement of a clock's hands, the rotation of the Earth, or the revolution of the Earth around the Sun and some other change. Length is a comparison between a meter stick and some other length.
So how would we measure an idea? By comparing it to other ideas. The Theory of Relativity has held up quite well for a century and has brought about an astounding array of new technology since it's inception. It's impact is enormous compared to other ideas.
In actual fact, it was a slightly tongue-in-cheek response to Terrapin's contention that 'ideas are physical'.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Of course, but that is not the point at issue.
The theory that Berkeley replaces materialism with does seem to be 'better' than Descartes at least in instrumental terms. It also competes with Locke's theory and if you accept God then it is also 'better' instrumentally.
The weakness I am trying to expose is Berkeley's reliance on the same 'insufficient empiricism' he accuses Locke of using, Berkeley admits this but says that his 'notions' of minds and God are immediate to us in a way that matter is not.
Is he right?
In fact he debates every possible weakness in his argument and overcomes each one (not always satisfactorily). Find one objection to his theory that he hasn't already discussed.
His prose are masterful, only bested by Hume IMO. For much of the dialogues he actually gets Hylas to defend the refutation of matter, it really is a very clever piece of writing.
My reply to this will be much the same as my reply to Wayfarer. Masterful prose? Perhaps. A very clever piece of writing? May well be. But are the key arguments plausible? No. What's more important? Are you a truth seeker or something akin to an admirer of exotic artifacts?
His key arguments are as plausible as materialism and just as well supported. That is the problem, he cannot provide better support that materialism has, he basically uses the same support that he demolished in materialism.
Please take some time and actually read his theory and dialogues before engaging in a meaningful discussion about them.
Is reality partially made of questions? To that degree, he has a point. Any description or name of the real that forgets the question and its own naming seems forgetful.
A certain vague dualism may dominate all talk to the contrary. We treat people and things differently. We don't feel bad about kicking a rock. We are quite interested at times in how another 'object' sees the world and perhaps questions it in a way that changes the basic project of our life. To me we are 'primarily' in a vast of world of things and others who also see these things and others. If we drop any part of this (however we might slap 'mind' or 'matter' on the rocks we can kick), our own participation in philosophy becomes unintelligible. What are we talking about and who are we talking to? Maybe the rock is a 'piece' of the overlapping or distributed subject, whatever that means, or the manifestation of some non-mind substrate, whatever that means. But we will find ourselves distinguishing between the pieces of the subject that we can talk to and the pieces we can kick, an ontology based on how we can treat and what we want from beings. (The move from rocks through germs and insects and up to mammals in our sympathy looks like a continuum.)
These are things that we cannot really do, we can form an abstract idea of a tree but it is not separate as Locke proposes. We imagine a tree from memory and 'mute' out the other details. So we take the tree in our back yard and try to forget when and where and how it is. We cannot actually conceive of that tree's existence independently of our minds.
Beautifully expressed. I agree. The idea of mind-independent existence falls apart in some sense. But I also think the thought of the subject depends upon objects-in-common or individual-independent entities.
IMV, it's useful to look behind the proposed metaphysical names of these 'socially' real objects to the fundamental structure of communication. What does philosophy presuppose as philosophy? And is presupposition even the right word? Are we talking about a basic or pre-theoretical structure of experience as among things and others? These 'things' can be thought of as concepts or the opposite of concept (the 'noncept' of mind-independence), but what is the structure beneath the debate that makes the debate possible? To debate reality is to assume something in common with others with whom one debates. It makes no sense to debate the nature of that which is not mutually grasped as important, as in-some-sense real and talk-about-able. And unless we are always only talking about other debaters (which I can't make sense of), we are talking about non-persons, things of some kind, be they rocks mistaken for ideas or idea mistaken for rocks.
In short we live (as we theorize) a 'pre-theory' that makes theory possible/intelligible in world with others containing things that can be talked about (including the strange notion of that world itself and all the others as grounded in a fragile, functioning brain. --itself grounded in that world with the others.) Arguably this structure is far more important than any metaphysical terms fastened to its 'nodes.' The 'we' precedes any theory of the 'I,' even as the individual human body among other bodys makes this 'we.' 'We' is made of you and you and you and lives like a distributed ghost across bodies, faces, and voices. The enworlded community finds itself only through its members, who find themselves in an enworlded community.
The debate here is whether materialism as a theory has a stronger foundation that immaterialism. If we can prove this as so then we don't need to worry about our acceptance of the theory. If it turns out that the argument against materialism is more robust than the one in favour of it, we can be justified in searching deeper.
You accidentally quoted me as saying your response.
Thanks. I am writing a reply. Great issue.
I understand what you mean, but I think we are something like a movement against this bias, directed at an ideal community that makes truth valuable and intelligible in some sense. To think that we are trapped in a perspective is already a move against that perspective from outside that perspective in some sense.
Quoting Jamesk
While there are good reasons to think this way, it's still a metaphysical construction. Hegel and FIchte both made fascinating critiques of this proposed origin or law of thinking. The thing-in-itself is one more thought that wants to point beyond itself. So now we have two thing-in-itself entities. Our idea and what it points to. But then we have three, because the second thing-it-self is an object of [s]consciousness[/s] too. I'm not trying to take a dogmatic position here but only mention some problems with that as a foundational thought. From another perspective I very much believe in only partially known objects. Such objects make conversation possible, it seems to me. Perhaps the 'thing-in-itself' is something like the dark of the future, the unsaid, the potentially-experienced projected as a paradoxical entity. It is something like a basic structure. I see the front of the house and 'know' that it has a back. I know that you in the back yard are seeing the same thing, but some other aspect of it. Is the thing-in-itself a kind of public unity of possible and actual experience?
So velocity is weight in your understanding?
Well I will leave off if others want to keep on that level, but I think the problem can also be dissolved or transformed by looking at a deeper structure. What does it mean to have a stronger foundation? It's hard not to think in terms of what an ideal community believes (what our community ought to believe.) And it's something we ought to believe about the stuff that's already here, in which we live and from where we speak in the first place. What does it mean to name it 'matter' or 'mind' in this context? What are we deciding exactly? If everything is 'matter,' then matter is the kind of thing that talks about itself. If everything is 'mind', then mind sometimes acts like a tree fallen across the road when we have somewhere to be, a tree that 'you' with your truck can move out of the way for me, a tree that we don't feel bad about sawing in half.
I've already explained why it's not a category error. What did I say? I don't want to have to keep explaining the same thing over and over to the same people. I want them to at least be able to understand and remember what my view is. So let's see if you can recall any of my responses to you saying the same thing again and again.
In other words, your response wasn't an argument against what Terrapin said. It was useless.
Quoting Wayfarer
The point was that you didn't say anything useful.
Matter is 'a physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit.' So a materialist would seem to understand 'mind and spirit' as a movement of modification of matter.
Fair enough. But what has really been said? 'Mind and spirit' are 'really' just modification of 'matter.' But then matter is so mind-like that materialism loses it charge.
Idealism asserts 'that reality, or reality as humans can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. ' Also, 'idealism believes consciousness and mind to be the origin of the material world and aims to explain the existing world according to these principles.'
Fair enough. But what is consciousness made of? Experiences of 'matter' and other 'consciousnesses' it seems. 'In' a world that makes it possible (or 'is' it) even as it makes the world possible. ' The concepts of mind and matter seem to depend on one another. To make either side absolute is to destroy the master word at the moment of its institution. And it would also seem to be a strategic ignoring of who and why we have such a distinction in the fist place, in a quest for 'the night in which all cows are black.'
No, it is you that is missing the point. The materialist just says that the mind is matter and there you go, now mind is just a process of matter and we have immediate access to matter. To say that what exists out there is different than what exists in here is the mistake dualism makes. Causation occurs across the boundary of mind and matter, in other words they are both the same substance. The problem comes when you want to call that substance, "mind" because that would be like a tree calling the primary substance, "wood" because that is what the tree would have immediate access too.
Also, if God were immediate, then why are their atheists? Atheists don't deny the existence of their minds, but do deny the existence of God.
What is its "charge"? I'm not sure what you're referring to there.
Which is a claim with no immediate proof. Many scientists, especially in neurosciences are having a hard time with materialism and cannot rule out some form of dualism. We understand less about our own minds than we do about matter, note I said minds not brains.
Philosophy of mind is one of the most active departments where ll the modern 'rock stars' of philosophy are making names.
I'm not for or against mind as a process of matter versus matter as a process of mind, but something occurs to me. If matter includes the process of mind, then the 'immediate access' we seemed to gain is lost. I only have immediate access to matter if I have immediate access to its mindlikeness. I would surely, I might think as this materialist, have immediate access to myself as a process of matter. And yet I keep questioning and overhearing myself, as matter exploring matter.
It seems to me that trying to collapse either concept into the other just sweeps the complexity of the situation (which inspired the imperfect but serviceable distinction in the fist place ) under the rug. And for the materialist, this very conversation about matter is a mode or process of matter. Which is fine, but matter is more or less the same protagonist as mind at that point. Matter does philosophy. And the idealist crashes into 'mind' that also known as a telephone poll, glad that it wasn't a human with a mind in the limited sense of mind distinguishing it as something not 'in' telephone poles.
If we say that everything is matter and yet that matter includes mind as a process, we aren't saying much in some sense. The drama or edge of the initial statement is quickly replaced by a sense of renaming the same old experiences. If we say everything is mind, it's the same situation. In both cases the concepts are stretched beyond recognition in a false overcoming of the distinction. I'm not saying I embrace dualism as some final position, but I do suggest that we all tend to be part time dualists in action and attitude. To propose collapsing the issue ('all is mind 'or 'all is matter') is the rely on both concepts in their difference implicitly. I propose such a thing to others about some kind of stuff that is not only those others but also the very proposition itself and the ground we walk on.
You don't need proof to label something. Labeling things is arbitrary. It doesn't matter if we call the mind "matter" or "mental", or "humpfalump". That's the point.
What is important is the nature of "mind" and "matter". What is the difference in the nature of "mind" and "matter"?
I don't think anyone is a materialist/physicalist to be dramatic or edgy. What we're saying is simply that mental stuff isn't something different than material/physical stuff, contra claims otherwise (for example, from Wayfarer).
It makes no sense to call the substance outside of you one thing and the substance inside of you another. They are both the same substance because they interact.
Now, what do we call the substance? Does it make a difference?
I don't mean edgy as in disruptive. I mean that the weight of the idea is reduced as matter swallows what used to be called mind. At most the distinction can be theoretically abolished. We live 'toward' two basic kinds of entities, persons and non-persons, in very different ways. I talk to persons. I care about what they think. I don't talk to beer cans (usually). We live a certain dualism in a way that makes any reduction highly theoretical and secondary, one might say. (Really we have something like a continuum, because we don't experience or act toward dogs, for instance, as we experience clouds or stones. We can already pity an ant and wish it on its way. )
That's what I've been asking all along. If there is no difference (You've finally come around to seeing that they're the same thing), then it doesn't matter what we call it.
Idealists could keep on referring to it as "mental" and materialists refer to it as "matter" and they would both be talking about the same thing and therefore there are no disagreements.
So, (I asked this question earlier in the thread) why the debate for the past 1000 years?
I'd say the distinction is imperfect but useful. I agree that their interaction shows the limitations of the distinction. At some point these issues lead back toward meaning and language. While I understand your point, that interaction implies identity of type leads to abolishing just about all distinctions. The world is full of different kinds of things that interact. We perhaps categorize them according the specifics of these interactions. I don't interact with a human as I do with a can-opener. Both are just things (share in being and maybe a causal nexus) from a point of view of maximum abstraction, but this doesn't say much. It just grasps them as separate and otherwise indeterminate unities.
The point isn't for it to have "weight," though, either. It's just to accurately describe the world in a way that's coherent/that makes sense. The ideal would be for that to be completely mundane because no one is saying anything wrong/stupid/incoherent/insane/etc.
Different things are just different arrangements of the primary substance (whatever we decide to call it). If you define "substance" as something that allows things to interact, then everything is made of the same "substance" and making a distinction between "substances" would be incoherent.
It doesn't matter what we call it, but it matters what think it is/think what its nature is, etc.because we don't want to say things that are wrong, incoherent, etc.
I agree with the spirit of this. Substance is subject, or subject is substance. But either way this subject or substance tends to divide itself into...subject-likeness and substance-likeness, things who might love it (us as matter or mind) and things that are just there, in the way or useful.
See, Harry, you get people saying things like this.
For the umpteenth time, What does it mean to be "material" as opposed to "mental"?
I'm not getting him to say that. He's performing all these mental gymnastics to avoid the questions I'm asking.
I don't understand what this means if you're not simply talking about different arrangements of the primary substance.
I'm open to this. I think it's fair, however, to question whether it makes sense to talk about a primary substance. Maybe it does. The mind (or matter in a mind-like mode) seems to aim at unifying experience this way. Let's grant your point. Then all the apparently plurality (all the different kinds of things) would seem merely to be renamed as 'arrangements' or 'modes' of a primary substance. So there is 'really' just one kind of thing. But it's the nature of this primary thing to express itself not only in different modes that ask for useful and illuminating categorization but also this categorization itself.
The primary substance has to be the kind of thing that can mistake itself as a plurality. Moreover the primary substance has to be able to exist in the form of the question too. The primary substance unveils itself as primary substance, within time, by having a conversation with itself. So it also has a memory. It is (or one of its arrangements is) a speaking, thinking mode of primary substance (tempting us to call it a subject all over again.) It is also the world in which these subjects converse. Even if 'mind' and 'matter' are 'false' categorizations in some sense, they are inescapable at least as the ladder with which primary substance learns to grasp itself as one and homogeneous. [All this is just following out the implications of there being a primary substance and us becoming aware of it and how it happened.]
lol--"you get" not in the sense of "you personally are producing this." The sense is akin to "one experiences."
Yes, assuming a primary substance, I just mean its tendency to be like persons or non-persons (that which inspires the loose, everyday distinction in its pre-philosophical ambiguity which is perhaps never perfectly sharpenable.
Well this is what reducing 'mind' to 'matter' leads to. Matter gets all the embarrassing and poetic qualities of mind that materialists perhaps wanted to escape in the first place. Their own questioning and answering becomes 'matter,' and 'matter' becomes a poet and philosopher. (Or poetry and philosophy are deemed somehow unreal, paradoxically.) Is our situation strange enough to inspire poetry? I think it can be. In some ways the 'all is X' project is maybe a flight from this strangeness to the comfort of a name. On the other hand, it is also found in ecstatic speech. Maybe it's 'be astonished at nothing' versus 'philosophy begins in wonder.' We might think of opposed appetites for closings and openings of the situation.
Material is made up of atoms that we can empirically measure. Mental states produce thoughts and ideas which cannot be empirically measured. We do not know how the brain works, all we know is which parts of the brain are working when we are thinking.
Materialists are gambling that one day they will have advanced enough equipment to actually 'see' our thoughts. Idealists are gambling that science will never be able to so.
Poetry is fine in literature class.
"We know how to measure this, and it's relatively easy to do so" isn't actually a criterion for something being physicall. You don't think that neutrinos aren't physical, do you?
You obviously believe that mental states are brain states which are biological states which are physical states and so mental states are physical states. This has yet to be proven.
You know that empirical claims are not provable, right? (Assuming that you're using "proof" in a more strict sense of that term.)
Could you please tell me what the criteria are then?
Which is one of Berkeley's crux points. You have no more proof for materialism than for immaterialism.
So first, the criteria are going to have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anything that WE do. It's not as if anything's ontological nature changes because of how we think about it, whether we can interact with it in particular ways that we have particualr understandings of, etc. It's important to remember that.
The criteria are the ontological nature of the "thing" in question. As a property cluster, whether it consists of material, whether it has mass, a charge, a location, spatial extension, etc.--those sorts of things. Whether we know how to measure those things in a particular case is irrelevant.
A fortiori because there's no proof of any empirical claim, hence "proof" is a red herring. We don't endorse or reject any empirical claims on proof. We endorse or reject empirical claims for other reasons.
Why is this a problem? It's informative, and may serve as a premise for a deductive argument. It tells me that anger is classed as an emotion. If we agree on this, we can make statements about emotions in general, and draw conclusions about anger, because we've agreed that anger is an emotion. That's the process of simple deductive logic.
Quoting S
Some people try to deny the obvious as irrelevant, that's my point. But this stymies deductive logic.
Quoting S
What are you talking about? We start a logical process by stating the obvious, as a premise, (preferably a self-evident truth) and when we have agreement on the premises, we can draw conclusions about the less obvious. There is no point to dismissing the proposition as irrelevant, or "cheating", without first understanding its position in the argument. It seems like you are saying "I don't like your premise because I'm afraid of the conclusions which it might produce, so I'm going to dismiss it as irrelevant, even though it's obviously true."
Quoting S
I see your method. You dismiss premises from the argument which are obviously true as "cheating", then you claim it's "a very clever piece of writing". If you were really a "truth seeker" you would not be so anxious to dismiss premises which you recognize as true..
Again, you don't need proof to label something. We can call something anything we like. We only need to agree on what to label something when we want to communicate that something. What is it that you want to communicate, Jamesk? What is the difference between "mind" and "matter"?
Thank You!!
This is the best response I've received so far to the point I've been trying to make. Unfortunately, I have to go to class. I'll respond later.
Quoting Terrapin Station
This just explains the initial responses you had to my questions. It's nice to see that you eventually came around to seeing and agreeing with what I've said all along.
If you're saying that realists and idealists are saying the same thing, I don't agree with you.
Matter is physical and mind is not.
Matter is not physical though, strictly speaking. And that's the demonstration which Berkeley makes. It's an assumption we make, an idea, which helps us to understand physical existence. But what Berkeley demonstrates is that this idea, "matter" really doesn't correspond with anything in the physical world. So we really can't say that matter is physical.
How do we get to the point of saying that matter is an idea?
You know, so phenomenally, there's a tree say (not as a tree--that is, the concept, etc.--but "that thing"--I have to call it something to type this), and then how do we go from that to saying that the phenomenal tree is an idea?
I discussed this with you earlier in the thread. There is nothing in the physical world that we sense as matter.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I'm not saying that the tree is an idea, I'm saying that matter is an idea. You sense the tree as a tree, you do not sense it as matter.
A couple different questions here, but I'll start with this one: what's the difference between the tree and matter?
The thing called "the tree" is something I can see, and reach out and touch. If that thing were called "the matter", then I could see and touch the matter. It's not though, it's called "the tree", and I haven't yet come across anything which I could see or reach out and touch which is called "matter".
So the distinction you're making is about what we call things?
Not exactly. We call things by names so that we can talk about them. I am talking about the things which are named, not the names. So the thing which we are calling a tree is something which I can sense, and these are the things which we call physical things. The thing we call "matter' is not such a thing, because of all the things which I sense, or can be sensed, the thing called "matter" is not one of them.
Unless you're saying something about the calling per se, that just restates that you think there's a difference between trees and matter. It doesn't specify what the difference is.
(And even if you were saying something about calling, would there be no difference if I did call a tree "matter"?)
I specified the difference with great clarity. A tree is a thing which I can sense. Matter is not. What's your problem?
A tree is something you can sense while matter is not only if it's the case that there's a difference between the tree and matter. I'm asking what that difference is. If you answer that the difference is that you can sense one and not the other it's circular.
The difference is that I can sense the existence of one but not the other. I can go out in the world and see trees all over the place, I can't see matter anywhere, nor can I sense its existence in any way. If this does not qualify as a difference to you, then I think you have serious problem.
If trees are matter, then you sense matter all the time, right? (Well, assuming you often encounter trees.)
The problems with that argument should be pretty obvious to you.
Trees are not matter though, they are trees. You violate the law of identity if you say trees are matter.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I don't see the problem. You asked me for the difference and I told you. You're obviously trying to create a problem where there is none to be found.
By denying the reality that there is nothing physical, sensible, which the word "matter" refers to, you are creating a problem for yourself. All you need to do is accept this simple fact, and your problems of understanding will disappear.
Do we violate the law of identity when we say that the song "Kashmir" is music?
"You can sense a song, you can't sense music" "What's the difference?" "You can sense the existence of a song, you can't sense the existence of music. That's the difference."
Of course not, this is classification. But music is not the thing you are sensing, you are sensing the particular playing of a particular song, just like "matter" is not what you are seeing, when you see a tree.
Do you understand the difference between a word which is being used to refer to a general idea like "music", or "matter", and a word being used to refer to a particular thing? You don't sense music.
This is like saying “t-shirts are not clothes though, they are t-shirts. You violate the law of identity if you say t-shirts are clothes” and in the context of this discussion you then use that statement to conclude that there are no clothes, or people cannot experience clothes but somehow still experience t-shirts.
Im afraid your a bit confused here.
And matter isnt decribing an idea, it is describing, in general as you said, something physical. When you experience the t-shirt, you are also experiencing clothes.
The in-itself outside of minds is not even an in-itself. There is not even nothing qua nothing.
Only our perception of them needs a mind. They can exist without our minds.
But can they exist without any mind.
Why wouldnt they?
No it’s a physical atttibute. Physical entities have such attributes - mass, location, and so on. Abstract entities, including numbers, do not, because they’re not physical. But they’re real nonetheless, because they’re the same for any observer.
You never did ‘explain your view’ because it’s self-contradictory and it can’t be explained, as it desn’t make sense.
lol. You are really off your rocker.
It might be worth talking to someone who isn't as trollish, confused or insane as Metaphysician Undercover. What I said above about this was:
"How do we get to the point of saying that matter is an idea?
"You know, so phenomenally, there's a tree say (not as a 'tree'--that is, the concept, etc.--but 'that thing'--I have to call it something to type this), and then how do we go from that to saying that the phenomenal tree is an idea?"
First off, this means that you weren't really paying attention. All you'd have to do is repeat back what I said, even if you think it's contradictory or doesn't make sense.
You asked about weight. So I answered about weight. It doesn't really make sense to talk about a theory's weight, just like it doesn't really make sense to talk about the wind's weight, or it wouldn't make sense to talk about the weight of your circulation. That doesn't imply that the wind or your circulation aren't physical.
The theory of relativity obviously has physical attributes. It's a set of dynamic states in any number of brains. Those have physical attributes.
And nothing is the same for multiple observers.
Simply ignoring what I say isn't actually an argument against it, even though you'll act like it is, and I'm sure we'll go through more or less this same exchange many times again in the future.
I would say that the information does still exist, it just exists in an encrypted state.
Let's try this from another angle that a 'dead head' can handle ;)
Can you please tell me what is matter? Then tell me what is a tree and then what is a mind.
If we can get these definitions accomplished we might be able to make some progress.
But idealists are saying that the book of gibberish IS itself the decryption key, that it was essentially just an illusion that it was something else; it's not something different than the decryption key.
The same information could have many encryption keys but the only encryption key that makes the information relevant (gives it a conditioned existence so to speak) is the one you have (ie. mind).
The idea of the physical is, among other things, the idea of radical, brute separation of all things from one another, whereas the idea of the mental is the idea of the deep inherent interconnection of all things.
So, if the substance is mental then all things are really one, and if the substance is physical then all things are separate and if interdependent are only so on account of quantifiable mechanical, energetic connections with one another.
Please remember the principle of charity, it is far more likely that either Metaphysician is failing to explain the point or that you are failing to understand it than Metaphysician being insane.
Until now he / she has made the most relevant posts in this thread and seems to have a superior understanding of the subject than most.
Locke separates, see's and uses words as symbols. Berkeley unites, listens and uses language to express much more than symbols.
Matter--substances consisting of subatomic particles, which combine to make atoms, which combine to make molecules, etc. in various structures of gases, liquids, solids, plasmas, and Bose-Einstein condensates. Matter has mass, spatial extension, charge, etc. Matter is always engaged in some processes, too, some changing relations with respect to other matter.
Trees are particular combinations of molecules, undergoing particular processes. Hence, trees are matter.
Mind is particular subsets of brain structure and function. Brains, of course, are composed of particular molecules undergoing particular processes, too--many different materials than trees, but materials nonetheless.
What are you basing this likelihood on?
By the way, if that's the problem, then what he and other folks in the same boat need to dos pause for a moment, step back, take a breath, drop the arrogance, and try tackling much smaller, simpler bits at a time.
To elaborate further; the idea of a universal physical substance makes no sense; what would it be? Energy? If it were then how would things further apart than the distance light could have travelled since the beginning of the universe be connected and be governed by the same laws?
A universal mental substance would be mind; which is the very principal of deep and universal interconnection.
So there is certainly a profound difference between idealist and physicalist views.
Where are you getting that idea from?
Why is the "mind" alternative simply left unexplained?
From my mind where else? What's the problem?
The problem is that I don't know if it coheres very well with anyone's view about physical stuff.
Because such a principle of universal entanglement cannot be modeled in the mechanical way the physical world is modeled. The mind is what does the modeling.
So it just doesn't need any explaining then?
Physicalists may or may not realize it, but it is the logical conclusion of the physicalist paradigm.
Can you show your work re the claim that that is the logical conclusion?
It cannot be explained in the kind of physicalist terms you are asking for; else it would be...physical. So that demand begs the question.
If it's a logical conclusion, then there's a chain of logical inferences, logical implication for it, right? Otherwise, what is the word "logic" referring to?
Yes, but relevent and existing are not the same thing.
If all things are merely physical then what would be the universal principle that determines that physical laws obtain everywhere, even across regions that cannot be energetically connected due to the immense distance separating them?
I wont pretend to even understand the last one but you seem to define matter as molecules that are made of atoms that are made of particles.
Quoting Terrapin Station
So you are saying that objects are specific combinations of the components of matter?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Ok I have a problem here, firstly I don't understand what a particular subset of brain structure means. Secondly Brains and trees are largely made of water, so the must more shared matter between brains and trees than distinct matter. Also these processes you talk of bother me, surely a the matter in a brain (a thinking substance) is undergoing more processes than the matter in a non-thinking one?
Trees are living and so perhaps can be seen as pseudo thinking in comparison to a rock let's say, however trees are in a constant state of growth and change whereas once fully grown brains are just slowly decaying organic material. We can see how a tree can be about wood, bark, branch, root and leaf, but what is a brain about?
You're not using "radical, brute separation of all things from one another" to simply refer to the idea of there not being literal physical laws that obtain everywhere, are you?
On the other guy for sure :)
The wind - masses of air in motion - is physical. Theories and ideas are not. That is the point of the argument - quite a simple point, which has triggered pages of confused babbling.
Do you mean their nature?
Would you say that as a theory materialism is instrumentally better than idealism? (in the Berkeley / Locke debate)
Well, objects are matter, but at least unless they're subatomic particles, they have "parts," if that's all you're basically saying there.
Quoting Jamesk
Weird,
So here's a structure of marks:
//[[]]\\
Here's a subset of that structure:
[]
Here's another subset:
]\
Quoting Jamesk
What the heck would it matter if there is more of the same sorts of molecules, etc. than different? How would that in any way be relevant to anything I'd said?
Quoting Jamesk
Again, what would a quantification matter there? Why would we be quantifying whether there are more mental than non-mental brain processes?
Quoting Jamesk
"Living" doesn't at all seem to be sufficient for "thinking."
Quoting Jamesk
Brains don't continue to increase in terms of extensional boundaries--your head doesn't keep getting bigger, obviously, but brains certainly keep developing as long as you're alive.
Re the "principle of charity," what would you say is the explanation re it seeming like you're trolling, or like you maybe never really had any science education?
Quoting Jamesk
For example, did you learn nothing about brains in biology? I can give you some basic info or direct you to some online resources, but what this seems like to me is you trying to argue in kind of a cocky way from a position of near-complete science illiteracy.
Well in the case of the Grateful Dead it is something that they believe that they sense. They also believe that it is music :)
That's your thesis. And you're telling me it as if it's some revelation, as if I either pay as little attention to what you say as you pay to what I say, or as if I'm also going to pretend that I have no memory, that my brain is a sieve.
I know you're not a physicalist. I am a physicalist, and presumably you know this. Repeating that you're not a physicalist isn't an argument against physicalism.
I think that is called doing philosophy. If I wanted a scientific discussion / debate I wouldn't expect to find it on A PHILOSOPHY FORUM.
Philosophy isn't about pretending to be ignorant. You don't do good work in philosophy by feigning ignorance, or feigning an inability to reason, etc.
Actually it kind of is.
What in the world would be the definition of "argument" you'd be using? "Saying something contrary to"?
Part of it is
Haha . . . we have enough problems without people pretending to be morons.
That he doesn't accept your premise and has not been convinced by Bose-Einstein condensates
Why can't we just go, "An idea as such can hardly not be matter because ideas are matter"?
At least Socrates thought so :)
So all I ever need to do with you in order to present an argument is disagree with you? Sweet.
Too bad I didn't have you as a professor.
https://youtu.be/uLlv_aZjHXc
What was your question? Was it "Is a letter some ink or a brain state?" If so, it depends on the context. it can be both. Sometimes it's just one or the other. (And of course, sometimes it's things other than ink, too.)
No, I'm saying the idea that there are "literal physical laws obtaining everywhere" is inexplicable on the position that energy or matter is the universal substance, and logically incompatible with the idea that all connections between things obtain mechanically. To repeat, the vast distances between some things makes such mechanical (energetic) connections impossible due to the limitation of light speed.
And what would that be, as explained in physicalist terms?
Then you weren't addressing what I asked you to address and you instead wanted to change the topic to something you wanted to talk about instead.
You had said that the idea of physicalism amounting to a "radical, brute separation of all things from one another" was a logical conclusion. I asked you to explain the logic--to show your work basically.
Why change the topic to natural laws? (I'm not a realist on natural laws, by the way.)
How can you claim to be a physicalist and not be a realist on natural laws?
What do you see as the conflict there? It's difficult to explain to you without having some idea of what you'd believe to be the conflict.
Actually I didn't say that at all; I said that the idea of the physical is the idea of the radical separation of things. Of course I was talking about actual spacial separation between things; that is the basic idea of physical things occupying actual spacial locations that are radically distinct from one another.
If you are not a "realist" on natural laws then you don't believe that the universe everywhere behaves in the same general ways re electromagnetic energy, subatomic particles, gravity, entropy and so on?
Natural laws are ways to think about phenomena we observe.
There are regularities, but not because of laws that somehow exist as an abstract whatever.
In my view there are no real abstracts. I'm a nominalist in that and other senses.
So how do those regularities obtain across regions that are energetically separate from one another in your physicalist view?
And who said anything about abstracts? Who is changing the subject now, eh?
So there goes the identity. Ideally a letter is some kind of sign.
Now I don't quite know what you want to hear. Their nature is expressed by the laws thereof. Tautologies do not always have ideal content.
It's simple the properties of the particulars in question.
The other alternative would be that the properties of the particulars would be random. But why would we assume that?
There goes the identity in the sense of it being just one thing, yes. Again, I'm a nominalist. Every instance of a letter, number, etc. is unique.
What is unique? The ink or the brain-state?
So, what in physicalist terms would the "properties of the particulars" be? Are the particulars and their properties different from one another?
Every instance of anything. Every ink mark, brain state, etc.
For example, the charge of an electron, the mass of a neutron, etc.
Are they different? Yes, they're not identical. The nonidentity of discernibles is pertinent here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalism
I didn't say "The letter is not a letter." What a letter is depends on context. They're ink marks on paper, brain states a la particular ideas/concepts (such as the symbol you referred to), and so on. That doesn't mean it's not a letter. Those things are what a letter is.
What makes you think I want to hear anything other than your view on the matter?
So, you're saying that the laws that govern or determine the behavior of things just are their nature? And that tautologies have physical content sometimes? What could that mean?
So, again I ask you what the laws that govern things, or their nature (which is the same thing according to you) are as understood in physicalist terms. Are they energy, matter, or something else?
So, what is the mass or the charge of an electron if it is something other than the electron itself? And what is the electron itself if it is something other than its mass and/ or charge?
Why would it be something other than the electron itself? I don't understand why you're asking that.
Quoting Terrapin Station
And nontheless you know it is unique? If we were looking at the same letter the problem is quite obvious.
Quoting Janus
The development of their spatio-temporal relations. We are talking about "things"(Kant: "Ding"). Those are always physical.
The "development of their spatio-temporal" relations is their behavior and the laws are usually understood to be what determines their behavior. You seem to be saying they are the same thing; so are you saying that their behavior is determined...by their behavior?
Different properties, not different than the matter they're properties of.
I'm saying the properties are different a la nominalism/contra universals or "type realism"
Unique a la nominalism.
The idea is that the behavior of things would be random if nothing determined it to be invariant or regular; if there were no universal principles, in other words. Why would you expect things to behave invariantly across vast regions energetically separate from one another, or even locally, if nothing determined that?
What you have given here is just a bunch of words, a trite formula, that really explains nothing. You think your position is cogently explained, but it is really no more coherent than the idealist alternative. In some ways the latter might be thought to be more coherent since it is more compatible with the unity of all things.
So, what is nominalism as explained in physicalist terms?
What you do not seem to grasp is that the mind is all reality only for itself.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/235371
Of course our conceptions of the laws are "derived" from the observed behaviors of phenomena. So, are the laws nothing more than our conceptions of them then?
If not, then it would seem to be saying nothing at all to say that the behavior of phenomena is determined by its laws and that the laws that determine the behavior of phenomena are determined by the behavior of the phenomena. What determines that the behavior of all phenomena everywhere is the same?
The rest of what you said is unintelligible to me.
But what are those universal regularities if they are anything beyond our conceptions of them? They can't just be the individual things that are regulated, because they are common to all things. And they can't just be energy because of the problem of separation by great distance I have highlighted a few times now (and which you are yet to address).
They do not not say anything about the things. Reality is negative.
That means nothing to me; it's just words...
You know it means nothing? Then why not remain silent?
If you think that what you said does mean something significant and it is just my failure to find that meaning at play here, then you are welcome to explain further. Or not, it's really up to you.
I don't own a rocker, so it's not my rocker that I'm off, I'm off all the rockers.
Quoting DingoJones
That's right, I'm saying that we sense individual pieces of clothing, like particular t-shirts. We do not sense what is referred to here as "clothes", when you say "t-shirt are clothes". if you do not understand that then I'm sure that you are the one confused, not me.
Quoting Terrapin Station
If you would have paid attention to what I said, instead of just saying "you're off your rocker", perhaps you might understand some of these things. Dismissing someone with such a statement, when you recognize that what they say is true, but you don't want to agree with it, because it conflicts with some of your beliefs, is pure nonsense.
In other words, don't ask the question if you're not going to accept the answer. That's just being a troll.
Why would we expect it to be random? What makes the default the default?
You didn't actually quote anything there, so I'm not sure what post you're referring to.
Re "really explains nothing," explanations are merely sets of words (or mathematical symbols, etc.) that an individual interprets so that it quells some of their "mystery to me" feeling. This, of couse, means that it's a matter of psychological factors. The individual's beliefs, biases, intellectual capabilities, and so on, all have a significant bearing on whether any particular set of words scratches that "it's a mystery" itch for them. That makes whether something counts as an explanation interesting primarily for what it tells us about the person in question's psychology.
What's not going on is that the set of words is "really" explaining or not explaining whatever it's about. Whether an explanation is successful is always a subjective judgment.
Quoting Janus
There's not a different "physicalist brand of nominalism." The Wikipedia entry I referenced covers the basics.
I already answered that. They're properties of the particulars in question. There's no reason to expect the properties of the particulars in question to be random.
Random behavior is unregulated (that's what 'random' means); so if there were no laws to regulate the behavior of phenomena, then the behavior of phenomena would be random. Since the behavior of phenomena is not random but seems to be universally invariant we have reason to think that there is something that we would call a law which gives rise to that universal invariance.
Each particular has its own regularities or invariances, but there is a universal web of regularity or invariance which seems to unify the individual regularities and invariances across all space and time.
Although the particular regularities may be thought to be properties of the particulars that instantiate them the universal web of invariance cannot be thought to be merely a property of particulars. And you still haven't addressed the problem of energetic interaction that arises due to the separation of things by vast distances.
"Random" means that if there were 5 possible properties, then over many iterations, 1 is going to occur 20% of the time, 2 is going to occur 20% of the time, etc., for no reason/just arbitrarily.
There's no reason to expect that that would be the case. Expecting that it would be the case is making an assumption about what the world is like by "default." But we have no way to know that.
If there are 5 possible properties, then maybe 1 and 2 are going to come up the vast majority of the time. There doesn't need to be anything to regulate this, it can just be the case as a brute fact. It can just be the way that things happen to be.
What in the world is that even referring to?
No, that limited notion of randomness always already presupposes the operation of natural laws. If things were truly random, no such statistical regularities would reliably occur.
Thank you for your kind response. I think this is a great issue, and I thought that we were at least in agreement on some insight that was worth clarifying. I look forward to your response.
I can't think how it would be possible to avoid statistical regularlties. If there are multiple possibilites, either they're all going to occur more or less evenly or some are going to occur significantly more than others, and both of those will appear to be regularlities.
Don't be obtuse: it refers to the idea that natural invariance manifests across all space and time.
Or just speak plainly. I'm still not even sure what you're referring to here. I'm not going to lie and say I know what you're referring to when I'm not sure.
Actually that's not true. Their always occurring more or less evenly is a regularity. There not always occurring more or less evenly would be a true randomness.
So you don't know what it means to say that natural invariance manifests across all space and time?
Okay but if 1 and 2 (out of 5 possibilities) occur the vast majority of the time, then that would simply appear to be a "law" that either 1 or 2.
No, I'm not sure what that's supposed to refer to, because all I believe exists are particulars.
But if nothing occurred "the vast majority of the time" that would be true randomness.
Then we're going to tend toward all the possibilities occuring more or less evenly, which is what you said wasn't randomness.
Again, given a set of possibilities, there are only two choices:
(1) all the possibilities occur more or less an even number of times
(2) some of the possibilities occur a significant number of times more than others
You don't have to believe in something to know what it means, do you? Putting it differently do you believe the behavior of particulars (in the broadest sense of course!) is invariant across all space and time?
It has to refer to something coherent.
Quoting Janus
Invariant--never changing? the same?
No to either one of those. Otherwise how are you using that term?
No, I said that true randomness would be that there are no determinate possibilities at all. Flowers might spontaneously transform into lions; anything might become anything else, or simply disappear and so on.
So, the very fact that we are "given a set of possibilities" means that things are not truly random.
"No determinate possibilites" isn't coherent in my view.
And if you're saying something like "infinite possibilities," then you're reifying mathematical concepts.
I have no idea, because I'm not clear on either how you're using the term "invariant" or "random" at this point.
If the world were truly random; no conversation would be possible; so in that sense, yes, if there were no determinate possibilities the world would be incoherent. But we live in a coherent, intelligible world, which fact requires that there be universal regularities. If you can't understand that, then I don't know else what to say.
The problem is that at this point I'm not clear on how you're using the term "random," but you're just using it in a sentence anyway, and then you go ahead and tack on the phrase "no determinate possibilities," when I think that phrase is incoherent.
OK, well there's not much point continuing if the discussion has exceeded your intellectual capacities. :wink:
Not to mention your poor teaching abilities. (Under the charitable interpretation that you're not just forwarding nonsense at this point.)
My "teaching abilities" or the coherence of what I have been saying would be in question if no one, or even the majority of people, could understand it (for which it is not necessary to agree, obviously). I doubt that is the case, and on the basis of a sample size of one who says he cannot even understand what I have been saying; I find poor comprehension skills, limited imagination or simply refusal to admit understanding, as an evasive tactic, to be more likely explanations.
Right, and just a few hours ago you were talking about the existence of music, and matter. How you contradict yourself.
I can relate to this project. What I meant by 'weight' was something like a clarifying force. Any 'ism' that doesn't understand what motivates its opposite is likely to be shallow and miss exactly the part of the problem that the other side sees. Framing the situation as the combat of positions might already stultify the pursuit of that coherent description of what is. At the very least a one-sided position that sees its opponent as absurd is failing to give a plausible account of that opposing position. If one really understands the opponent, then one can trace the logic of that opponent to the place where it goes wrong.
From my perspective, idealism and materialism both see complementary aspects of what is. For me the natural move (and maybe the natural move of thinking in general ) would be to synthesize these insights (which various thinkers have already tried to do.) IMV it's illuminating to consider what the idealism vs. materialism debate presupposes in order to exist as a debate. What does philosophizing 'blindly' assume as it speaks outward about what is to others?
Some people refuse to admit when they are in over their depth, they will twist and challenge everything rather than accept that they may be wrong about something. This has been an excellent discussion thread that Terrapin is intent on degrading down to a level where he can make his points heard.
If I could go back and delete all of his posts from this thread we would actually have a pretty solid piece of philosophy here. Thank you Meta, Janus and wayfarer, you have all brought valuable points to the discussion. I suggest that we just stop answering this Terrapin until he starts doing some philosophy.
I agree, and denying this would seem to make the very project of philosophy senseless. What is one denying exactly if there is no shared worlds or similar minds? We are talking to others about something relevant to or existing for us all.
What maybe becomes interesting then is what is means for us to able to talk to another (to share in a language.) Just as we talk about the objects we share in one and the same world, we really on something like a realm of shared concepts that are there not only for our senses (the sound of voice and the sight of faces and marks) but also for some other hypothetical faculty (an innate capacity to largely live 'in' this realm as we live among the usual objects.) The ego that proclaims its isolation in the 'I am' and 'I doubt all that is not me' uses concepts are already intelligible to others. Anyone can speak the 'I,' so that the 'I' refers beyond the pituitary gland from which it spies on a perfectly private realm.
Exactly. In some ways collapsing distinctions (this is 'really' just that) is simply moving backwards on the dialectical trail. A forward movement might instead take up those same distinctions 'under erasure' as partial and therefore incomplete truths or positions. A stitch in the coherence tempts us either to ignore it or fix it with more narrative or thinking. Distinctions accumulate. Our thinking becomes more differentiated and complex, containing our previous positions along with their limitations and what we did to synthesize them and proceed. From this position accepting the 'X versus Y' framework as we find it (uncritically) is itself the confusion. The staging of the issue is the heart of the issue perhaps.
I think a vague dualism is defensible in terms of understanding the distinction to be non-absolute. Another fix might be to recognize the intrinsic 'sociality of reason' (Terry Pinkard). None of this has to be understood in mechanical terms (like perfectly distinct matter-stuff and mind-stuff.)
As I see it, our life among both others with minds like our own and things without minds is more or less primary. Calling everything mind or matter even looks like a strange game from this perspective. What is the urge that drives such a project? Why cover over the complexity with a renaming that abolishes all living distinctions? Do I eat 'mind' when I eat a triscuit? Is my own mother 'really' just matter? We can assert such things and even defend them, but we don't stop treating triscuits and mothers and very different entities. This gap between theory and practice fascinates me. For me it points back to a questioning of the questioning. Why or how am I invested in materialism versus idealism? What is at stake?
I agree that our highest or most individual selves are in something like our (passionate) minds. What to me is fascinating is that our highest reaches of individuality are directed 'outward' toward an ideal community. I am most fascinated by that in 'myself' which transcends me in some sense, but not as an 'alien' object. Instead what I have in mind is a best self that I can live toward or up to, along with a sense of the universality of the virtue involved.
Personally I'd give wealth, beauty, and fun their due --especially beauty and fun (the worship of wealth for its own sake is hard to defend.) For me beauty and fun live at the heart of philosophy. Ultimately I think we want our lives to be beautiful and fun, which is not to insist on some shallow beauty or fun but quite the reverse. What I have in mind is a natural movement toward 'deep' beauty. Perhaps the incoherence or ignorance of an account of what is (of a philosophy) is a kind of ugliness that we seek to repair, so that the pursuit of truth is also a pursuit of beauty. Confusion is a kind of disharmony, perhaps, and thinking is a harmonization that simultaneously creates a new dissonance to be overcome (until maybe, as part of the philosophical dream, a final and stable harmony is achieved that no longer needs to be fixed.) Personally I think we never get to a point where the real stops trembling, but I do think we can live more and more in a sense of harmony (or at least more often in a sense of harmony which is maybe more intense.)
That is your Kantian position.
Quoting sign
And here we have your Utilitarian / hedonist position.
The trick is finding a balance between the two. If you were only allowed to stick to one of these positions, which one would you choose? Which one has priority?
Must we fit it into that jacket? IMV, what I am pointing at is likely to interpreted 'mechanically' or in terms of fixed entities. I have something more organic, familiar, and yet elusive in mind. What do your words aim at? They are directed outward not only to me but to anyone who sees them. Do they not aim for further clarification, beyond the current grasping of the situation? And is this further clarification not only mine but anyone's? The clarified truth I strive toward is not just mine and yet it is not alien to me. It is where we all (ideally) meet.
For me there is a deeper kind of structure than the image of the ego viewing the world through some eternal filter. This structure makes that image presentable and valuable in the first place. I have in mind something language understood in its full mysteriousness.
I am more guilty here. I do propose that we think in the direction of happiness. The word 'pleasure' has a crude connotation. We think of pleasure seekers who neglect the potential for higher states of being. But I find it hard to separate high states of being from some kind of positive feeling, something like a 'deep' pleasure. The pleasure I take in philosophy has a depth or height than typical more-bodily pleasures. I personally still wouldn't oppose lesser pleasures as the enemy of higher pleasures. It may be that a robust sensuality and 'emotional intelligence' in 'the guts' is even essential to the heights of thinking --especially if thinking is directed finally at an ideal community. We have to bring truth to the other as a gift and be open to that same gift for others. The rest largely seems to be a kind of will to claim the center akin to hoarding all the gold. An unfriendly argument just bangs positions together with no interest in synthesis and communion.
Sir may currently choose between jackets made from three types of material, Virtue, Duty, and Consequence. Once you choose the material there are further choices of 'cut' and 'style' for Sir's jacket, but yes the options are quite limited until someone invents or discovers a new concept. :)
In search of our own pleasure we ignore the plight of the weak and of those yet to be born. IMO we need to have duty as the main position for morality. A duty to ourselves, to others, to the world, and to future generations. We must learn to forfeit pleasure for long term security.
OK. How would you categorize the idea that virtue is itself already 'heaven'? It feels good to be good. There are different ways to feel good, but some of the best ways to feel good involve sharing something like beautiful truths with others.
You do touch on a profound issue here. For me to enjoy my 'negative theology' next to my space heater and my clock radio playing classical music, I have to do nothing about a particular person in my mind who may be outside without shoes right now in a tent (it's been cold here.) In theory I could be hosting this person, but this person is in their situation exactly because they tend to turn order into chaos (and recently squandered an unearned, relative fortune on drugs in a spree.)
In short I do see a certain guilt and violence in even the higher pleasures. We are entering Nietzschean terrain. Is the suffering of many justified by the heights that a few can reach? If we embrace duty, on the other hand, are we not instituting a structure of infinite deferral? When are we finally done working and living for the future, a future that only arrives with its own future? I don't have easy answers here. Personally I embrace my 'selfish' yet community-directed higher pleasure. Are we caught within some intrinsically elitist structure? If you or I present duty as above beauty, for instance, are we not raising those who agree with us to a superior status? And is there no pleasure in the sense of such status? A pleasure in righteously denying pleasure?
And what of the pleasure in imposing the truth of duty as above pleasure? Let's think where duty-as-absolute is going. Was it a 'sin' in some sense for Mozart to write his piano sonatas? It may be so. But can we regret that sin?
Kant said that happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.
Nietzsche said that man does not strive for happiness, only the Englishman does that.
Rawls makes an important distinction between good and right, with right taking priority.
You have no way of supporting such a generalization. People fall on hard times through no fault of their own, or by being unlucky. We are all just accidents of geography and family. Those who may have fallen into chaos also cannot be judged, we are all victims of circumstance and you really shouldn't judge anyone until you have walked a mile in their shoes.
I like the sentiment. I wasn't generalizing though. As I said, I had a particular person in mind. I have lived the difficultly of the situation of defending the order and happiness of my household against the claim of another.
As far as ideal shoulds, I'm not against them. (And if I was it would be an ideal should itself, I think.) But it's not really about anything as abstract as judging. It's more concrete than that. Do you give the junky who knocks on your door at 3AM money for 'food'? Do you let your brother-in-law crash when he very well might steal from you or set your house on fire? One says 'yes' or 'no,' whatever the complexity of one's mental state. Is everyone innocent in some sense? I think so. But that 'in some sense' doesn't slay the dragon of living through concrete situations. If a friend confesses to me that he has committed adultery, am I bound to tell his wife, an acquaintance? [This is a fictional example.] My current view on the matter is a distrust of any algorithmic approach to such things. The problems of real life are something like a collision of duties and values. This does refer back to your essentially Christian perspective (the forgiveness of sin.) As I act within a certain ignorance and darkness toward the good imperfectly grasped, making my own mistakes, I have to forgive other imperfect approaches. I have to try to understand why so-and-so did something I wouldn't have done. Can we learn without a certain openness or forgiveness of difference? Right here and right now the possibilities of our conversation depend on an mutual openness toward one another.
There was a great bit on the trolley problem in The Good Place. This show puts the ethicist in a Hell disguised as Heaven (for being endlessly indecisive and closed off to others in his righteous self-absorption.) He is joined by a stereo-typically selfish and cynical person along with a person obsessed with fame (in terms of charity as conspicuous goodness, of course) and a low-minded dummy. Of course they are all lovable in their way, and they become lovable largely as they learn to love and forgive one another and work together against the devil who runs the place disguised as an angel. In the second season this devil joins them. It was his idea to try a new form of Hell that looked like Heaven and yet was designed to shame its guests. They kept figuring out it was an illusion by coming together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfIdNV22LQM
This second part is where it gets hilariously concrete and gory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWb_svTrcOg
We have had a few of those in this thread so far :)
Quoting Jamesk So asking people to ignore someone who doesn't hold your views and doesn't conform to how you think a philosophy discussion ought to be is doing philosophy?
Quoting Wayfarer All is quantifying all instances (not universals :wink:) of the predication of existing with the predication of being particulars. In predicate logic form: ?x(Ex?Px).
Please read all of his posts before commenting. There is only so much I can take from someone who keeps contradicting his own theory. I am expressing no views here, only discussing two theories.
I will defend each side as equally as I will attack them both. If Terrapin wants to make sophistic arguments then I just ask he does it somewhere else.
It seems to be the other way around.
Science implies an interconnectedness between everything. You cannot exist without air, water or food. Atoms are just relationships between protons, neutrons and electrons. I have come to realize the interconnectedness of everything through my understanding of science.
When I was religious, there was a separateness that was implied. I was separate from nature - a spirit in a physical world. Dualism implies the same thing - seperateness.
Indirect realism allows for the world to not appear as it actually is. It appears as a representation and how it is represented makes many believe that that is how it actually is. Indirect realism implies that it may appear to be a world of separate objects when in essence everything is interconnected. Science shows this to be the case.
It seems logical that indirect realism would lead many to use some explanation of dualism to explain how they see the world and how they see their mind, but this ignores the fact that the mind and world interact and would be the same type of thing.
This is begging the question. What is it about "physical" and "non-physical" that are different?
Quoting JameskWe used to think that it was fantasy that human beings would walk on the Moon. What science has done since it's formal inception (the Scientific Method) is beyond what religion and philosophy have done and science has only been around a fraction of the time.
Quoting Jamesk Finally you made an attempt to answer my question.
This is wrong. I already went over this with Wayfarer and he didn't disagree.
Measurements are comparisons between similar things, like the length of a meter stick and the length of a rope, or the change in the hands around a clock's face and the change in you falling asleep and waking up again. You measure ideas by comparing them to other ideas. What is it about an idea that you want to measure - it's impact on society, it's coherence? Ideas can be measured empirically.
Science explains the smallest unit of matter as protons, neutrons and electrons (or maybe quarks now). The arrangement and amount of protons, neutrons, and electrons dictate the the type of element that emerges on a larger size scale, and the amount and number of atoms dictate the emergent property of molecules on an even larger size scale, and so on, up to galaxies and universes.
What would be the smallest unit of the mind? Ideas? Sensory impressions? It seems to me that it would be the latter as all of our ideas, knowledge, imaginings, language itself is composed of sensory impressions - colors, shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, etc. These things come together to form the contents of our minds (emergent properties).
So, which is it? Is the world composed of sensory impressions or quarks?
Indirect realism implies that we would think of the world as dualistic - of being some way independent of how we perceive it. If the world isn't really how we see it, then it probably isn't composed of quarks or atoms, or brains. Brains would simply be a representation of the mind. In a sense, the world would be mind-like but that would be making a category mistake deriving from an anthropomorphic worldview. It would be like a tree claiming that the primary substance is wood-like because that is what the tree is and the world interacts with it so the rest of the world must be wood-like too.
It might make more sense to say that primary "substance" is processes, or relationships. Minds are just a process or relationship. Another term I like to use is, "information". I have referred to the world as being a relationship between causes and their effects. Effects carry information about their causes and information would actually be that relationship between causes and their effects.
As beings in and of the world, our minds are a process of a certain frequency relative to all of the other processes. This relativity between minds and the world are what creates this visual representation of objects. Causal relationships that are very slow in changing relative to how fast our minds process it appear as stable, solid objects. Causal relationships that have higher frequency of change appear as blurs, or aren't perceived at all (think of how reptiles are lethargic when they are cold, and how they perceive the world would be different than if they were warmed up. Their minds process information faster and faster change would appear to slow down.) Our own minds have subjective perceptions of time based on our own mental states. In other words, our minds stretch these causal relationships into what we call space-time, and these causal relationships are the fundamental units of reality.
At least you have humility.
Someone like me who thinks that only particulars exist does not think that concepts do not exist (concepts simply are particular ideas in particular heads), and that's all that abstracts/universal terms are. And we don't think that the stuff that the concepts are in response to don't exist--we just think that those are particulars, too. So things like songs, symphonies, etc. are examples of music. When you experience a song you experience music. And as someone else already pointed out to you, "song," "symphony," etc. are just as much abstracts/concepts/universals/forms/type-terms--whatever you want to call them. The only thing that wouldn't be is a proper name for a particular.
So if your point had been to say that one can't experience a universal, then you wouldn't say that you can experience songs or trees, either.
On a view that's realist about universals, where one thinks that universals are some sort of real abstract that exist who-knows-where-maybe-nowhere-and-everywhere, or whatever nonsense one might believe, then sure, you could say that you can't experience universals (which again would include things like songs and trees), but those sorts of beliefs are extremely muddled, and you can't assume that everyone believes such nonsense.
You have made Berkeley's point. Only ideas can resemble ideas. You cannot compare the idea of a tree with a tree or with anything else except another idea. All we know immediately are our ideas and we don't know enough about our own biology to say much more.
Yes indeed we have been to the moon and made some stunning advances in technology since Berkeley's time, however we still produce electricity from steam and use our technology to make smart phones and social media.........
In Berkeley, there's no non-idea tree is there? If you're claiming there is, what would be the textual evidence of that?
And whether that's in Berkeley or not, if one has ideas of trees and trees and there's a difference, then one isn't an idealist--at least not an ontological idealist.
That's what I was trying to get at with asking how we go from a phenomenal tree to thinking "that's just an idea," but no one has really answered that yet.
One difference is that idealsts are saying that not every existent has mass, but materialists are saying that they do.
But you and Berkeley are saying that the tree (the external tree, not the idea of a tree) is an idea too. If everything is an idea, including the things external to your mind, then of course you can measure your idea of a tree in your mind to the tree external to your mind (which you and Berkeley say is in the mind of God which makes it just another idea)).
Which existent do idealists say has mass (you said not every...so some might)?
Mass is the amount of matter in an object, so you are begging the question. You have to accept that there is "matter" to say that there is "mass". Again, the materialist just says that the mind is an arrangement of matter and therefore has mass. Are there minds with more "mass" than others? That is to say, do minds have different amounts of content (mass)? What is the difference between "matter" and "mind" and how would this difference still allow them to interact?
Irrelevant. Saying that not every existent has mass is different than saying that they do, isn't it?
This doesn't answer my question, nor address the main point in my post (but that is what I should expect from you by now). I was simply asking what existents that idealists say have mass, Terrapin. Answer the question.
...and you skipped this part:
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, I'm not going to be distracted.
You said, "Yet you haven't been able to explain the difference in what they are saying."
I said, "One difference is that idealsts are saying that not every existent has mass, but materialists are saying that they do."
Is that a difference or not?
Actually it's "No, I can say shit and not back it up."
Is that a difference or not?
I already said it isn't. Because you are begging the question. Mass is an amount of matter, so you are simply saying that materialist claim that matter exists while idealists say that it doesn't. I asked you what is the difference between "matter" and "mind", or "ideas".
Re "begging the question" that's only pertinent to arguments per se, no?
We can talk about that after we finish the other thing first.
Re "begging the question" that's only pertinent to arguments per se, no?
Quoting Harry Hindu
I asked this question a million times before your question about begging the question. Maybe if you try to answer it, you will see why I said you're creating a circular argument.
All I care about at the moment is addressing "Yet you haven't been able to explain the difference in what they are saying" because you keep saying that even though I've explained differences in what they're saying many times.
And I keep reiterating that what they say is incoherent.
Re "begging the question" that's only pertinent to arguments per se, no?
Which is irrelevant. All that's relevant is if they're saying something different.
I already went over this with you. Saying two different things that are both incoherent isn't really saying anything different, other than simply using different sounds, or scribbles that don't refer to any actual state of affairs, like differences between what matter is and what ideas are.
"X is flooble."
"X is not flooble."
Are those saying something different?
You wrote, "Yet you haven't been able to explain the difference in what they are saying"
Meaning is subjective and can't be shared. Do you want different definitions?
Because in order to say anything, it must be coherent, or else you haven't really said anything. You've simply created a bunch of scribbles or sounds.
"Xyrchitz" is different than saying "Xyrchits". But what am I saying? What do I mean?
So what you're really asking for is not what they're saying that's different, and not whether they think about it differently, or whether they think that the nature or the world is different. You want to know what one side or the other is saying differently that you find to be coherent, that makes sense to you.
That's making it about you, no?
(I'm not disagreeing with you, by the way, but this makes it about you, about your understanding.)
If the concepts of "matter" vs. "ideas" are coherent to you then why is it so difficult to answer the question? I'm trying to get at the state-of-affairs that is independent of what we say or believe. What is "matter" and what is "mind"?
Right now I'm clarifying what you're even asking.
You're asking something about your own understanding, right?
No, I'm asking about "matter" and "ideas" and how you understand the difference. You've only supplied a difference in scribbles.
Coherence is always to someone, isn't it?
Okay, so then your idea of "matter" and "mind" is only coherent to you, then.
It is when something is coherent to many, not just one, that we make strides in objective knowledge.
Are you asking if something is coherent to someone else? Or to yourself?
The only way we're going to get anywhere is by doing this "game."
I'm not going to keep addressing the same things over and over. It's only going to work if we go step by step.
I wasn't asking anything. I was simply reiterating what you said - that your concept of "matter" and "mind" are only coherent to you, and that isn't enough. Coherence isn't subjective. It follows rules of logic that are the same for everyone.
No. It would be by answering the question that you keep avoiding.
So, we don't at all agree on this, and we don't at all agree about logic, either, including that I think that logic is subjective, and obviously, even for those who do not, there are many different species of logics, some incompatible with others.
So then why are you trying to be coherent to others when you speak? How is it that you expect them to understand anything that you say? Do words mean things? Are they coherent?
Whether you will participate in getting somewhere is up to you, but I wasn't asking your opinion about what was required. I don't consider you qualified to know.
That would be a whole big tangent about how communication works that wouldn't help you figure out what the difference is between what idealists and materialists are saying, which is all I'd want to accomplish.
It is very difficult for you to stay focused. I wasn't asking about how the difference in that post. I was asking how you can expect others to understand you if coherence is subjective.
You obviously have issues that won't allow you to engage in any real, meaningful discussions. I'm done.
What I'm focused on is you understanding the difference of what idealists and materialists are saying.
A tangent about communication, which is what that would be, won't help us get to you understanding the difference betwen what idealists and materialists are saying.
The correspondence between mental states and physical conditions ties them together in such a way that their causes are not to be separated into different kinds of existence. For the purposes of studying the physical as the cause of those states, it is an eminent example of operational assignment of meaning as per Bridgeman.
However far it can proceed on that basis, the theory goes forward on being able to explain itself against objections to its claims. The success or failure of the correspondence does not inform other ways of talking about substances because those meanings are not germane to the project as given.
While the theory revokes the use of other kinds of explanation, it does not refute them as something proven by deduction. Aren't you in danger of "reifying the instrumental" by using it in this fashion?
The limits you argue for remind me of Kant's rhetoric in the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics.
And I already told you I'm not interested in the difference of scribbles or sounds. I'm interested in the difference of what those scribbles and sounds mean. In order for a word to be coherent it must mean something. What do materialists mean when they say, "matter" or "mind". What do idealists mean when they use those words?
Synonyms are different words that mean the same thing. It seems to me that "matter" and "ideas" are synonyms because while they are different words, saying one would be different than saying the other, but they mean the same thing.
I don't think that physicalism is an instrumental theory but rather what's really the case ontologically. Instrumentally, it's not very practical for some things. Psychological, sociological, etc. approaches are often better suited for making predictions, where those approaches don't focus on more or less "mechanistic" explanations re what's going on in brains.
Yes. We went through that. So, given that you can't grasp the differences in what each side is saying in that regard, we need to look at what your beliefs/expectations are re meaning and coherency, so we can diagnose just what's going on for you not understanding the difference.
I was in the process of doing that when you bowed out.
One slightly alternate way to approach this is to figure out why, in your view, people aren't saying something different than each other just in case you don't believe that they're saying something coherent.
But from that alteranate approach, we still have to deal with what you understand meaning, coherence, etc. to be, because part of the issue we need to deal with is whether you can understand that to the people in question, they may be saying someting different than each other per their own understandings, even if it's incoherent to you.
For example, one person saying "Color my love brittle" and another saying "Polecats dance planets" are both saying something that's incoherent to me, at least at first blush, but that doesn't lead me to thinking that they're saying the same thing.
According to Berkeley the tree is not your idea or my idea but God's idea. So the tree is a real mind-independent (in the sense of being independent of human minds) thing. Unlike with a human idea which is to be a reflection of a concrete thing to be God's idea is to be a real concrete thing; a thing that can exist only as long as God holds it in mind.
That still makes it an idea though. So there's no non-idea tree (per Berkeley).
Yes but it's a very different kind of idea; it is an idea which is a concrete existent. It doesn't accord at all to our limited idea of what an idea is.
Also when we perceive the tree it is not the same as thinking about the tree. So perceiving the tree is using real concrete faculties to grasp a real concrete existent. In that sense it is similar to ordinary realism as Harry said. It's just that what is thought about the ultimate nature of things is different in idealism and realism.
What in Berkeley supports that he considers it a concrete existent? (Well, and where "concrete" doesn't amount to "clear and distinct" or something like that)
I already explained that; it is a concrete existent because it is thought by God. That's just what it means to be a concrete existent for Berkeley. The concrete existence of everything is on account of its being thought by God.
You're misunderstanding me. I'm not asking for you to explain anything. I'm asking for some quotations from Berkeley--some textual evidence (I had specified that earlier)-- that support the notion that he believes there are concrete things.
The substance of Berkeley's philosophy is well known. What do you think it means to be a concrete thing? To my understanding it means to be a stably persistent entity that does not depend on the human mind for its existence. How would Berkeley's things, which are stable entities in the mind of God, not qualify as concrete objects?
The more I think about it I still don't understand how it all works. How do we actually receive sense data if sense data is basically Gods ideas? If it is a Brain in a vat situation I can understand, however if it isn't then where exactly do our minds exists? How do our own bodies interact with other bodies?
I also understand the frustration people are having with this discussion of ideas and matter. I still haven't understood how the immaterial universe actually functions other than God makes it so.
Depends on the context, of course. Above, you seemed to be suggesting a context that was close to claiming a material thing.
We should simply quote Berkeley on this, though. The only thing I recall was him using "concrete" in the sense of something being a clear and distinct idea.
Good questions/comments.
Yes to be a material thing in Berkeley's view just is to be an idea in the mind of God.
Consider the well known limericks which have Berkeley's philosophy and the common sense naive realist questioning of it as their subject:
[i]There once was a man who said: "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."
Dear Sir,
Your astonishment's odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by
Yours faithfully,
God.[/i]
Of course, God both thinks into being His creation and observes it. This is not in the least unorthodox thinking in a Christian context. All things have their being in God.
There was nothing to grasp. You keep referring to what scribble or sounds an idealist and materialist makes when I'm talking about what those scribbles and sounds mean. You have only shown that they make different scribbles and sounds. You have yet to explain the difference that those scribbles and sounds mean.
I already told you that for a word to be coherent, it must mean something. If you don't mean something when you make scribbles and sounds, then you aren't saying anything, you're just making noise and scribbles (what you have been doing). When someone says, "Color my love brittle" then it is only coherent if it actually means something other than just being noise. What do they mean? That is what I ask them, and they would tell me. You can't seem to do that with words you seem so sure that you know what they mean, "matter" and "mind".
To make it coherent it must be realized that according to this view we are also ideas in the mind of God. Sense data, our sensory apparatuses, our brains, our minds, our souls are all ideas in the mind of God. So there is no problem concerning our bodies interacting with other bodies (or our souls or minds) on this view.
In your last sentence did you mean 'material universe'?
But you and Berkeley are saying that the tree (the external tree, not the idea of a tree) is an idea too. If everything is an idea, including the things external to your mind, then of course you can measure your idea of a tree in your mind to the tree external to your mind (which you and Berkeley say is in the mind of God which makes it just another idea)).
Quoting Janus
And there would be no problem with our bodies interacting if God was material and we all were material.
What is the actual difference between "material" and "ideas"? How do ideas interact with other ideas differently than how matter interacts with other matter? How are the interactions between ideas different than the interaction between matter?
Ideas can interact with other ideas purely logically I suppose whereas material objects, although they do interact with one another logically (or at least, not illogically), do not do so purely logically (although Hegel, the man who said "The rational is the real", might disagree).
In other words material objects do not logically (that is,necessarily) presuppose one another (well, not unless hard determinism is the case, anyway, and even then the necessity would be more than purely logical, it would be physical).
You completely bypassed "because part of the issue we need to deal with is whether you can understand that to the people in question, they may be saying someting different than each other per their own understandings, even if it's incoherent to you."
You're the one bypassing. Janus is actually making an attempt to answer the question thatt I'm asking. He seems to understand the question just fine. So I'll continue with him. Thanks for nothing.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes, I understand that is the theory. And it fits in with the Nominalist rejection of universals you ascribe to. But as identity theory refines itself through different iterations to more precisely perform the reduction it calls for, it starts to look more like an epistemology geared to solve problems on the basis of a finite set of assumptions. The ontology is asserted but not in relation to anything not assumed at the beginning.
How ever you wish to address that observation, it occurs to me that this element is a source of much talking past each other on this thread.
What do you mean by "purely logically"?
If matter interacts in deterministic fashion then it there are rules we can establish and make predictions with. Can you predict the behavior of ideas?
Some ideas logically presuppose other ideas; that is all I was saying.
As to determinism, if all events since the big bang have been precisely what they had to be; in other words if it is true that if you 're-ran' the Universe every event would have been precisely the same down to the smallest particle, then it could be said that objects physically presuppose ('entail' is probably a better, clearer, word) one another.
It could even be said that, in a sense they logically entail one another: ' if this one exists that one had to' and so on. But this is not a purely logical entailment insofar as you could never know precisely which future objects are entailed by present ones, you could only know in general that future objects are logically (and physically) entailed by present ones.
So to rewrite the first sentnece:
Some ideas logically entail, or are logically entailed by, other ideas.
For me this bottom-up approach is not the way to go. We can't atomize the mind and reconstruct it. Of course you mention emergent properties, so you see the problem. But I'd say that our atomizing theories themselves emerge from this same 'emergent property.'
Another way we might approach this is to 'confess' that meaning (in all its embarrassing and suspicious mysteriousness) is fundamental. The world or what exists is clearly not only 'meaning' (whatever this meaning is), of course. But existence is always already meaningfully structured. Of course we can theorize about the origin of meaning as an act of meaning.
For me we still have the problem here that 'sensory impressions' and 'quarks' are signs that point to meanings that themselves point beyond themselves. The world, in my view, is composed of (among other things) acts of meaning. The world is composed of (among other things) attempts to say what the world is composed of. I know this may sound strange. But what does it mean when a metaphysics excludes itself from the real it tries to grasp? If acts of meaning are 'unreal,' then any theory of the real is itself unreal. It's odd that a theory of the real would be satisfied with building up itself from quarks or sensory impressions that themselves function within this theory.
What comes to my mind are too 'gaps' that are related but maybe worth distinguishing. There is the gap between the individual and his community and then the gap between the community and 'language-independence reality' (a problematic but intuitively appealing concept.)
Quoting Harry Hindu
I like this kind of approach. Our experience of the world is dynamic. In some ways looking for a stilled and constantly present essence can only be looking for a useful fiction. Of course it makes sense to hunt out the constantly present. We can work with these things. A physical law that always holds is always available as a tool. A map that doesn't 'lie' by reducing the situation is useless. Even if no meaning act is a perfect repetition of another act we are still motivated to ignore the difference. A prudent ignorance (a filtering out of noise) is like our basic strategy.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Fascinating theory. I must confess that I'm still somewhat opposed to the project being framed in terms of finding fundamental units. IMV, any description of what is has to acknowledge what makes such a description possible and intelligible. I'm not saying yours doesn't, but it doesn't go into much detail about its own presence. Let's say we have a theory about what is fundamental that does not include language. Maybe it theorizes the origin of language. Yet language is also the origin of this theory of the origin. This doesn't make the theory worthless. But perhaps it calls for an enriched account.
OK, so let's go back and revisit your claim then. You said something like, "the song Kashmir is music", as an example of how we can say "this is that", without violating the law of identity. "The song Kashmir" refers to a particular, and so does "music" refer to a particular (particular idea or whatever), according to what you state here. Since these clearly refer to distinct particulars, the law of identity is definitely violated if we say "the song Kashmir is music".
I am not sure that I agree with you on this point. Berkeley says that all that exists are spirits, ideas and an infinite spirit. Are you sure that our spirits are also ideas of God? It certainly solves my problem with the immaterial universe because as you say it simply doesn't exist if our minds are only ideas of the infinite spirit, we are then in a B.I.V scenario, but is Berkeley saying that?
If he is then isn't he denying the outside world and objects in it? Which he seems committed to maintain, he states that the world is real just not material. Or is he saying that it seems real?
Music is not a particular, it is a universal, or type. It is a catagory error for you to use the Law of Identity in the way you did, there has been no violation.
Music is a general / abstract name given to different combinations of notes. Music is the general title that all pieces of music belong to as separate entities. The word music may describe a general or universal term but when you think 'music' there must be a certain 'piece of' it that supports your idea of it.
Damn I guess I need to go back and study the section on universals.
How can mind move matter? What is it to move my mind? How different is it for me to move my hand than a thought in my mind? I agree that the mind is the without-which-nothing of being fully human in some sense, so I understand the priority of mind. But maybe what we could use most is richer understanding of mind. The sort of pure mind that can't interact with matter may just be a theoretical fiction in the first place (along with some kind of pure matter.)
One thing I"m sure of is that we only start theorizing after already being in the world and learning how to use certain words. If 'mind' and 'matter' don't have sharp context-independent meanings, this would seem to limit their accuracy. And of course we live in our bodies, see through our eyes, and hear through our ears. The body is entangled with most of our thinking in an obvious way. In certain states thought has something like a maximal freedom to wander around in itself. Is this exceptional state in which the body isn't explicit quietly take as the inspiration for 'pure' mind? It seems to me that usually the mind is immersed in the body and the subject is immersed in its doing. Perhaps something that is neither matter nor mind is fundamental in some sense. We have our reasons for sorting things out. In everyday life we feel watched by and listened to by some 'objects' and not by others. Here at least a fairly sharp dualism seems to prevail.
But if determinism is the case, and we could re-run the Universe, every event would have been precisely the same down to the smallest particle, then it could be said that objects physically presuppose ('entail' is probably a better, clearer, word) one another, then it seems that all future objects are entailed by the ultimate cause. You are simply talking about knowing what the future holds as opposed to what it actually holds independent of our knowledge. Our knowledge can be wrong. Ideas can be wrong. If Idealism is the case, can ideas be wrong, and if so, what does that actually mean? It is incoherent to say that "matter" can be wrong, unless we redefine "matter" as what the mind is made of as well as everything else, in which case arrangements of matter can inaccurately represent other arrangements of matter.
I don't know what you mean by "physically" entails... What is the difference between things that physically entail one another and those that logically entail one another? It seems to me that determinism would be that logical entailment - the "rules" for which everything follows. If we were to know the "rules" we could predict every event. Nothing would be random.
Are idealism and determinism compatible? Can you logically predict ideas that haven't been realized yet? If you can't then how can you say that there is a purely logical entailment? You would have the same problem you described earlier with not knowing what present ideas entail future ones.
Thanks, I'll reply when I get a change to absorb your posts.
I know that music is a universal, and as such there is no violation of the law of identity. The point is that TS claims all things are particulars. And I told TS that a tree is not matter because that would violate the law of identity. TS claimed that a tree is matter in the same way that the song called Kashmir is music. This statement is only true and sound if universals are real.
Trees and matter are the same catagory error, even though you are trying to make a separate point.
But anyways, about Berkeley and his subjective realism: if I observed an oar in the water and it is bent then according to Berkeley, the oar does not appear to be bent, it's actually bent. But if I put my hand in the water, I feel the oar is straight! Does this mean that there are two actual oars I am perceiving?. Also, God wouldn't be any help in this matter because then either God has a different idea in mind, making three different ideas of an oar or I should call him Loki rather than God.
It is problems such as this that make me think that an objective reality is more so than a subjective reality. It is no use in asking me what I think what stuff matter actually is because I don't really know without kicking the stone, but given the choice between the two, I prefer the epistemic uncertainty of an objective reality rather than a subjective reality with it's mysterious deity. Well so much for my two cents worth! :smile:
Quoting Wayfarer
Thanks :up:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
When someone says something is real I take it to mean absolute (as opposed to being dependent or relative) in being, so particulars are absolute in being wheres universals are not so absolute but rather dependently being on something absolutely being. Such as music dependently being on absolute instruments for creation and absolute people to listen to. Trees dependently being on particular configurations of absolute matter and absolute people naming these configurations such.
100% Everything is caused by God.
I am also struggling with the distinction between determinism and fatalism.
Berkeley addresses and answers this objection in the Dialogues. Optics was actually his best subject, his book on it did much better than immaterialism.
I admit that I haven't read his Dialogues, only Principles of Human Knowledge and even then, that was a while ago. But cheers for the heads up anyway, I'll download a copy and give it a read.
In it he pretty much uncovers every possible objection to his theory and overcomes them.
Focus on the 3rd dialogue, it is where he is on a 'sticky wicket'.
Quoting Jamesk
If everything is ideas and if the ideas external to my mind are the ideas of God, then why is it easier to predict the mind of God than it is to predict the mind of another human being? There are many theories of science that make accurate predictions and are why the theories persist. In essence, science is predicting the mind of God.
So, why do idealists complain that science can't explain the mind - the human mind - like it can explain gravity or chemical reactions when gravity and chemical reactions are ideas of God? Why is our knowledge of the human mind less than our knowledge of the mind of God? How is it we can make so many predictions of the mind of God, but can't do so when trying to predict the minds of others?
Berkeley says that we don't have ideas of other spirits or of God, because an idea can only resemble an idea. We do have 'notions' of other minds and of God because of our intuitive knowledge that we have ourselves minds. The notion theory is a bit more complex than I make it out and it is one of the weakest parts of his theory.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Science can explain what gravity does but it can't explain how it happens or why, there is still no gravity equation. Newton clearly admitted that all he was doing was asserting what it does and how to measure it, that's even less than neuroscience can tell us today about 'minds'. God is not such an unrealistic alternative.
I want to add to my previous reply that I have grown uncomfortable with my description that the "ontological" turns into the "epistemological" in regard identity theory. The theory does not explain how things are known.
I am back to what I was asking before about the limits of what is being explained. The epistemology involved is how to approach what has been proposed. If I take my starting point that brains are what causes mental events, it is like the big bang theory, what happened to cause brains? Why did they develop the way did?
I can ask those questions while having no doubt that my brain is a player.
To me, what you have said here appears very confused. Why does something have to be absolute to be real? Are relations not real?
I'm familiar with his key arguments, and I don't agree that they're anywhere near as plausible as materialism; which is why, in terms of adherents, Berkeleian idealism is a minority position dwarfed by materialism. His arguments are clever enough to give one pause for thought, in a similar way to some of the arguments of Descartes or of Zeno of Elea, but that's about all they have going for them.
This is the most incoherent reply you've had yet. If an idea can only resemble an idea, then an idea is a resemblance of itself? Or, it would be that resemblances are the fundamental aspect of reality - not ideas!
"Notions" is a synonym for "ideas", so you've contradicted yourself.
"Emergent" might be the wrong word. It's a result from our size relative to the size of other things. We seem to be right in the middle with everything extending away in both space, size and time. Our minds compartmentalize space - into atoms, molecules, on up to things on our size-scale and past it to planets, solar systems, galaxies and universes. These larger things seem to "emerge" from the interactions of smaller processes if you think from "bottom to top". In order to try to get a more objective understanding of it, we'd need to think of ourselves as not having a size relative to other things. That seems difficult - maybe something we just can't grasp because having a size relative to other things fixes our subjective size-relation perception of the world and we can't escape that view of the world
I agree with your explanation of meaning. I consider meaning and information the same thing and the relationship between causes and their effects. Effects carry information about their causes. Effects mean their causes. I like to use Steven Pinker's tree rings example. Tree rings (the effect) are the result of how the tree grows throughout the year (the cause). The tree rings mean, or carry information about, the cause, which is why you can get the age of the tree by the number of rings it has.
Quoting sign
This seems like how I keep saying that the mind, including it's misperceptions, illusions and delusions, are real because they are part of reality as much as everything else. Galaxies and illusions should be part of the same substratum.
Quoting sign
As for the basic building blocks of the mind, it seems to me that it would be sensory impressions. All of our ideas, imaginings, beliefs and knowledge are composed of sensory impressions. The smallest unit I can think about is a sensory impression. For instance, I can think of just the color red, or a tactile sensation, or a sound with no meaning. Anything else I can think of, would be composed of these things. Coffee is composed of visual (black vs. w/ cream), tactile (warm liquid or iced), auditory (the sound of the coffee dripping), olfactory and gustatory units.
Even language is composed of these sensory impressions. Language is just visual scribbles or sounds. Words refer to other sensory impressions. When you think of "democracy" what fills your mind? What form does "democracy" take in your mind other than just the scribbles on the screen? How do you know that you're thinking of "democracy"? It requires an awareness of some visualization of maybe politicians vying for your vote, or citizens voting. Our minds cross-reference these visual or auditory impressions with other sensory impressions. "Warmth" refers to some tactile sensation. "Green eggs and ham" refer to a visual of eggs and ham that are colored green with maybe even an imagined smell or taste.
Can you think of anything more basic than your sensory impressions? Is that evidence of a fundamental unit of thought, or mind?
I like this and think you make a good point. This also points back to the body as the bridge between 'mind' and 'matter' as poles of a continuum (which is only one way among others to try to frame our situation.)
Quoting Harry Hindu
I like this. It's less linguistic than my approach, but that might even be good in that it blends 'mind' and 'matter' more successfully, or points further toward the matter pole.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I agree. In one sense there is nothing that isn't real. Of course people use 'real' sometimes for the physical or genuine, etc. I understand that use. But philosophy does seem to be the mission to conceptually unify and clarify experience, which means it can't ignore illusions (concepts, meanings). It has to account for its own possibility and recognize itself as perhaps even a primary entity. (Another approach thinks of thinking as radically isolated from the 'object,' not seeing that its own thinking is perhaps the essence of the 'object' it supposes itself unable to touch directly. An absolute gap is assumed and the absolute knowledge of the impossibility of absolute knowledge is produced from this assumption.)
Quoting Harry Hindu
In my view, this approach has quietly slipped into the theoretical mode without noticing it. Our everyday experience is a moving around in a world of objects and persons instantly grasped as such. Similarly we live in language (in meaning) in a kind of easy and automatic way. Heidegger is great on this issue. In one of his early breakthrough lectures, he uses the lecture room as an example in a powerful way.
[quote= link]
Heidegger takes the path of repudiating the primacy of the theoretical attitude. For him, we are never in the position of experiencing the sensedata of the Anglo-Saxon tradition.
According to this view, all perceptual experience involves awareness of an appearance, regardless of whether it is an experience of a physical object. Moreover, all our knowledge of the external world is said to be based upon our beliefs concerning the sense-data that we experience. For Heidegger, in contrast, the theoretical attitude is secondary, being predicated on the existence of a preconceptual understanding that is the basis on which we conduct our day-to-day life. We do not see sense-data, what we see – at least as students and lecturers – are, for example, chairs, desks, windows. There is no problem of the external world because we are always already in that world.
He gives the example of the lectern from which he is speaking. He doesn’t see brown surfaces, arranged in such and such a way, from which he infers the existence of a lectern; what he sees is the lectern ‘in one fell swoop’ as either too high or too low, as convenient to his purpose or not. He sees it as already something meaningful... For the young Heidegger and his audience it is simply part of the environment (Umwelt) in which they live, it has the character of a world (Welt). Further, in a neologism which is to become characteristic of his manner, he turns the noun into a verb – ‘es weltet’ – that is, ‘it worlds.’
[/quote]
https://philosophynow.org/issues/32/Towards_the_Definition_of_Philosophy_by_Martin_Heidegger
This doesn't make sensedata a useless or absurd concept, but it does reveal the idea of such data to be a theoretical tool or hypothesis. Heidegger acknowledges in the lecture that one can indeed switch into the theoretical mode and de-world an object. He can learn to see the lectern as brown surfaces. IMV, I understand the appeal of sense-data as building blocks, but I think this neglects the significance of significance itself.
An idea can only resemble another idea. I already said that the whole 'notion' business is where he starts to come undone. Notions are kind of the seeds of ideas, but we also have notions of matter.
Yes, and eventually realize that it may even be presumptuous to call this state-of-affairs a "view" where one is "seeing" brown surfaces. What the f*** is this state-of-affairs that is going on?!
I think this is a nice disassembly of coffee. In some ways we are trying to undo the mind's automatic unification of the coffee and the entire living world in which it fits. Heidegger is great when he brings the pre-theoretical world to theoretical consciousness, but he doesn't thereby cancel this project of disassembling to reassemble. In that lecture he associated transcendental idealism with this project, if memory serves. The lifeworld can be deconstructed, examined by reason, and put back together (if possible) to test our understanding of the pieces and the way they fit together.
Indeed. His word is not the last word. He does increase the complexity of the situation. If sense-data remain appealing as atoms, we at least gain a new distance from them by recognizing them as a meaning act of the theoretical gaze.
And put together into completely new configurations (imagination). This is another reason to think of sensory impressions as fundamental units.
I can at least grant that they are well-chosen atoms for certain purposes. I very much consider sensation to be fundamental. The world is not just ideas, not just meaning. It is very much sensation and emotion too. 'Being' or that which is seems to be or include (roughly, as a start) concept, sensation, and emotion. Or rather we can try to construct an external world from these subjective concepts if we choose. It's a path among others. The 'external world' and 'concept' are themselves concepts, which complicates things. Is it even correct to assume that concept is subjective or only subjective?
I am clarifying for myself that I don't object to the atomistic project. Analysis is good. I would just balance it out with a further clarification of what is already there. If we are going to explain reality (including what is called mind or reason) in terms of building blocks, then we also have to really look into the nature of reason. (Do we betray it when we only scan it for atoms to rip out of context?) Otherwise we have something like an un-opened box at the heart of our explanation. We We explain 'mind' (which includes our own ability to do) without having clarified its nature. Our attempts to explain reality add to reality and in that sense oppose themselves. (This still doesn't cancel the value of an atomistic/analytic approach.)
***
A little more on my understanding of Heidegger that might add this issue. Our pre-theoretical experience of the world is largely in terms of objects that we can just grab and use. We as the subject aren't present to ourselves much of the time. Instead we just 'are' grabbing and using. From this perspective, pure mind as opposed to pure object is a theoretical postulation. When we switch to the theoretical mode we gaze on the objects dispassionately (or of value only in the construction of generalizations.) And we are also highly conscious of the subject as we scan our own ideas for coherence. So the theoretical mode only reinforces its founding assumptions, in some sense --maybe trapping us in problems or at least trapping us in a reduced set of approaches to these problems.
Ok been reading some Dancy on Berkeley.
1. Berkeley wants to deny material substance but want to allow the existence of physical things.
2.'Physical' means part of the outside world.
3. He takes the word physical to mean material and so in one sense accepts material things
4. Does not accept that material things can exist outside of minds.
So Berkeley on one hand accepts physical objects as material things but because he doesn't accept that physical things can be mind independent . So the physical side of matter presents no conflict, only the quality matter has to exist independently stops materiel being a synonym physical.
So what Berkeley does is deny material objects while insisting on the existence of physical things.
Only minds and ideas exist (two things) but only one substance exists - minds / spirits.
That's not really how I see it. I see explanations (both right and wrong ones) as part of that causal substratum I talked about. They are just new arrangements resulting from interactions of input (sensory data) and our built-in software (genetic and life history). Explanations would be the output, no different than any output a computer produces (processed information). Explanations are causes themselves and produce effects. Everything is a process of causation (information/meaning). In essence, what is real is what has causal power.
Fair enough. How do you understand explanation? For me it's the postulation of necessary relationships. It's a grid thrown over experience. If you see this, then expect that (or project 'that' back on the past.) To get this, do that. Entities in relationship. I like this project/understanding of explanation. Clarifying/installing the causal nexus is what it looks like to me.
But I'd add that we have genesis and not just structure. The 'mind' creates new entities. Since the mind is creative, it is never finished knowing itself. It is its own product in some sense. The mind determines the nature of mind according to the memory of its own products. Meaning accumulates. The conversation becomes more complex and involves the introduction of explanatory entities that themselves end up asking for explanation. Reality swells and reflects on itself, at least if we grant the reality of ideas as deserving of explanation. Now we can box all of this up with the word 'mind' and still get some work done. I see that. This doesn't prevent our imposition of causal relationships.
This reminds me of Derrida's point taken to the extreme. I largely agree. I'm interested in the 'finite resolution' of thought in the lifestream. Meaning is 'dirtied' by sensation, history, image, metaphor. 'Pure' meaning (the ideal essence of democracy in perfect clarity) does indeed look like a fiction. But I can't go the other way and neglect what is 'ideal' in the voice and text altogether.
I think we are emphasizing different aspects of the same situation. I'm focusing on the internal evolution of the imperfectly ideal and sensation-soaked concept system. You are starting more from the stuff of the world.
Quoting sign
The original impulse behind philosophy was soteriological, in the sense of seeking an unconditional truth - understanding this one thing, all things are understood. Explanation was finding the reason for everything.
I agree with Berkeley in that regard. He reminds us that it’s a conceit to believe we can see the world as if from no perspective whatever, as if sense-knowledge is absolute. In so doing we attribute to sense-knowledge a kind of absoluteness which is not warranted. This is his principle point.
Quoting Happenstance
I understand why one would say 'if you understand anything completely, then you understand everything.' It captures that the nature of things consists largely of actual and possible relationships with other things. Things in isolation are in some sense an abstraction.
Is explanation just the projection of necessary relationships? Or does passion come into it? A sense of recognition and familiarity? One can use the word in various ways, but I'd say that metaphors the frame the situation in terms of motive and purpose have their value.
I have also gleaned from Dancy that Berkeley is only attacking the theory of materialism that also accepts spiritual substance - in which case he is also attacking Descartes and saying Rene you got it wrong, there is only one type of substance and that is spiritual
I am not clear on whether Locke accepted spiritual substance or not although I suppose he must have. Locke presents us a world created by God that runs by itself, so I guess he does allow for it.
Also Berkeley has a strict definition of 'sensible thing', for him the tree presents itself to our senses,'matter' or material substrata do not directly present themselves as 'clouds' of atoms, particles and forces. Matter presents itself in the form of the tree, all we sense is that aspect, anything more behind it is beyond our senses.
Thanks for that , but what does God, the arbiter of actuality, see? Why would he present such an illusion to us if not just the mere behaviour of physical things? I guess I'm appealing to parsimony here.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover What was confusing about it? I may be wrong about it but I thought what I typed was pretty clear! Relationships do exist, there is no denying this, as do illusions, so what is your definition of real?
This is a question to both of you, are illusions, even though they exist, real?
I see explanation as just a use of language, and language is just composed of visual and/or auditory impressions. When we explain things to others, we use our cultural language (those specific visual and auditory symbols) to communicate an explanation.
If we are just explaining it to ourselves, we may do it in our cultural language, but those scribbles and sounds still need to refer to something to mean something other than just being visual scribbles and sounds. We don't necessarily think in our cultural language, rather we think in our sensory impressions. Most of the information we receive about the world comes visually. We are visual creatures and is why most of the terms in our language refer to visual experiences, or visual models. They are the "words" (or symbols) that make up a majority our explanation of the world (world-view). We then communicate that amalgam of visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory representation of the world by converting them to specific visual and auditory symbols that we know others understand the meaning to (they refer to their other sensory units). I hope that makes sense.
Quoting sign
Going back to being skeptical of this state-of-affairs being a "view", I have to ask, "why does it appear like a "view""? What I mean is, why is there depth, not just in vision, but in our auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory symbols? That may be the one thing that they all share in common because if not for that, we could have good reason to be skeptical of our sensations being about a external world. Each sense supplies very different symbols. The fact that I can see coffee and feel coffee at the same time, isn't as good as being able to see them and feel them in the same location as well.
And it's not just depth, but the location of everything seems to be relative to a specific location - the head, or dare I say, the brain. All of our sensory impressions carry with them a location in space relative to the head. Try this experiment. Close your eyes and touch your thumb and index finger together. Move your arm slowly around and you can sense the location of that sensation moving relative to a specific location - your head.
It just seems odd that this state-of-affairs isn't a view when it certainly seems like one. And it's not just using language to call it a "view". This state-of-affairs is what a "view" would be, no?
Berkeley is a proper empiricist, all the laws of nature are preserved, real and empirically knowable. With everything being an idea of God causation is also explained. There is no necessary connection between events except Gods will, event A precedes event B because God makes it this way. God is the ultimate causal force in the universe, being finite spirits ourselves we also have some minor causal efficacy but none whatsoever exists in objects.
Meaning and coherence are subjective.
There, "music" refers to a particular as in a particular song, like "Kashmir" (and a particular instantiation of "Kashmir" at that.)
Not sure, but I suppose the doctrinal answer would be that, being omnipotent, He sees everything. I would also imagine that classical theology surmises that God sees in a way that humans - or ‘individual spirits’ in Berkeley’s parlance - cannot.
I should clarify that will only defend Berkeley up to a point. I think his fundamental intuition is sound, but the way that I interpret it is in the sense that it reminds us that we are participants in reality, and not just observers of it; ‘the world’ is not something that exists quite independently of us in the way that modern philosophy nearly always assumes. That assumption is grounded in an attitude characteristic of early modern science, which I think Berkeley also intuited, and was reacting against.
The problem resides in taking the methodological attitude of ‘objectivity’ as a metaphysical axiom, which it isn’t; because reality is not actually something we are outside of or apart from (and this shows up eventually in the so-called ‘observer problem’). But this subtle point is something that I have come to understand through the perspective of non-dualism rather than through Western philosophy per se, although once you learn to see it through this perspective, then some convergences between Western philosophical idealism and Eastern non-dualism emerge (see e.g. here.)
I agree, but you didn't go into how you understand explanation. What is an explanation?
Quoting Harry Hindu
I agree. I think being-in-a-world-with-others is something like a basic structure of experience. I see an lamp on my desk as see-able also by others and as something I can switch on for light. I expect others (within my community) to also grasp it immediately as something one can switch on for light and as something that I can see. I grasp the word 'lamp' as grasping such things in a vagueness that covers many individual lamps. So we start from somewhere like this, understanding 'too much.' And then an atomic reconstruction needs to forget this complex unity of self, others, and world through language in order to build it all back up.
In all pre-modern philosophy, there is an underlying architecture or archetype of the ‘great chain of being’, such that what is the source of being or ground of being possesses a greater or higher degree of reality than does the phenomenal domain/realm of sense/material world. That is why in classical culture, philosophy (and philosophical spirituality) is characterised in term of ‘ascent’ through higher forms of understanding. So ‘the real’ can only properly be known by the sage or philosopher who, in the Western philosophical tradition at least, ascends by the use of reason to the ‘vision of the One’ (which is the meaning of the allegory of the Cave).
This overall orientation is still visible in Hegel, but with the subsequent rejection of philosophical idealism, especially in the English-speaking world, it has basically been abandoned and forgotten, save for in the work of a few solitary individuals (see obit for Timothy Sprigge.)
These are great points and questions. An imperfect answer would be that when we are just gliding along pre-theoretically through life the notion of the external world never comes up. I am 'in' the world which is not an object for theory. I drive home for work, at one with the driving. I know that other drivers are in the same world with me. They can see the objects I see (if they are paying attention.) Sharing a world full of objects with others and a language with others is something like a foundation that obscures itself. A critic of this automatic view might talk of presupposing the external. I 'unconsciously' presuppose the reality of the everyday world. But talk of presuppositions arguably just projects a theoretical gaze that just isn't there, covering up the phenomenon of being-in-the-world.
The synchronization of our senses does seem to play a huge role in this. When we see an object, we expect that we can touch it too (though we learn that things like shadows break the general rule.)
This is that 'isolated ego' you asked me about in the other thread. The 'subject' alone with its meaning. Let's work with this view. Then the isolated subject can interpret marks and noises and approximately repeat the meaning acts of other isolated subjects, therefore generating an 'illusion' of approximately public approximate meaning. Fair enough.
For me what's strange is a naive realism (which I like in many ways) combined with an insistence on the subject cut off from direct public meaning. I see the tree, but I don't hear the other. The other spits out meaningless (but potentially meaningful) noises that I have to 'bring to life' with a 'meaning act.' And yet the tree doesn't send meaningless photons that have to be reconstituted by the subject.
All these positions are defensible, but I like the spirit of naive realism and connect it to communication as well (and that means calling meaning and coherence subjective becomes problematic.) The gap between the subject and the thing-in-itself is not unlike the gap between subjects, a kind of theoretical assumption that ignores our primary experience of the world in order to obsess over absolute certainty, etc.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "immaterial universe". It's a long time since I have looked in any detail at Berkeley's philosophy, but my understanding of its basic logic is that material objects, including we ourselves, are real, because they are thought into existence by God. Spirits or souls are also real because they are thought into existence by God. The logical corollary would seem to be that God is substance, and that 'material' and 'mental' are not different substances, but different modes of God. I see a similarity between Berkeley and Spinoza in this.
So Berkeley would not be denying the "outside world and objects in it", because that world and its objects are indeed outside those who perceive it. Of course nothing is 'outside' God. If Berkeley states that the world is real but not material; I would not think he is denying the materiality of things, but rather the idea that there is a brute, material existence of the world independent of God's thinking of it. There would still be a material existence of the world independent of our thinking and perceiving of it, though.
That's true, and that's the difference between this hypothetical deterministic 'entailment' and purely logical entailment. We can't be wrong about logical entailment (if we are being logical at least, and if were not we would not be wrong but would be missing the point).
I would not define "real" in a way so as to exclude relations from being real, such that only absolutes are real.
Quoting Happenstance
I think that this would depend on your context of usage. Illusions are very real things, the existence of which must be accounted for. However in another sense, an illusion may incline one to believe as real, what is not real. So if we assume this distinction between real and not real, we would need some principles to differentiate one from the other in this context.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You were talking about "the song called Kashmir", not a particular instantiation of that song. "The song called Kashmir" is an abstraction, a particular concept. How is it that "the song called Kashmir", and "music" both refer to the very same particular concept when you say "the song called Kashmir is music", without violating the law of identity?
Locke's view is close to deism, God as a remote 'first cause' who no longer has anything to do with the running of the world which unfolds according to mechanical causes and effects. An influential and pernicious view in my opinion.
But I think that's the correct depiction of Berkeley. He takes the reality of perceptions as primary.
Quoting Janus
Berkeley doesn't deny that material bodies exist, but your second claim is the very point that he denies. The whole point of his philosophy is to deny the reality of 'mind-independence'. 'Esse est percipe', 'to be is to be perceived'.
It's worth reading Richard Conn Henry's controversial opinion piece, The Mental Universe. He advocates an explicitly idealist/mentalist view of the world very like Berkeley, and based, he says, entirely on physics, of which he is Professor at Johns Hopkins.
If you think back to the Greeks, try and imagine the immensity of the realisation that accompanied the discovery of the faculty of reason. Consider the awe-inspiring achievements of the ancient world, such as Archimedes' discoveries in mathematics (to name but one). We're at a transitional stage between nomadism and the beginning of civilisation as we know it. The whole intellectual project was about discovering the 'logos' of things - from whence all of today's disciplines ending in -logy arose, as well as 'logic' itself. 'Reason' and 'rationality' originated with such discoveries as the Pythagorean ratios and harmonics. In that context, everything point back, or up, to the origin or source (the One, in later Platonism).
In the intervening millenia, all of that understanding became absorbed into Christian theology (for better or for worse) although many aspects of it are still visible in language and culture. But along with the overall rejection of religious philosophy by Enlightenment philosophers, much of that traditional understanding went with it. I know that I am going to be criticized for saying it, that it's sentimental or idealised or whatever, but I really think that is what happened.
So, originally, I think the search was for a kind of intellectual illumination, a seeing-into-the-first-principles as a noetic act.
Quoting Wayfarer
The second claim is only that the material existence of the world is independent of our thinking and perceiving of it, not independent of Gods' thinking and perceiving of it. So the world is 'human-mind-independent' but not 'God-mind-independent'. That seems to be the logic of Berkeley's position. This also seems to be the point of the limericks I posted earlier.
Of course I could be wrong, so if you can cite any text where Berkeley explicitly states that the world is human-mind-dependent I will gladly revise my view.
:cool:
The problem is that if you say that meaning is public, then what, exactly, would you be saying it is ontologically?
No, I'm talking about the sounds, because we were talking about experiencing it. Why would I be talking about concepts per se?
This is what you said.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Clearly you were talking about two distinct abstract concepts here, "the song Kashmir", and "music". As distinct, particular concepts, one cannot be the other without violation of the law of identity. As universals, one, "the song Kashmir", may be classed as within the larger category "music". Obviously you were not talking about experiencing sounds. If that were the case you'd be talking about what you were hearing, not about classifying the song Kashmir as music.
I think that's a great question. I'd say we have a experience/phenomenon of partially public meaning and that it's just not easy to fit in to traditional philosophical projects. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking your question is about how to categorize the being of meaning. We could only do so via meaningful signs. You also use the word 'exactly,' and that's another great issue. Granting that meaning is partially shared, is it ever shared exactly? Is any 'meaning act' ever the perfect repetition of another? If it is not, then any categorization of meaning is itself necessarily inexact. Basically we are somewhere between the exaggerated notion that a text has just any kind of meaning and an equally exaggerated notion that there is some exact/true meaning of a text (perhaps relying on the idea that the speaking subject is 'transparent' for himself, understands exactly what his own signs mean.).
*This connects to Speech and Phenomena. In some ways the dream of metaphysics can be reduced to an isolated and yet universal/transcendental mind having the meaning of its signs perfectly and exactly present for itself.
You are still making a category error. The law of identity doesnt apply to “music” and “the song of Kashmir”, music is a universal and Kashmir song a particular. It does not violate the law.
I agree. You know I love Hegel, and he in Werner Marx's view was a logos philosopher. His genius was addressing the genesis of the logos. The One or Being divides itself in order to know and recover itself in its fullness, a fullness that is only achieved by division. The acorn becomes the oak. The German idealists were thinkers of the One, but some of them stopped at an intuition of unity and 'the night in which all cows are black.' Along the same lines, some of them insisted that the 'absolute' was only grasped by feeling and not by 'the labor of the concept.' Personally I'm more open minded about grasping the absolute by feeling, while also respecting the labor of the concept. Anyway, Hegel (as I'm sure you know) was a thinker of telos. It is the nature of the One to blossom into a rich self-knowing which is also a self-creation. 'Spirit' is its own product. Theology is God, which it recognizes at the moment of its completion, one might say. Others might say that the whole story is a dazzling fiction. It speaks to me, but I understand the suspicion or disinterest of others (Hegel mostly won't help one pay the rent, etc.)
[quote=Hegel]
Spirit must know itself, externalize itself, have itself as object, must know itself in such a way as to exhaust its own possibilities in becoming totally object to itself...The goal of spirit is, if we may employ the expression, to comprehend itself, to remain no longer hidden to itself. The road to this is its development, and the series of developments form the levels of its development.
...
Now, the history of philosophy is precisely that and nothing else. In philosophy as such, in the present, most recent philosophy, is contained all that the work of millennia has produced; it is the result of all that has preceded it. And the same development of Spirit, looked at historically, is the history of philosophy. It is the history of all the developments which Spirit has undergone, a presentation of its moments or stages as they follow one another in time. Philosophy presents the development of thought as it is in and for itself, without addition; the history of philosophy is this development in time. Consequently the history of philosophy is identical with the system of philosophy.
[/quote]
I don't take this as the final word, but the idea of system as history or history as system really speaks to me.
I agree. Natural science is effective by focusing on a certain aspect of experience as it ignores others. Before long there is a tendency to think that meaning itself is unreal (!?). An 'anti-Hegelian' scientism repeats the reality of the rational by denying the reality of anything that doesn't fit into its un-criticized and narrow notion of rationality. What I call scientism ignores the tension in itself between Baconian utilitarian pragmatism and its high-flown rhetoric of about grasping the objective real without distortion. This high-flown rhetoric is what remains of its disavowed spirituality (Deism?)
I was talking about experiencing things. The whole point was talking about experiencing a tree pre-conceptually. You said that you can experience the tree but not matter, which is what led to mocking you with the music example . . . and then you decided to seriously endorse the absurdity I was mocking.
Not categorize, per se, but to say what it's supposed to be physically as something public.
For me this identification of the public and the physical is problematic. When I drive, I stop at red octagons inscribed STOP. The meaning of a stop sign is no small point, either. It makes driving relatively safe. Another culture might use yellow diamonds for a stop sign and get approximately the same result. So it can't be about the frequency of red light. Similarly the words and letters we use for the idea of stopping are contingent. What matters is that we can tell the difference between an arbitrary sign for going and another for stopping. Meaning seems to evade our typical measurement devices.
I think this makes a case that meaning can't be reduced to the physical, along with a case for the publicity of meaning. We have instituted relatively safe driving patterns with the help of such arbitrary signs. Meaning matters. It acts in the world as a public phenomenon. It works because it is public.
But TS claims that all universals are really particulars, therefore the law of identity is applicable against TS's claims.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I said we sense particular things like trees, but we do not sense matter because it is in no sense of the word a particular thing. "Matter" in no way refers to any particular thing which we sense. Where's the problem? Maybe if you could explain where the problem with this is, instead of changing the subject by making a mockery of yourself, we might be able to make some progress on this subject.
i
That's where maths comes in so handy! Nobody has to say 'whaddya mean, "7" '?
Quoting sign
I certainly get it. But idealism, Hegelian and anything like it, pretty well fell right out of favour in the English-speaking world (except for amongst 'neck-beards' ;-) ) That's the problem!
I appreciate the neckbeards allusion, but neckbeards are Dawkins fan-boys, haters of Hegel if they've ever heard of him. Neckbeards aren't sexy like Hegelians, damn it! :cool: More seriously, the stereotype is aimed at antisocial atheists who are Conspicuously Rational on social media. The steretype also suggests bad hygeine and complaints about women only liking bad boys who don't mylady them as a neckbeard might.
I saw it on reddit by chance and looked it up. It really amused me. I don't really spend much time in places where the kids make up this lingo, but I sometimes get curious. I also looked up 'Chad' and 'incel.' It's a weird world out there. I'm getting old.
Exactly. And this even helps explain scientism as a kind of pythogoreanism in love with the heiroglyphs. It's not unlike some extremely reduced kind of Platonism without a dialectic to make sense of itself. It's a strange worship of power and heiroglyphs that hasn't clarified itself , mixed with the religious idea of a universal reason in which we participate (or so it seems to me.) Of course I like this universal in which we participate. It's what makes philosophy possible (even as certain philosophers deny what makes its denial possible: meeting in a language that aims at transpersonal or objective truth.)
I like what I just briefly read. But then I embrace ambitious philosophy, 'useless' philosophy that tries to make sense of existence in a way that helps us live well. (I think we agree on this. My 'useless' was ironic, of course.)
He does dent material bodies but not physical ones. Objects owe their existence to the power of Gods idea giving them physical form. This physical form however is not material in the way the materialist say's. This material is a spiritual material (substance) not made up of a mind independent substrata.
Have you ever checked out Husserl? I just did recently, and I only wish I had looked into him sooner. It makes sense to me that first-principles have to be intuitively grasped or given.
There is no asking what meaning is.
Thought is proper to man alone – not, however, to man only as an isolated individual subject; we have to look at thought as essentially objective.
[/quote]
Note the humanism. Perhaps materialism is appealing to some as a flight from anthropomorphism. Is this flight from anthropomorphism not also the institution of a new essence of the human? I am more human or a better human by being anti-anthropomorphic (fighting against today's humanism.) The truly human wants to see around the human. (And finds the human as this wanting to see around the human?)
Perhaps it's best to think of idealism in terms of meaning-ism. If meaning is understood as above as being objective rather than subjective, then thinking of meaning in terms of the isolated mind misses the point entirely. One starts with a narrow concept of meaning and begins by (impossibly) setting it up as trapped in a subject cut off from world, neglecting that language or meaning is already the essence of the world. This essence as language of the world can dissonantly dream of a world before language and a language before the world.
But this is strange because water and other liquids (themselves an idea rather than a physical entity), produce this error in judgement constantly and appealing to laws of refraction would be kicking the stone also. What is also strange is that we all have an idea that this planet is covered mostly by water which means that God is the cause of this idea and that most of our world is prone to this error in judgement constantly??!!
Why God does such a thing is not forthcoming and all we are left with then is faith that God has his reasons for such because Berkeley doesn't explain it further and considering he wrote such to dispel scepticism and atheism, he hasn't done a very good job of it in my view, in fact it leaves me with more answers than before!
The dialogues make no bones about criticising atheism and goes as far to say that if I realize objective realism is mistaken then I would realize atheism is mistaken also. But my atheism was neither informed by science or philosophy, it just seemed a ridiculous story to me just like stories of Zeus or Odin are ridiculous. A believer may say that what I stated is clichéd but this is only because it's a matter of fact for many atheists. And the thing about my atheism is that, in itself, it doesn't inform my belief in an objective realism. Can this be said of subjective realists with deity and the like?
I have not encountered a believer in such that isn't informed by a belief in deity, or some other greater power, because what I call the persistence of existence (such that a tree is still there when not being perceived) can only be with some deistic figure perceiving it so. I find it quite amazing that, given Berkeley is an empiricist and a nominalist, he doesn't appeal to parsimony or question what he does or doesn't experience about deity??!! Look at it from my point of view; either I believe that matter is actual or deity is actual! This to me, is the crux of the matter (if you pardon the pun!)
Quoting WayfarerYes Berkeley does state as such in that we have volitional cause but God is the prime causer, so to speak. But as you see from my answer to JamesK above, all we are left with is faith because deity himself (or spiritual realm) is shy about such things.
Quoting WayfarerWhatever metaphysical axioms are afoot, we all have metaphysical ignorance so saying what is or isn't seems to me something we can't be sure of. I don't presume that objective reality is right and subjective reality is wrong, just that objective reality, i.e. physicalism, is a story well told in my view. Granted that physicalism is by no means an epistemic done deal but I prefer it's uncertainty to any other metaphysical notions' uncertainty.
Quoting WayfarerAnd this is why we have metaphysical ignorance.
Quoting WayfarerSo wait a minute, you have forwarded a statement that illusions are erroneous judgements and now you're saying that enlightened people who endorse a theory of the forms can only know what's real? So not-real (i.e. illusion) is erroneous judgement and real is correct judgement so long as you buy into anything that isn't objective realism? It all seems wishy-washy to me in its so-long-it's-not objective-realism attitude.
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverOkay, so again you've just stated in different words that you don't think real is absolutely being. What is your definition of real?
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverSo what are these principles?
Hi. I relate to that kind of openmindedness. I am interested though in precisely this metaphysical ignorance as a metaphysical axiom. I associate this with Hegel's critique of Kant. To start from the idea of a gap between us and the absolute is actually to start with the same absolute being placed beyond us. 'The absolute is closed to us' is itself embraced as an absolute principle. At the very least this is fascinating. Note that this is also language pointing outside itself to an 'essence' it can never touch. Such an essence must be nonconceptual it seems. But surely sensation or emotion aren't either, excepting for certain romantics. Does this mean the absolute is worshiped as a Nothing ? An impossible object in the distance, a horizon that outruns us? Or do we get closer?
In some ways this is like the idea that the history philosophy teaches us nothing. That nothing it teaches us is not only something but something sometimes embraced as the height of intellectual sophistication. The highest achievement of rationality is its self-recognition of its necessary failure. (The skeptic in me relates to this view, but I can't enjoy it as the whole story.)
You point out the second weakness of his theory which is his lack of metaphysics for God. His first weakness is approaching the whole deal from the Cartesian internal introspection point of view.
The quasi-Cartesian stance can be forgiven, is there really a better way for us to acquire knowledge? But his absent metaphysics of God are more I think a product of his time.
In Berkeley's time atheism was in it's early stages, the vast majority of the western world believed in a God whom they were scared of. God was much more taken for granted then than now. I think that this may explain his glossing over of the subject because people had a much stronger idea of God than they do today.
Idealism was born out of Melebranche's occasionalism which had God destroying and recreating the world on a second to second basis, thus being present in all of our lives. Berkeley say's why would God make such massive and destructive efforts just to prove his existence when he could do the whole thing mentally
I like the crux here, because what about deity-in-matter or deity-as-matter. For instance, Heidegger reminds of us pre-theoretical life where the 'subject' is dissolved in the 'object' (tool use) and the object in a meaningful world in a nexus of other tools.
No doubt we can imagine (in some problematic way) that 'matter' (whatever it is exactly supposed to be) was here first and be here after. If we identify the actual with durability, then matter becomes tempting as the actual. On the other hand, this whole line of thought exists as meaning. Perhaps the materialist forgets the ideal nature of matter (itself an abstraction in some views from a stream of sensation and therefore a part of universal spirit in others), and the idealist forgets the entanglement of meaning in its other. We can even postulate that the distinction between 'mind' and 'matter' is necessarily ambiguous, precisely because 'mind' is entangled in 'matter.' --or also note that the distinction is already a metaphysical axiom that obscures how we actually live in or even as meaning-matter. If language is the essence of the world (another way to frame idealism), then this language has a worldly flesh which makes separating itself from the world impossible.
*Derrida seems to be emphasizing the flesh of language that it can't peel off. Traditional metaphysics is like language that dreams of peeling its flesh off to peek at its skeleton.
Quoting Jamesk Yeah, it does seem that Berkeley proposes an epistemological idealism.
Quoting Jamesk It does seem like Berkeley is writing to atheist intellectuals rather than common folk. Much in the way Pascal did earlier, but whereas Pascal uses pragmatism, Berkeley uses scepticism.
Quoting Jamesk Would you not say that Plato's theory of the forms informed idealism also?
Ha. Well, I'd love to see what else you have to say about the issue. (And of course I trusted your open-mindedness as I raised the weird issue.) I just love these crazy (?) thoughts.
Fair enough! I'm happy to have at least not been boring.
I'm high on some new insights lately about just how idealistic 'all' philosophy really is some sense. Varieties of [s]religious experience[/s] idealism-humanism.
You're too kind. Thanks!
Sounds great. I look forward to it. May your drive be pleasant.
Plato is the first dualist as I see it but not necessarily an idealist. Berkeley is talking to the followers of Descartes who agreed on material and spiritual substances hence the duality. Berkeley tells them to just drop the material substance and everything else can be explained.
I am taking this out of context, but I wanted to reply in a different way than before.
If meaning and coherence are subjective, then how or why would we do philosophy? Do you have something in mind like intersubjective coherence? I can imagine meaning and coherence being distributed and separated in different minds, and maybe there is no perfect overlap of two individual experiences of meaning and coherence. But there has to be significant overlap to make philosophy possible. How could you or any other thinker hope to offer anything valuable to another thinker without appealing to a similar meaning and coherence? And how could objects in the world be objective (for me and you both independent of our wishful thinking) without assuming an immense overlap in the interpretation of sensation? (I'd say we just grasp chairs as things we sit on and only come up with sense-data theories much later to patch up the theoretical construction of the subject opposed to the object.) Or if we just directly see the object, then how do we nevertheless assemble a shared coherent picture of the world, which we can't see all at once?
Quoting Happenstance
I think you're in a bit of a tangle here with what Berkeley is really saying. The place of God in Berkeley's philosophy is not as the guarantor that our ideas and perceptions are correct. The place is, as far as I understand it, as the guarantor that the Universe exists unperceived by humans, because it is still being perceived by the Creator. There is the well-known and oft-quoted limerick which might have already been posted in this very thread, but it's such a gem it can hardly be repeated too often:
Quoting Happenstance
Pardon the personal digression, but it's necessary to frame my response. I'm in the position of being (I hope) neither atheist nor believer. I discovered what might be termed popular Eastern mysticism in my teens and early adulthood and that resonates with me to this day. From those sources, I learned of what is called 'Realisation'. This is not really a religious belief per se, but a state of intuitive unity (=yoga) with the principle underlying all existence. It’s both similar to, and also very different from, how religion is understood in Western culture.
Anyway to cut a very long story short, I came to the view that 'God is not God' early in life (in fact, wrote an essay on it). What I mean by that is that many people's notion of 'God' is indeed something like Zeus. In fact the Latin name for Zeus is Jupiter, which is derived from the Sanskrit 'Dyaus-Pitar', which means, literally, 'sky-father'. So it is not a large leap from there to 'our father, who art in Heaven'.
But on the other hand, I have also come to understand that these archetypal mythologies play a real role in the individual and collective psyche; they're not simply illusions or projections, but (to quote one of the sages that I encountered through my readings), 'they're as real as the people who believe in them'.
The basis of any of these philosophies, theistic or not, is, in my view, a sense of relatedness to the Cosmos and all that this entails. (Read this!) Whatever is ‘virtuous’ is what opens up that sense of relatedness, whatever is ‘vicious’ is what drives illusion and the sense of otherness. Stories of gods and religious mythologies are the outer form of this inner reality.
Quoting Happenstance
There’s a lot more to it than that. The Platonic Academy was a place of very rigorous and multi-disciplinary training across the whole curriculum. It was the early model of what was to become the University. And what you’re calling ‘objective realism’ is a very recent arrival!
I would not define a term like that, because it has too many different uses in different contexts. I might define it for use in a particular context, but I'd have to make clear that the definition is for that particular context only, otherwise you'd see me using it in another way in another context.
Quoting Happenstance
I can't say that I have an answer to this question because I do not understand the context. This thread appears to wander all over the place, and with such wanderings I do not see a particular context whereby we could set up such criteria. To list such principles would be an attempt to restrict the wanderings of the thread, and the stated principles might just as likely be wrong as right. To produce such principles, I'd have to refer to something else to validate them, but what could I refer to?
Imagine a person tripping on some hallucinogenic drug. That individual might start getting the feeling that it's difficult to distinguish between what's real and not real. As the effect of the drug continues to build, the anxiety over the inability to distinguish real from not real may intensify. How could that person possibly establish principles or criteria to distinguish between real and not real? If the feeling persists, that a distinction between real and not real must be made, the anxiety will increase, as the person falls deeper into the trap of knowing that what needs to be done cannot be done. The only solution is for the person to relax and forget about this problem, because it's not a real problem in the first place. And in believing "it's not a real problem", the person has demonstrated to oneself the capacity to distinguish real from not real, so that the problem is actually resolved.
It seems to me that if something is logical, it is deterministic. If the same input is put into a logical system, you always get the same output. Same cause leads to the same effect.
I think that the idea of anything being nonphysical is incoherent.
Meaning can be pinpointed as physical events in our brains. (I wouldn't say "reduced" because that suggests we're changing something in some manner. We're not. We're simply correctly identifying what something is ontologically.) If meaning is supposed to be located elsewhere, there's no evidence for it obtaining in or amounting to a process of other physical things. And it can't be something nonphysical because the very idea of that is incoherent.
I thought I did. I said an explanation is a use of language, and then I explained what language is.
Quoting sign
Yeah, but how did we get to the point of "understanding too much" in the first place if we didn't already start from a deconstructed state and then built it all up? The presence of culture and other human beings dominated our development and has a huge impact in developing our established norms - like there are human beings and I'm one of them.
Yes. I've often put "external" and "internal" in quotes as I don't really see it as an inside vs. outside thing. I agree.
In this sense, a "view" is a unique (subjective) model of the world from a point in space/time. Our view is from somewhere as the world appears relative to our heads (remember what I mentioned before). We all know that the world is not located relative to our heads, but that is how it appears. Why?
One problem with this is that there isn't anything that's not a particular. That's not to say that there are not abstract or general concepts (types, universals, whatever we want to call them), but concepts are particular events (or series/"sets" of events) in our particular brains. When you take a universal term to refer to a "real abstract," all that it's really referring to is a very vague, particular idea of a "real abstract," in your particular head, at a particular time.
Outside of that, as has been pointed out to you many times- -and not just by me--"tree" refers to a universal just as much as "matter" does. Neither is a "proper name.". So it's not as if you have a doctrine that one only senses things picked out by non-universal terms.
Because we want to know what the world is like, and we believe it's worthwhile to examine that with a methodological approach different than science in addition to doing it with science's methodological approach. That would be the case no matter the ontological reality of meaning. The whole point is to figure out what meaning really is, how it really works, which just as when we're doing science, can easily turn out to be contrary to conventional wisdom, conventional ways of looking at it, etc.
The real puzzler is why people are so averse to subjectivity.
Quoting sign
Lord no. I think that the whole idea of "intersubjectivity" is nonsense outside of the fact that we can agree with and cooperate with each other. "Intersubjectivity" is an intentionally fuzzy invention of folks who are averse to/uncomfortable with subjectivity but who realize that claiming that things like meaning and ethical stances are objective is ridiculous.
Quoting sign
Your assumption here is "philosophy isn't possible, and even if it were it would offer nothing of value, if we couldn't know that we have the same or at least remarkably similar meanings (and assessments of coherence, etc.)"
The mystery is why that would be the assumption. We could go through how communication works on my view step by step if you're interested, but that will probably take some time and it's a significant enough tangent that we should probably start another thread on it if you're interested.
Quoting sign
That question particular strikes me as bizarre. Objectivity in no way hinges on us. The objective world would be there just the same if life had never started.
Quoting sign
What's shared are the observable parts of language, for example. Explaining how this works logistically could be part of the longer discussion about how communication works on my view.
Materiality is a phenomenological notion; it denotes the solidity, liquidity, or airiness, texture, weightiness or lightness and so on, of phenomena. I have no doubt that Berkeley would say that all these material qualities are thought and perceived by God (after all He knows all things !) just as the objects in themselves are, and that they are therefore real in a human-mind independent way.
You have missed the point of the difference between logical entailment and physical determination. Even if you wanted to say they are the same that would be reliant on the assumption that rigid determinism obtains, which is itself not logically necessary and we don't and can't know empirically whether it does or does not obtain , and yet we can and do know what is logically entailed by premises.
The possibility of agreement and cooperation is exactly what is intended. I have the sense that 'intersubjectivty' is misunderstood in terms of some entity, some magical quasi-physical item.
Okay, but how would the fact that we can agree ("I think that nonconsensual killing is wrong"--"Hey! I think that nonconsensual killing is wrong, too!") or the fact that we can cooperate ("Let's make that illegal then") have any impact on the fact that morality, meaning, etc. are subjective?
I agree with all this, and indeed it's crucial to my point. Note the 'we' that appears here.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I agree, and I'd even say that it's absurd in some sense to categorize meaning. The sign escapes the instituting question of philosophy ('what is it?')
Quoting Terrapin Station
Indeed. I agree here to. And I am personally challenging the conventional wisdom that meaning or language is only in the subject (the subject as a concept is itself a meaning, an abstraction.)
Quoting Terrapin Station
I don't think it's an aversion to subjectivity. It's just we, who want to know what the world is like, can come to realize that we are engaged in a social project of working together to figure out what the world is like. It seems to be a fact that we bring signs to other human beings to have them recognized as representing or unveiling the real. The very notion of the real seems to involve what is true for us and not just me. The appeal of the 'physical' seems to lie in just this. It is one image of the true-for-us-and-not-just-me.
If I make the string of words 'Let's make that illegal, then' by vibrating the air a certain way, surely it's not the physical energy of that vibrating air that helps get a law passed. Those vibrations are intelligible. Roughly speaking, an image of what we might and should do is somehow repeated in the mind of the listener. And such a thing only makes sense if we understand ourselves to be in the same world, talking about the same objects. These arbitrary signs, the spoken words, are charged with an imperfectly shared meaning. To learn a language is to enter in to a kind of network, where the vibrations of the air take on meaning that they would otherwise not have. (I don't think this is a perfect description of what is going on. I agree that we should keep trying to figure it out. It's not about mystifying but rather about clarifying the 'we of language' that makes this conversation possible. )
That's a good point. It's an interesting project, considering how 'matter' became 'conscious' (or however one wants to frame it.)
We seem to have two origins. We can use language to contemplate the origin of language. Then the origin of language would exist for or within language. A Mobius strip comes to mind.
I agree completely.
There's a traditional sense (a la scholasticism for example) of "real" that's basically the same as "objective ," but that's a bad idea, because it discounts an d basically dismisses personal, psychological phenomena.
I suspect that your theory of communication will eventually have to get around to addressing something like public meaning or inter-subjectivity, even if it eschews those terms. It's not so much that I pretend to have an explanation for what is going on. I would like to bring it to attention, make it more vivid.
I relate to that. But one can embrace the reality of a fantasy. A community can believe that one of its members had a dream about giraffes. Roughly, anything in intelligible is a being or has being, or so one might say. Then further categorizations can establish visibility or access.
Obviously. Because people think about them, assign meanings to them, etc.
Quoting sign
That's so rough that it's inaccurate. You're not literally passing any sort of mental content, just catalyzing the same.
It seems, by the way, like we're just going to keep doing the same dance over and over. You're going to keep asserting "shared" meaning and I'll keep pointing out that it's not actually shared, and then you'll respond where you talk about shared meaning again, and then I'll point out that it's not actually shared again, etc.
In other words, you'd probably call something "public meaning" that I'd say isn't actually meaning? That could be.
There is much to recommend this view, but it is a metaphysical position. It's one way to define the objective.
[quote =Wiki]
Objectivity is a philosophical concept of being true independently from individual subjectivity caused by perception, emotions, or imagination. A proposition is considered to have objective truth when its truth conditions are met without bias caused by a sentient subject. Scientific objectivity refers to the ability to judge without partiality or external influence, sometimes used synonymously with neutrality.
[/quote]
The essence of objectivity seems to be true-for-us-and-not-just-me. The notion of the physical seems to fit this ideal perfectly. But I don't think the physical exhausts the objective. As Husserl might add, we should consider in what way logic and math exist objectively. Arguably, reducing the objective to the physical simply ignores part of experience and offers therefore an only partial account of the situation.
Obviously it's a metaphysical position, yes.
Quoting sign
I don't agree with any sentence there, but I don't know if it's worth it to spell out why I disagree with all of it. (Because are you really interested in my view per se? Are you even paying much attention to it? Will it have any impact on you? I doubt it.)
And I'll keep pointing out that I'm not attached to any terminology but interested in something that makes this conversation possible. I'm quite OK with the idea of the sounds and letters being 'physically' meaningless on their way from one skull to another.
It all hinges on this 'actually,' the specification of this actually. I take that you are saying that matter is not mind, that the signs are dead. And of course in some sense I agree. But the very concept of the 'subject alone with meaning' who uses 'dead signs' is itself a product of these publicly used signs in some sense. I'm saying let's loosen up some of our fundamental assumptions. Insights about language are going to reverberate all through our metaphysical positions. If, for instance, language was fundamentally ambiguous (never perfectly clear), then we could never have a perfectly clear or transmittable theory of the real.
No, I'm not saying that at all. Some matter is obviously mind on my view. I'm a physicalist, an identity theorist.
Quoting sign
All concepts are the result of individual thought.
So you don't find it true for us but only for me? Or you don't find it true for you? If it's only not true for you and that's the issue, then we aren't really doing philosophy in some sense. We are just gossiping about preferences. The projection of our opinions of being worthy as being acted on as truths seems pretty fundamental to me.
Well we probably can find more agreement than you think, then. I have the sense that you understand me to be saying some more outlandish than is the case. The German idealists were identity theorists (maybe in a different way than you), and I think they were on to something. The problem may largely be about jargon and background.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I see the truth of this statement, what it gets right. Let me make that clear. But I'd add that this individual only actually exists in a particular community, having been raised in a form of life and at least one language. So the individual is largely constituted by his community. To rip out an isolated subject is like ripping a wolf out of its environment, the things it eats, etc. A wolf only makes sense in its total context and a subject only makes sense as part of a community. Brains have evolved to interact with other brains through language. This is arguably what is most human about the human. The single brain can of course be contemplated, but this is an abstraction that risks throwing away the 'essence' of the human brain as a node in a network. Individual personality is itself in some sense a product of a thought of this network, even if from a physical point of view we can see that individual brain encased in its own skull.
My truth theory (which I'm pretty sure I gave you in detail a few weeks ago) has truth as a subjective judgment, but that's rooted in (though obviously not the same as past the roots) the standard analytic way of looking at truth and its relationship to propositions. That's a big tangent to get into and we're already way off topic.
The more important thing here is that "'true' for everyone" overlooks perspectivalism, the fact that no two perspectives or reference frames/reference points are going to be the same, a fortiori because they necessarily have different spatial orientations.
Yes, I agree that no two perspectives are going to be the same. I'd say that true-for-everyone is a kind of ideal that we strive toward, an ideal that requires abstraction from individual perspectives to something like what they all have in common or usefully overlap.
I know, you said this already. But this doesn't account for how you can say that the song Kashmir is music. If each of these ideas "the song Kashmir", and "music", are particulars, they are clearly distinct particulars and therefore to say "the song Kashmir is music" is to violate the law of identity.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I know, we've been through this already as well. But when I refer to "the tree outside my window", I am talking about a particular. We do not use "matter" in this way, it never refers to a particular. Do you understand this? I can say "that tree", "that chair", etc., and this refers to a particular sensible thing, but if I say "that matter" it does not refer to a particular thing.
I look at it like this. Say that there's a particular kind of mold that only grows inside refrigerators when they're running. I don't know if that's true--I don't think it is, but let's just imagine that it is. Well, you could say, "Those refrigerators, that mold, only exists due to a particular community, having been designed and build blah blah blah" Yeah, that would be true, but nevertheless, there's a kind of mold that ONLY occurs inside running refrigerators. It doesn't occur outside of those refrigerators, or when they're not running. Pointing that out isn't claiming that the refrigerators aren't designed and built in social contexts, etc.
And if every time you talked about that mold, someone felt the need to interject, "But ultimately that mold can only exist in a social context, because you need a society that has ideas and builds refrigerators and blah blah blah," that would be very annoying.
Quoting sign
An abstraction? Why would you say it's an abstraction?
I don't see shooting for something that isn't true as an ideal there. The ideal (in my view) would be to get people to realize/acknowledge perspectivalism.
When I talk about sensing or experiencing "Kashmir" and music, I'm not talking about ideas.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I always refer to particulars by "matter."
This is not actually the case.
That was very persuasive.
We could diagnose you.
Furthermore, something like this has been shown by physics itself.
(Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271)
Right, but when you say "the song Kashmir is music", you are talking about ideas.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I didn't say "particulars", I said "a particular". No one uses "matter" to refer to a particular object, not even you. If someone did, no one would know which particular object was being referred to, so such talk would be pointless.
No I'm not. I'm talking about objective events, objective sounds.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Why would we be talking about how people use language? That's not the topic.
Good example of reifying mathematics.(Which I see has led him to focusing on nonsense like "multiverse" theory, string theory, etc.)
The single brain, grasped as a distinct object, is already an interpretation that plucks it out of the human body as a hole. And that human body is an abstraction, too. To really describe the nature of one thing is to be led to its relationships with every other thing. Concepts are inter-related. To explain one thing exhaustively is to explain everything. Since thinking is often about the skillful ignoring of purpose-irrelevant relationships, the systematicity of concept doesn't come up much.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Is this not an attempt to impose your perspective (perspectivalism) as precisely a truth beyond mere perspective? The impossibility of objectivity as objectivity itself?
Why would you be talking about "grasping" something?
You're not understanding me. The objective world is perspectival. I'm saying nothing like "the objective world is impossible."
We see the unity of the human body broken up in terms of organs that function together. The brain becomes a separate object of attention with a boundary. Do we include the spine or not? Where do we draw the line? Do we include the eyes? We make a decision about what is and is not to count as brain. We pluck it out of its context as an object for inquiry.
So is it something like a union of perspectives? Or is the real an intersection of perspectives? Does every perspective has some reality and then the intersection become the objectively real? Is this all matter aware of itself somehow?
You're talking about concept-formation there, right? Again, I'd ask why you're talking about that. I wasn't talking about concepts per se.
You asked me about what I meant about 'grasping' a brain. To think that this is only concept formation is perhaps to miss an important point --which is that it is also object formation. To take the brain is some kind of simple object that is just 'given' misses the interpretation implicit in that givenness. To be sure, such 'interpretation' is largely automatic. I experience the world as objects and persons without having to try. On the other hand, we seem to have some conscious control of what we take for objects. We can question whether we are cutting nature at the joints. We can become aware or postulate (like Kant) how our own cognition shapes sensation into objects in a causal nexus. This is actually to create an object, some faculty that transforms sensation into this nexus of objects by applying concepts. (One doesn't haven't to embrace Kant. That's just an example.)
But i wasn't talking about our concepts, perception, knowledge, etc.
It's very annoying to keep changing the topic to epistemology. (And/or philosophy of language, etc.)
The question seems to want to reduce meaning-as-public to the physical, missing that 'physical' itself a meaning we are publicly discussing. Note that 'mental' is also a meaning publicly debated. So reducing meaning to the mental is just as problematic as reducing it to the physical. The 'rational is the real and the real is the rational' to the degree that meaning is publicly aimed at the institution or revolution of the real. In some sense philosophy is a manifestation of the faith in the reality of the rational. It decides to take as real what stands the test of critical thought. To decide that matter is real is to institute matter as having proved itself a rational grasping or understanding of the real.
We can drop it if you want, but it sure seems like the heart of idealism versus materialism to me. One way to understand idealism is 'language is the essence of the world.' From my perspective, it's exactly your framing of these issues as beside the point that misses the point. But I don't want to annoy you. If we are temporarily at a dead end, that's OK.
I'm not saying it's "beside the point." Just that it wasn't what I was talking about. "A single brain" isn't an abstraction, because I'm not talking about the concept of a single brain, our our knowledge of it, or anything like that. I'm talking about the material thing, the thing that would still be present (at least for a short period of time) if everyone were to sudddenly drop dead. That isn't abstract. There are no real abstracts (in the sense of objective abstracts).
Sometimes I want to talk about, do philosophy about, etc. the world independent of human concepts, human knowledge, etc. I like ontology.
What kind of wall do you prefer to bang your head against? Brick or concrete? One with sharp extruding bits that draw blood, or more a smooth surface that just causes concussion?
Ha. Well, it is a little frustrating to be misunderstood. As I understand it, I am basically trying to point out what is always already going on as we philosophize, a mutual recognition of the real through language. But meaning is misunderstood from the beginning as merely one of its own determinations ('mental' as opposed to 'physical.')
The very process proclaiming the real to be 'matter' or 'mind' or 'X' ignores its own role in the determination of the real. What 'mind' points to for any serious idealist is already bigger than the mental. Similarly the serious materialist has to include in his concept of matter whatever has been traditionally attributed to 'mind.' Call it 'mind or 'matter.' It's the real as determined by reason, so that we might even say that the real in its becoming or movement is its own determination via a self-transcendence that remembers. Statements like 'the One determines itself' sound spooky and ridiculous until one just watches philosophers at work and generalizes what they are doing, and until one understands that concepts only have determinate meaning in relation to one another.
You seem to assume that the stuff 'out there' independent of language is already broken up (quite conveniently!) into the objects of human discourse. Assuming for the sake of argument that this language independent stuff exists (which is admittedly intuitively appealing), how can we say anything determinate about it all without muddying its pristine independence from language/consciousness?
I relate. Indeed, philosophy thinks the human only to overcome the human. And is there anything more essentially human than this flight from the merely human? I am more human by being more bored by the merely human, one might say. Similarly I am a grander or more noble personality by thinking beyond my own petty perspective, etc. Metaphysics is language that wants to crawl out of its own skin.
It doesn't matter if it's divvied up in particular ways re edges/boundaries for whether it's abstract or not (it's not).
Quoting sign
Remember that I'm a direct/"naive" realist, so I don't at all buy that we can't access "(non-mental) things-in-themselves" or that perception is necessarily theory-laden.
Re the other comment, on the other hand, being so self-centered is probably not a good thing. The world doesn't actually revolve around you.
I get that. But let's note that people nevertheless pride themselves on being not self-centered. 'I'm less anthropomorphic than you.' 'I am less self-centered than you.' It's the same structure repeated of something being more noble or commendable than something else. I am interested in this unchanging structure in all philosophy. The noble or the good is the rational determination of the real. That's a rough approximation (and maybe only rough approximations are possible.)
Moreover, it's hard to make sense of 'rational' apart from some 'we,' some ideal community, perhaps only virtual. I can be alone with the truth, but what is it that makes the truth the truth? If the physical is the truth, then how do I determine the physical from the non-physical without help from others? The dream from the non-dream? Etc.
I don't think there is anything unchanging, I don't think there is anything that isn't physical, and I see the "noble," good, etc. as a matter of individual preferences.
So should I not expect to find anything that doesn't change? Is that something I can't count on?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Then apparently the physical itself doesn't think there is anything that isn't physical. That's fine, but it seems the 'physical' has become mind-like indeed. It talks about itself. Pretty soon we might have to divide the physical into the part that talks and the part that doesn't? (I find the purely mental to be as problematic as the purely physical, to be clear.)
Quoting Terrapin Station
Of course conceptions of the noble and good vary to some degree, but I postulate that we tend to push our own sense of the noble and good outward. In this case it's hard not to read the very statement above as the suggestion that it is noble and good to understand the noble and good to be a matter of preference. The mere fact that we present our ideas to others and reason with others suggest some desire for consensus and mutual recognition of virtue and rationality. And civil discourse presupposes all kinds of consensus that largely goes unstated. We don't talk to people who insult or threaten us or have opinions that are beyond the pale. Basically I grant that there is wiggleroom, but we don't have anarchy. (And let's not forget jails and obeying stop signs! We can't utterly separate value and rationality.)
Quoting WayfarerYou can imply that I have misread Berkeley all you want but it still remains that if you buy into Berkeley's immaterialism then you should accept that deity itself is but a perception also and not of any actual substance. If you don't then it's a case of special pleading. Berkeley's immaterialism is preposterous due to this simple inconsistency. And you can replace deity with whatever, because at the end of the day, they too are all just ideas.
I do kick the stone and say, "persistent existence of matter, not persistent whim of deity!"
Quoting WayfarerMy mum likes those inspirational quotes/biblical verses on prints (tea-towels, cushions etc.) I might get her those words printed for a xmas present!
Quoting Wayfarer Maybe that term as such but ancient man did conceive of gods and other fantastical creatures very much part of the natural world with Plato being apart from the norm in contemporary Greek thinking.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover There is only one context pertinent here; ontology!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover:brow: It was you that brought up these principles. I'm starting to think that you really don't know what's real or not! But in your defense, you're not the only one! :up:
No. It is you that has missing the point. I understand what you are trying to say. What I'm saying is that it is no different than what a materialist says. We are both saying the same thing (kind of). What you call a premise, I call a cause. A premise is a type of cause - a deterministic one - like all causes and their effects. What I call an effect, you call a conclusion. A conclusion is a type of effect - an effect of premises. But then conclusions are causes too. They cause action, or behavior, and so on. The causal relationships "cross" this "boundary" between causal relationships in the mind and the causal relationships that are not part of the mind (what people refer to as the external world). Thinking of them as separate sides is what dualism does. Monism says that they are one and the same. There is no "boundary". It's just an illusion.
What idealists are doing is simply using anthropomorphic terms to refer to reality. Saying everything is "ideas" or "mind" is making a category mistake. Ideas and minds exist in only one part of reality. They are a subset - a part of a larger group of related things (causation, or processes, or relationships).
Loops often come to my mind when thinking about reality. Self-awareness is like a camera pointing at it's monitor and creates a visual feedback loop of a "infinite" corridor. Natural selection is basically environmental feedback - the environment shaping itself.
Well then I have no idea of what you're talking about because I have no idea of what you mean by "objective sounds".
Quoting Terrapin Station
You seem to have a very short memory. What we've been talking about since we first engaged in this thread is how people use the word "matter", what "matter" commonly refers to. At least that's what I've been talking about, but maybe you have no idea of what I'm talking about, just like I have no idea what you're talking about above.
As for why we would be talking about this, it's because the thread is entitled idealism vs. Materialism, so it's a good idea, for starters, to have an understanding of what people refer to with "matter".
However, this conversation is going nowhere because you seem to have no idea what people refer to with "matter", and have no desire to even begin understanding.
Quoting Happenstance
Yes, the point though is that there are many different ontologies, as the title of the thread starts to indicate. In the different contexts of different ontologies, "real" has different meanings.
Quoting Happenstance
That's right, did you read my example? To worry about the distinction between what is real and what is not real is to needlessly create anxiety. However, we all live our lives commonly making judgements about what is real, without referring to any such principles or criteria. Success in our activities based on those judgements allow us to escape the anxiety caused by worrying about the distinction between what is real and what is not real.
Weird. That's such a basic thing to know. Objective sounds are sounds occurring external to your body.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's not at all what I'm talking about. My topic wasn't language.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I explained a number of times what I'm referring to with "matter." For the common definition, we can simply look in dictionaries.
Quoting sign
If I have learned one thing from following this discussion, It is that the "identity theory" Terrapin Station is espousing is decidedly not a child of any German Idealist. First of all, there are no "phenomena" because that term implies a separation between the spectator and the show that the theory is trying to disappear.
It is that quality that prompted me to try earlier in my previous comments to understand what the difference between epistemology and ontology means in the context of the theory. Since it has consequences for epistemology, I am not sure if the status of ontology is not a product of epistemic circularity. Or another way to put it, a problem of tautology that leads to a stopping point. It reminds me
of Aristotle's description of Cratylus:
"But the reason why these thinkers held this opinion is that while they were inquiring into the truth of that which is, they thought, ‘that which is’ was identical with the sensible world; in this, however, there is largely present the nature of the indeterminate—of that which exists in the peculiar sense which we have explained; and therefore, while they speak plausibly, they do not say what is true (for it is fitting to put the matter so rather than as Epicharmus put it against Xenophanes). And again, because they saw that all this world of nature is in movement and that about that which changes no true statement can be made, they said that of course, regarding that which everywhere in every respect is changing, nothing could truly be affirmed. It was this belief that blossomed into the most extreme of the views above mentioned, that of the professed Heracliteans, such as was held by Cratylus, who finally did not think it right to say anything but only moved his finger, and criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river; for he thought one could not do it even once."
Metaphysics 4.5
Although reading all of the different points of view is fascinating, my thread asks only which theory is instrumentally better, Locke's material thesis or Berkeley's immaterial thesis.
Locke builds his case on an ability to abstract ideas from general terms and on primary and secondary qualities. Locke continues on from Descartes by offering indirect realism and by saying that it is ok to doubt, with the little knowledge we have we can still get by and build working scientific theories.
Berkeley attacks Locke over abstract ideas, something he says he cannot do. He also attacks primary and secondary qualities and tries to show that even primary qualities are subjective. Berkeley rejects Locke's mitigated scepticism that asserts a materiel substratum that is something that Locke cannot know what it is, indirect realism is a mistake. He goes back to Descartes and says there is no mind body problem, all there is are minds. Everything comes from God and is just ideas, thus we can know directly what is going on.
If we could try and stay on topic it might help us get somewhere.
I don't think that is true of Locke at all. His 'representative realism' is rather that ideas are 'inscribed' on the mind by experience, that we are born 'tabula rasa' (a blank slate) and whatever ideas we have, we receive through experience - one of the dogmas of empiricism. The ability of the mind to generalise was not, I think, something much considered by Locke, and indeed one of his main weaknesses (as it was also with Berkeley).
But Locke's distinction of 'primary and secondary' is indeed fundamental to him, and the very point on which Berkeley attacks him. 'Locke’s question was, “What in the perceived body causes ideas in the mind?” His answer was primary and secondary qualities. He believed that there was a clear and definite distinction between the primary and secondary qualities of an object. Primary qualities were those that are intrinsic to the object. Examples of these would include the object’s bulk, figure, color, or texture. An object’s secondary qualities were somewhat more complex. Locke described them as the relationship between the object’s physical substance and the way our mind perceives and interprets them through our senses. He argued that secondary qualities only exist in the world because of our relationship to the object. Therefore the existence and knowledge of other things is revealed through the sensation of a material that underlies all physical substance. We can figure out that objects exist outside of our mind because we have knowledge of these things independent of the things themselves. In other words, physical substances exist whether we perceive them or not, and therefore it is a physical substance that makes up the object. This is Locke’s main point.'
It was this idea that was to become central to modern science, with the primary qualities being equated with those elements of an object that are precisely quantifiable - mass, velocity, chemical composition, and so on. Secondary qualities were associated with the mind of the perceiving subject, and included colour, flavour, and so on. You can see how easily this attitude tended towards the basic kind of materialism that you see advocated by some posters here - that what 'really exists' are the measurable physical attributes of objects that exist independently of any act of perception.
It was this that Berkeley attacked. Any attributes of an object, even those so called 'primary', are present to us as 'ideas in the mind'. He says - I think misleadingly - that 'what we know are ideas'. Why that's misleading, is because it's not as if 'ideas' are the objects of perception; rather it's that whatever we know, is present in our mind as 'an idea'. And we never know anything that is not present as an idea, because that is what 'knowing' comprises!
Both are clearly indebted to Descartes in the sense that they hold his 'clear and distinct ideas' as fundamental to knowledge.
Quoting Wayfarer
Berkeley says that we cannot form abstract ideas of colour without shape, or of bodies without a background, motion without something moving. It is this separation that Locke uses to describe primary and secondary qualities that Berkeley calls abstract ideas. Berkeley says he cannot abstract in that way, can you think of an abstract man, of no particular size, body type, colour, hair etc?
It is this abstraction that allows Locke to claim the general term of matter. For Berkeley this is incoherent, because he cannot imagine a secondary quality in absence of a primary one and so Locke is abusing language by only using it as symbols of denotation. I am still not 100% on how this works, but I hve limited language understanding.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes he did argue this but Berkeley denies any direct sensation from the underlying material, all we sense is the object being supported by matter. Locke himself says that matter is 'something I know not what'. Which is enough for Berkeley to claim Locke is being insufficiently empirical basing a theory on such flimsy evidence. His evidence of ideas seems much stronger and offers a direct sensory experience of the object as long as we can accept God in the role of producer, director, editor and author of our experience of the world.
Quoting Wayfarer
Locke says that ideas are inscribed on the mind (as you said in the beginning of your post) Berkeley says that our experience of the object causes an idea of it to form, however all we can know directly are our ideas. Hume developed this with the copy principle that ideas are copies of impressions.
They are all three legitimate empirical approaches, and all probably wrong but until today we don't really understand how the mind works and we cannot know the full nature of 'ideas'.
I looked into it, and I agree. There is a vague similarity in an attempt to overcome dualism, but that's all I see from a brief perusal.
[quote= https://www.iep.utm.edu/identity/]
Seeking an alternative to the classic dualist position, according to which mental states possess an ontology distinct from the physiological states with which they are thought to be correlated, Place claimed that sensations and the like might very well be processes in the brain—despite the fact that statements about the former cannot be logically analyzed into statements about the latter. Drawing an analogy with such scientifically verifiable (and obviously contingent) statements as "Lightning is a motion of electric charges," Place cited potential explanatory power as the reason for hypothesizing consciousness-brain state relations in terms of identity rather than mere correlation. This still left the problem of explaining introspective reports in terms of brain processes, since these reports (for example, of a green after-image) typically make reference to entities which do not fit with the physicalist picture (there is nothing green in the brain, for example). To solve this problem, Place called attention to the "phenomenological fallacy"—the mistaken assumption that one's introspective observations report "the actual state of affairs in some mysterious internal environment." All that the Mind-Brain Identity theorist need do to adequately explain a subject's introspective observation, according to Place, is show that the brain process causing the subject to describe his experience in this particular way is the kind of process which normally occurs when there is actually something in the environment corresponding to his description.
[/quote]
As far as I can tell this is the same old grasping of 'internal' and 'external' experiences in the same causal network. Is it any deeper than saying that opiates makes the pain go away?
And is phenomenology about the internal environment? https://medium.com/@LancePeterson/heidegger-s-lectern-1919-4c5a3ca47ccd
The genius of Heidegger was to show that the theoretical gaze is a devivification of world-with-others-in-language and the postulation of an isolated a-historical subject. It installs the gap itself! I am not an 'I' for myself most of the time and objects aren't just there to be stared at. The world is more like a using-of-objects, neither subject nor object. An event. 'It worlds.' The 'mysterious internal environment' is a creation of the same approach that objects to it. It's just the shadow cast by the fiction or implement of the deworlded ego (impossible to think of without its object.)
Much more can be said (it's more complicated than this, I confess!), but I'll stop there.
Actually you're correct in that. I now recall that Locke explained abstractions very much as generalisations or general ideas, and that Berkeley criticized them on those grounds. But to really go into details would take a bit of revision and reading and work beckons!
Quoting Jamesk
Berkeley, Hume and Locke were all very perceptive and clever men and their ideas live on in our culture (especially Locke, whose influence on the formation of modern liberalism can hardly be overstated.)
One thing I will say is this - I think Locke's basic idea that the mind 'represents' object is fatally mistaken on the following grounds: when you ask the question, how can you distinguish between the object, and its representation? If you say, here on the one hand, is the thing, and there, on the other, is the idea of the thing then the question must be asked, from which perspective do you make that distinction between object and idea?
Because, whatever 'thing' you select to make out as an 'object', then that 'thing' is only known to us as a bundle of perceptions, sensations and judgements - whatever it might be. And I think this is perfectly consistent with science as per the following blog post:
Now I don't think that either Locke or Berkeley's philosophy could have taken this into account; but I think that Kant's does. It was Kant who criticized his predecessors, and showed how empiricism and rationalism inform each other. See Kant's Metaphysics (although that might be better as a separate thread.)
Quoting sign
It is deeper. I am not convinced by the argument but it is interesting. If the relationship between epistemology and ontology is problematic in the thesis, maybe it is troublesome outside of it.
I can describe the theory as a reduction but am I reducing other things to do it? The theory appears to be completely uninterested in helping me answer that question. The silence of Cratylus, perhaps.
In regards to the Heidegger approach to contending points of view on the matter of experience, I prefer Sartre who noted that not all of our experiences of awareness require the "Ego." That view is less entangled with what we mean by meaning and how objects are what they are in relation to being an object.
Well I do think the relationship between ontology and epistemology is deep indeed. I've been thinking about Hegel lately. The real is rational and the rational is real. This collapses ontology and epistemology. What we as rational inquires acknowledge as truly/objectively there is a product of rational debate. And merely approaching reality as if reason can reveal it already implies that it is essentially rational. Moreover, engaging in philosophy implies that it is good to reveal reality rationality. This is certainly an oversimplification, but I'm quite taken by this interpretation of Hegel's insistence that all philosophy was idealism. (and Derrida's that it is all humanism, albeit a humanism always trying to surpass itself.)
Quoting Valentinus
Ah yes, the gap between us and the absolute is taken as the absolute itself! And of course such thinkers don't acknowledge the intelligibility of their own discourse which establishes the absolute impossibility of the absolute. It occurs to me that rejections of absolute knowledge just make our finite knowledge in its plurality absolute. It is all the absolute we can hope for and therefore the functioning absolute.
Quoting Valentinus
Sartre is great too. He touches on some stuff that I've just never found in Heidegger.
I agree. And on one hand this points to an aporia, an M.C. Escher 'impossible' vision of reality. On the other hand we have some kind of Hegelianism.
[quote=Hegel]
Constituted as it is, this process cannot belong to the subject; but when that point of support is fixed to start with, this process cannot be otherwise constituted, it can only be external. The anticipation that the Absolute is subject is therefore not merely not the realisation of this conception; it even makes this realisation impossible. For it makes out the notion to be a static point, while its actual reality is self-movement, self-activity.
...Everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well. At the same time we must note that concrete substantiality implicates and involves the universal or the immediacy of knowledge itself, as well as that immediacy which is being, or immediacy qua object for knowledge.
[/quote]
We have something like the entanglement of language in non-language. The real is intelligible. It includes this very discourse about itself. But intelligibility is not a matter of the 'private' subject. To be in language is to participate in a group subject. What the community takes for real is just the real, inasmuch as the real is intelligible.
But this especially includes worldly objects. Indeed, we tend to collapse objectivity (unbiasedness) into these objects, forgetting intuitions of logic that don't depend directly on sense organs. From one perspective objects and concepts are two ways of saying the same thing. The chair is grasped as a chair. As Husserl has shown, objects already transcend our perspectival viewing of them. If we walk around the chair or close our eyes and open them again, it is the same chair. The chair is never completely devoured by the eyes. So this 'involuntary' concept is just the object as object as the 'kernel' of sensation. But we can of course take meanings as 'objects' in a shared 'mental' space, and we call them 'concepts.'And concepts-objects exist in a network, getting their determination from one another. At the level of reason (conversations like this), we have something like the real's determination of itself. To the degree that what I am saying in these public signs is rational, 'I' do not speak as some isolated subject. We co-determine the real ---as that which is co-determined through a distributed rationality with a variety of bodily perspectives on the world.
Quoting sign
This observation may or not be helpful but neither Aristotle nor Plato dismissed or declared victory over Cratylus and his arguments. They, in their various fashions, were holding out for it not being the last word.
A point of comparison would be the times both of those writers excluded some points of view as matters they hoped would never come up again.
"Sound" refers to a sensation. How could a sensation be external to a sensing body?
Quoting Terrapin Station
I don't recall any such explanation, only a confused bit of nonsense.
Quoting Jamesk
It's been quite a while since I read Locke. But I remember that I think his division between primary and secondary qualities is unsound, and somewhat arbitrary. I think that if this distinction falls through, Locke's ontology is pretty much lost Berkeley provides a much more sound argument, though he really does not provide principles for an ontology. Maybe Berkeley disproves Locke's ontology without providing an acceptable alternative. That's what I remember about Berkeley, he provides a lot of good arguments against some ontological principles, without providing an alternative to those refuted principles. I'll reread yours and wayfarer's posts above, and see if I can recall why I was unimpressed by Locke's ontology, and quite incline to accept Berkeley's points. Maybe I can contribute something worthwhile to the thread.
I commented on this a while back. One way to think of it is not that the universe didn't exist prior to sentient observers, but that its dynamics presuppose a frame of reference (which an observer can provide).
Just as we look at an object from a specific perspective (yet the object exists independent of our looking), so we describe the universe from a specific perspective (yet the universe exists independent of our describing).
But the point is, the manner in which either 'the universe' or 'the object' exists 'independent of our describing' is never known to us (as per Kant). So the object is not simply 'in the mind', but the reference frame, which the observer brings to the picture, is intrinsic to any description or knowledge of the world. We can't know of it outside of or apart from any such frame. The 'assumed independence of the object' is just what Kant refers to as 'transcendental realism'. (CPR, A369. And that is also the main point at issue in the debate between Bohr and Einstein.)
But the other point is, this allows Kant to be both an empirical realist, and a transcendental idealist. He can accept (as I do) the empirical reality of the age of the Universe etc, but at the same time, insist on the fact that the 'intuitions of time and space' are still intrinsic to the observer and not to the so-called objective world. It is being able to grasp that kind of 'double perspective' that is important here. (On that note, have to log out for at least a few days, duty calls.)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is right in line with my question. He does actually provide a lot of support for his theory however a lot of that support is almost identical to the support Locke had used and Berkeley had refuted. Kind of like saying you can't use that reason to support matter but I can use it to support spiritual substance.
If we can expose this tactic it would seriously undermine immateriality as an alternative to Locke.
I would say the point is that "the universe" or "the object" (or to be precise what appears to us as such)-- the ding an sich--- doesn't exist in any "manner" independent of our perceptions and conceptions; it simply exists.
Things can only be "in a manner" for a percipient; so unless there is an all-seeing infinite intelligence that thinks and perceives the ding an sich in all its infinite possible "manners"; things in themselves simply exist.
Also, things exist in "manners" for other perceptive beings (animals); manners which we can never know because of the differences between their body/brain/nervous systems and ours.
I think that for Berkeley the ding an sich is God. There is no veil of perception to be overcome, just God, his ideas of objects and us and our minds, it is all clear and very direct.
What could maybe be added here is inter-subjectivity. Or rather I think 'inter-subjectivity' is still too theoretical but points to what I have in mind. Science is a community effort. Objectivity is (and I think you'd agree) not about stuff out there but precisely about separating science from non-science. An statement is objective/rational or not. Objective reality is science's (or philosophy's) determination (ascertainment not construction) of reality. Objectivity is about the social and not the physical. The physical does indeed offer intense objectivity, but collapsing objectivity into objects creates a mess I think we both agree on. I could summarize by saying that it's impossible for an isolated subject to be rational or scientific. (This doesn't mean that I can't run off to the woods having been raised/educated and do science. But I'm still in a world that knows my language.)
I would say that the manner in which a thing exists is known to us. The apple is red, etc. That is the thing in itself, as described in human terms.
Looking at the apple is the basis for our language about it. Nonetheless the apple exists independently of human experience and representation.
Quoting Wayfarer
The moon still exists when no-one is looking...
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not clear what transcendental idealism is adding here. All that seems required is that empirical explanations take into account the nature of the observer.
I think we ought to recognize the difference between an abstract concept (universal), and an imagination, an image of a particular within the mind. The former, for example mathematical concepts, geometrical figures, etc., exist by definition. A "square" is such and such, a "circle" is such, and so on. The very existence of these concepts in the realm of the human mind, relies on their respective definitions. On the other hand, we can imagine a particular, by producing an image in the mind without knowing a definition. We can however make a judgement as to how the image corresponds to sensations. Is the image produced from sense experience, or is it completely imaginary?
So, "an abstract man" would not be an image of a particular man, rather a definition of what it means to be a man. We can consider the distinction between primary and secondary qualities in this way as well. Locke looks at qualities, and realizes that some qualities we do not directly sense, or imagine, we deduce their existence through definitions. The question for Berkeley might be described as how would we validate abstract concepts as referring to anything independent from the mind. So he uses "matter" as an example to demonstrate that we can just as easily conceive of the world without matter. It all becomes much more complex than either Locke or Berkeley represents it as, and this is just like a lead up to Kant's a priori/a posteriori, and analytic/synthetic distinctions.
Quoting Jamesk
This just takes us back to Descartes' argument. We can validate the existence of our own ideas because they are immediately present to us, but that there is substance (substance or matter, being an abstract idea) independent from this requires building up a system of correspondence, and correspondence is based in fundamental assumptions which cannot be proven. So the arguments Berkeley uses against Locke cannot really be applied back against Berkeley as you suggest. But Berkeley is basically just an extension of Descartes' naivety which is fine for grasping the reality of ideas, but gives us nothing to base an understanding of the physical world on. And the objections which one might use against Berkeley are quite distinct from the ones Berkeley uses against Locke. This would be that his strictly monist reality can provide no principles for correspondence.
I would agree except I would say the things are objectively real insofar as God makes them to be by thinking them. Obviously things are not static they are all more or less dynamic and hence constantly changing.
I don't know what Berkeley would say to that; according to the logic of his thinking (based on what I recall) I think there would still be a real difference and hence a valid distinction between what is, what is experienced by us and the subjective feelings that arise on account of what we experience, with the former two being objective and the latter subjective.
Certainly the objects of common experience exist in a common-sense way - which is the attitude of empirical realism. But when you really examine the nature of those objects, and indeed the nature of experience itself, at bottom it is actually quite mysterious - even unreal. The statement that 'the moon exists when not being looked at' is, of course, almost exactly the kind of point that Berkeley made his case on. And that exact question, as you know, was asked, exasperatedly, by Einstein himself, during the debates with Bohr and Heisenberg over the meaning of quantum physics. Why did he feel compelled to ask it?
[quote=Werner Heisenberg, The Debate between Plato and Democritus]The fact that, at least indirectly, one can actually see a single elementary particle—in a cloud chamber, say, or a bubble chamber—supports the view that the smallest units of matter are real physical objects, existing in the same sense that stones or flowers do.
But the inherent difficulties of the materialist theory of the atom, which had become apparent even in the ancient discussions about smallest particles, have also appeared very clearly in the development of physics during the present century.
This difficulty relates to the question whether the smallest units are ordinary physical objects, whether they exist in the same way as stones or flowers. Here, the development of quantum theory some forty years ago has created a complete change in the situation. The mathematically formulated laws of quantum theory show clearly that our ordinary intuitive concepts cannot be unambiguously applied to the smallest particles. All the words or concepts we use to describe ordinary physical objects, such as "position", "velocity", "color", "size", and so on, become indefinite and problematic if we try to use then of elementary particles....it is important to realize that, while the behavior of the smallest particles cannot be unambiguously described in ordinary language, the language of mathematics is still adequate for a clear-cut account of what is going on.
During the coming years, the high-energy accelerators will bring to light many further interesting details about the behavior of elementary particles [sup] 1 [/sup]. But I am inclined to think that the answer just considered to the old philosophical problem [i.e. of idealism vs materialism] will turn out to be final. If this is so, does this answer confirm the views of Democritus or Plato?
I think that on this point modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are, in fact, not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structures or—in Plato's sense—Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics. [/quote]
1. Although the LHC has by no means resolved this question, arguably it has only amplified it.
Quoting Andrew M
It's a subtle but important point, but it undermines the entire notion of 'mind-independence', albeit on different grounds to Berkeley. Kant points out that empirical knowledge is dependent on attributes and powers which already exist in the mind - so 'things conform to thoughts', rather than vice versa.
Quoting sign
What we have with modern scientific method is a way of distilling the kinds of facts that are generalisable for all observers, and also quantifiable through mathematics. So objectivity is applicable across an enormous range of phenomena, but it's not absolute. That is why, at the end of the day, we have only the shifting sands of falsifiable hypothesis.
A lot rests on the way that science was interpolated into the position that had previously been assigned to religion, as a 'guide to how educated folks ought to think'. Of course, when it comes to technê that is quite appropriate, but not necessarily when it comes to practical wisdom, aesthetics or ethics. It doesn't allow any space for the sense of the unknowable and the mysterious, which hems in and bounds human knowledge.
What could it possibly mean for objectivity to be "absolute"? Is that even a coherent notion?
I agree. The scientific subject is an ideal, unbiased subject. It is ideal both as an idea and a goal.
Quoting Wayfarer
Indeed. What occurs to me is that this is precisely the ground of pluralism. If objectivity is understood in terms of the scientific object or object of common sense, then everything else can only be subjective. The space for the unknowable and the mysterious is the privatized conscience. From this perspective we maintain a 'priesthood' and 'theology' of the objective (the scientific subject) but reduce its realm. In practice, I think we recognize quasi-objectivity in a wider realm. It is 'not just my opinion' that hurting children is wrong. Or rather that's arguably a superstitious way of looking at which pretends that worldly objects are perfectly established. The fantasy is that there is stuff out there which is 'perfectly' there. Somehow 'hurting children is wrong' is subjective despite the consensus while what is 'perfectly' there is not consensus, despite its mediation by a scientific consensus. In short, some 'stuff in itself' is a dead 'god' or ground of objectivity.
I'm under the impression that you believe in some kind of non-scientific non-subjective truth. I'm suggesting that 'objective' is a good word for this. Indeed, the dominant definition is still 'of a person or their judgment' that is 'not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.'
Due mainly to Protestantism, which 'internalised' the entire vast salvific machinery of medieval religion.
Quoting sign
Indeed - embedded in the Great Chain of Being. All of the world's wisdom traditions were 'topographies' of that conception. (Actually I bought Arthur Lovejoy's book of that title, which regrettably doesn't read very well as it's poorly edited and written in rather turgid academic prose comprising very long paragraphs. But the overall idea is still sound in my view. I'll reply further in that other thread.)
Quoting Janus
I believe that overall, a very important motivation of Enlightenment philosophy - exemplified by the French 'philosophes', Auguste Comte, the Scottish Enlightenment (including Hume), and Kant himself - was the attempt to shift the foundations of knowledge from the generally metaphysical and religious outlook of the foregoing culture, to one provided by the natural sciences.
And really part of that is the aspiration to arrive at an understanding of the absolute, an answer to the question of 'what is behind it all?' It's not unprecedented in philosophy and religion, after all: God, in the Christian doctrine, is the 'alpha and omega', source and end of everything. Later Greek philosophy was likewise animated by the idea of the One (ta hen) which was the source of all (and which Christian theology borrowed heavily from). Hegel himself sought to understand and explain how the Absolute manifested in history. More recently, 'in a 1980 lecture, “Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?”, Stephen Hawkings expressed “cautious optimism” that within 20 years physicists would discover a “complete theory” that would solve the riddle of existence. It would tell us what reality is made of, where it came from and why it takes the form we observe. He expanded on these ideas in Brief History of Time, published in 1988' (quoted by John Horgan). So I think it's quite reasonable to portray science as 'the quest for the absolute'. And I think that scientific realism still generally maintains that aspiration. And doesn't that make the claim that it is possible, in principle, to arrive at an objective understanding of the absolute? Isn't the 'search for the grand unified theory' that Hawkings refers to, trying to do that?
I agree, and internalizing it differentiated it. We are all 'still Protestants' inasmuch as we believe in freedom, one might say. The meta-belief (the functioning absolute) is that the 'absolute' is a private matter. I intend neither praise nor blame. 'I' in my noisy idiosyncrasy who strive nevertheless to determine the real-for-us am of course made possible as 'myself' by this freedom. So the private conscience in fact strives outward for public recognition, via persuasion which is not forbidden. We can also note the gap between words and deeds here. The freedom of speech is 'Protestant.'
Indeed, I read science in its most expansive and romantic conception of itself as a 'theology' of the real understand in terms of publicly available objects (to be redundant). The feeling-tone justifies the metaphor. Nature is a goddess to see in her nudity. So perhaps the focus is simply on the sensually public (already 'conceptualized' in the ordinary sense that makes the arranging the experiments possible.) This is a 'theology' of the real that methodologically excludes its own substance (meaning). This meaning is like the optic nerve, the condition for the possibility of science and also its instituting blind-spot. The 'primordial' problem of interpreting the other (the problem of reading non-mathematical language) is simply dodged, with impressive results.
To be clear, I think one can cherish science without collapsing it into philosophy, and I ultimately don't think 'scientism' is the name of the 'problem.' The 'problem' (if we must have one) is perhaps our own individual freedom, but as it exists in others. On the other hand, we need such frustrating freedom to enjoy being recognized as freedom by freedom. But this is also as reason by reason, and 'scientism' would be one of many claims in a plurality of privatized consciences sharing a world in which they are bodily interdependent.
People at one time thought that the movements of the stars and planets were mysterious. But that turned out to be a statement about people's knowledge and understanding, not about the phenomena themselves.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't understand that conclusion. Was Kant claiming that the existence of dinosaurs in the ancient past depended on human thought?
Of course we know vastly more about physical cosmology than did the ancients, but mysteries have a way of re-appearing in new guises. We have discussed at length the problems of the interpretation of the meaning of quantum mechanics. Meanwhile controversy rages about the scientific status, or lack thereof, of strings, super-symmetry and multiverses. They are all mysteries that don't look like being resolved anytime soon.
Quoting Andrew M
I have quoted this before:
Bryan Magee Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107
I interpret the underlined phrase to mean that realism smuggles a human perspective in, without recognising that it has done so. The pre-history of the Earth (for instance) is understood in terms of preceding epochs - that is, to all of us, an objective fact or set of observations, and I am not taking issue with that. But what this doesn't recognise is that, these observations are still oriented around an implicitly human perspective in terms of time and space. And that spatio-temporal framework is what is 'the creation of the understanding'. That is what would not be real, in the absence of any observers. So the picture we have, of the serene early Earth, silently orbiting the Sun, still contains an implicit observer, who forgets that she is still part of the picture. Absent that organising principle supplied by the mind, what can be said to exist?
Schopenhauer, again:
WWR vol. 1, sect. 7
If we can use feelings as explanations for peoples' behaviors, then aren't feelings objective? Anytime that you talk about the way things are, which includes peoples' emotional state, you are speaking objectively.
The subjective is a subset of the objective. Your feelings are part of reality as much as the waves of the ocean are. They are effects and causes.
I'd phrase that as "an understanding of the objective absolute," not as "an objective understanding," since understanding itself doesn't have the property of being objective. Understanding is a mental phenomenon, not an extramental phenomenon.
Anyway, so you're basically using "absolute" to refer to "what's behind it all." I wouldn't say that an understanding of that is necessarily achievable only by science, at least not with the assumptions that are currently made by the sciences, and scientists are just as prone to endorsing nonsense as anyone else, but the answer to "what's behind it all" is certainly not going to be religious, and is certainly not going to be arrived at by anything like religious "inquiry."
How would it make any sense to say that subjective/subjectivity refers to or necessarily implies "not the way things are"?
I've said this a ton of times, but when I use the terms subjectve/objective, I'm using them as simple synonyms for "mental" versus "extramental," and ultimately, I'm using those as terms for two different sorts of locations (brains versus everything else). Applying one term versus another to various things is like asking whether something goes in a cabinet or not. "Peanut butter?" "Yeah in the cabinet." "The couch?" "No, not in the cabinet." Etc.
Why does the location matter? Simply because if something is only a mental phenomenon, then it's not something that one can get right or wrong in the sense that one can get right or wrong what the chemical composition of, say, a volume of seawater is, It's simply a fact that people have the mental content that they do.
The problem with this perspective is that the religious traditions give us a much more comprehensive and realistic understanding of the nature of time, and the relationship between time and space, than the assumptions employed in modern science do. All of the unanswerable problems of modern physics, and cosmology, mentioned by wayfarer above, along with the issues of spatial expansion, dark matter, dark energy etc., are all incomprehensible aspects of reality under the paradigm of the scientific representation of time. It is my opinion that the problems in understanding these aspects of reality, will never be resolved until we release the scientific representation of time, and return to the religious ideology for guidance.
Thanks for your explanation, that was helpful.
As I read it, Kant is reifying the way things appear to us into a world of appearances and making that the domain where dinosaurs, along with space and time, exist. A world of appearances does imply an observer.
Whereas the empirical realist says there is no world of appearances (nor a noumenal world), only a unitary world that appears in a particular way to observers and is described in human terms. So while our descriptions or pictures of the early Earth imply an observer, the early Earth itself does not.
And what is the religious theory of time?
How ignorant would you have to be to not be familiar with definitions of "sound" not as a sensation?
"Sound is defined as "(a) Oscillation in pressure, stress, particle displacement, particle velocity, etc., propagated in a medium with internal forces (e.g., elastic or viscous), or the superposition of such propagated oscillation" for example
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your evaluation of it is independent of the fact that I explained it.
Typical TS - responding to something I never said because they didn't take the time to read the whole post.
I never said, nor implied, that subjectivity is the opposite of objectivity. I said it is a subset of objectivity.
I think I actually said something like what you said. Illusions exist and are real. What they are interpreted to be about, doesn't exist and isn't real (that's what an illusion is - a misinterpretation of sensory data). That would be the subjective part that you are referring to - the way it appears, but isn't the way it is.
When I say that subjectivity is a subset, I'm saying that it is just a unique area in space/time, just like most areas of space/time. That rock is just as unique as this rock and your view is to my view. Views exist and are real. A view is located where you are located, and where I am located, and where every sensory-processing system is located. Rocks don't have a sensory-processing system, so there is no view located at the rock.
Re this, so you are speaking what when you talk about the way things aren't? Not objectively, but _____?
Even in Protestantism the 'salvific machinery" still consists in a communal context: the church. Protestantism does also allow, though, for the individual's relationship with God; it brings the experiential dimension of religion into play.
It is worth asking just who was saved by the "entire vast salvific machinery of medieval religion" and just how those who were saved were saved, and what they were saved from. They were mostly not the common people I'd wager!
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
To me the equation of science with realism is a strawman, since realism is by no means necessary to do science. Many scientists are devoutly religious (although of course mainstream Christianity is a form of realism; it is realist about the world that has been created by God and about the human soul, and about the afterlife (even to the point of positing actual physical resurrection) and there is no idea of a 'veil of illusion' equivalent to what might be found in some eastern religions).
I don't think science can rightly be thought as search for the absolute. Perhaps physics and cosmology are searches for the fundamental and for the origin respectively. But science mostly consists not in worrying about 'what is behind it all" but in trying to discover how it all works and how the parts of it relate to the whole of it. The idea of something "behind", which means something hidden, transcendental is really alien to science, I would say, because it is outside the range of its data sources.
The absolute is the idea of how things are absolutely independently of us, and I think any intelligent scientist would realize that science, as a human practice, deals with the world as it is experienced by humans. On the other hand science has no reason not to think, has every reason to think, that our experience is a real process, as real as any other, and so our experiences of things reveal a part, at least, of the reality of those things. Not many scientists would imagine that we can exhaustively know the nature of things, since there must be properties of things which are inaccessible to us due to the configuration and limitations of our senses.
The fact that people have actual feelings is objective; the subjective part is that only the person having the feeling (if anyone) can confirm that they in fact had a particular feeling at a certain time. In other words the feelings themselves, or even the fact of their having been had, are not objective in the sense of being available for public scrutiny.
It may be objectively true that I felt sad at 9 AM this morning, but only I can really confirm that. And the feeling of sadness I had this morning at 9 AM is subjective also in that its unique feeling tone makes it so; no one else but this subject, I, can experience it.
In a kind of 'absolute' sense I can see where you are coming from, though: the feeling I had this morning actually happened, it was real, it really felt like whatever it felt like, and in that sense you might say it was objective. But 'on the ground', so to speak, what is objective is what is available for inter-subjective scrutiny and confirmation.
There is no succinct "religious theory of time" just like there is no succinct "scientific theory of time". But the religious perspectives are far more insightful for giving us guidance toward understanding the nature of time..
Quoting Terrapin Station
That's not a definition, it's a bunch of incoherent nonsense. Look, you class "oscillation in pressure" and "particle velocity" together within the same definition. This is clear evidence that your so-called example of a definition of sound is nothing but incoherent nonsense. Clearly you just copied that off of some random website, Wikipedia actually, which will allow anyone to add their two cents worth into a definition, resulting in a bunch of incoherent nonsense.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Right, just like your so-called example of a definition, above. would be supposed to demonstrate that you've defined what sound is. Random, incoherent, confused, nonsense, does not qualify as "an explanation".
My post was in response to the remark 'The space for the unknowable and the mysterious is the privatized conscience' which I said is very characteristic of Lutheranism.
Quoting Janus
I very much doubt that. The whole question of the 'mind-independent' nature of reality and whether it was discoverable, was central to the debate between Bohr and Einstein. Einstein remained a staunch defender of scientific realism all his life.
Quoting Janus
Back in my undergrad days, I wrote an essay for the Philosophy of Matter course on the prose poem of Lucretius. It was called 'De Rerum Natura', which literally means 'on the nature of things'. It was an early classic in philosophical atomism, and is still taught. Science, and philosophy, is often concerned with that question.
I would have thought that you were in favour of privileging personal experience over dogma. And I think it is simply true that the "unknowable and the mysterious" are the province of personal contemplation; since they obviously cannot exist in the public space.
Quoting Wayfarer
If so, then I think you should get out more. :wink:
You haven't responded to any of the more challenging points in my post. In my view someone who genuinely wishes to learn the truth will be eager to question every tenet of their beliefs.
Quoting Janus
It's an historical thing. Most atheism in my experience is Protestant in origin. The import of it is very much that 'the individual' is the central focus, but the individual in turn relies entirely on the grace of God. Whereas, in the iconography and sacraments, and so on, there is, arguably, a symbolic representation of the spiritual landscape. That is what it is supposed to communicate.
Also your remark about how 'scientists recognise that science is a human practice' - I'm sure that's not true. Einstein, as I said, was a staunch realist. Almost everyone in this thread, with the exception of Sign, likewise is so bound to a basically realist (scientific or naive) viewpoint, that they can't even comprehend criticism of it - when they respond to criticisms of it, it's obvious that they haven't the first idea of what was intended. Hence, I give up. I'm trying to learn programming. :-)
It seems to me the problem is that you count all realism as "naive realism' and I don't think that is a suitable nuanced view. Scientific realism would be just the claim that the world of phenomena that appears to us is the result of real, dynamic processes including the real, dynamic processes that are us.
There would be no world as it appears to us, if there were no us, obviously, just as there would be no world as it appears to ants, bees, aardvarks, bears, antelopes and buffalo if there were no ants, bees, aardvarks, bears, antelopes and buffalo. I doubt any intelligent scientist, if asked, would disagree with that.
A true scientist does not want the world to be any way (in the ontological, as opposed to the moral sense of course), or if that is impossible to achieve at least aspires to attain a state of not wanting the world to be any way, she wants to find out the truth about the way the world is. Can you honestly say that you don't want the world to be any particular way, that you wouldn't mind if the world turned out not be spiritual but merely material, in other words that you are not emotionally biased and have no desire to get beyond those emotional biases? If you cannot say that then you are not operating in accordance with the scientific spirit; the desire to know the truth, whatever it turns out to be.
What I was stressing is that the individual brain is structured to work with other brains. To think the brain in isolation is misleading. We can stare at a single brain, and we can also stare at a single ant. But the brain makes more sense individually as a node in a network with other brains, just as the ant makes more sense as part of a colony. We start with a world of objects in a causal nexus and enrich this causal nexus by determining new relationships between the objects.. We also create new objects, both virtual (concepts) and actual both to establish these relationships and to put them to work. One could even say that thinking by its very nature 'transcends' the isolated object in order to embed it in a system (nature, etc.) The 'individual' does this largely with language, which is to say with an accumulated 'we' acting 'through' this individual. I didn't create the English language I think in. 'I' am clearly largely a product of my community, and I also don't create the food I eat. I buy it with mostly electronic 'points.' This 'I' is more like one end of a continuum than something distinct (if we really just look at it live.)
I'm invisible, or maybe my viewpoint is incomprehensible.
Quoting Janus
There's a real problem with this paragraph, and that is that once we uncover the deficiencies in human understanding we start to realize that the world is not the way that any of us think that it is. That is why realism at its core is off track. Some of us might think that the world is 'merely material", but this is not the case because the world is not the way that any of us think it is. So it's nonsensical to propose that the world might turn out to be merely material.
It's nonsensical to suppose that some viewpoints are not more in accordance with reality than others.
There's a very real problem with that assumption of "more in accordance with reality". Reality is vast and complex. Some viewpoints focus on this, others focus on that. On what basis would you claim that the ones which focus on this, are "more in accordance with reality" than the ones which focus on that.
I'm enjoying your posts. I'd like to hear more about the religious conception of time. Heidegger was influenced by this and did some great work with it. So I'd like to see what else can be done with it.
Beautifully put. But @Wayfarer himself emphasized detachment. I think we can all meet on this common ground. I suggest that the move basic to both 'true' science and religion is against the 'bad' subject, the irrational or ungodly or greedy or superstitious or alienated subject. 'I' strive to transcend what is merely 'I', perhaps by finding some 'kingdom of God' within this 'I.' The 'I' strives towards its 'substance.' What I seem to strive for is some kind of communion (with God or nature) or community of [synonym for good] people. Of course this has to be vague in order to point at a general structure, but I think the vagueness allows for a common ground.
Sorry MU it wasn't a reference to you. I haven't had any reason to take issue with your posts here.
Quoting Janus
Not all realists are naive realists, but there are some:
Quoting Terrapin Station
I'm taking that as representative, (although I've also given up in this case.)
Quoting Janus
Of course, and I'm not taking issue with that. There are many places where Einstein expresses sentiments that I find admirable (like his famous quote about 'we are entering a huge library' or 'the individual is an optical illusion in consciousness'.)
What I have in mind is more the kind of uncritical acceptance of science as the 'arbiter of reality'. This is the view of many of the popular intellectuals and science writers who comment on philosophical questions. It is also pretty close to the attitude of many academic philosophers. Of course there are also scientists that doesn't apply to. But you can't say it isn't a very widespread element of modern culture. Why, I have even seen you criticize it from time to time (except for when I criticize it, in which case then apparently I'm attacking straw men.)
Quoting sign
Isn't the point about all forms of idealism, that they're actually pointing to the fact that knowledge of the world is something that implies and requires an observing mind?
Quoting sign
One of the key points about Galileo's interpretation of Plato was that it was deeply influenced by the Italian Renaissance, in which there was a big revival of Plato. Galileo accepted that Plato's 'dianoia', which is mathematical knowledge, is of a higher order than empirical knowledge, in the sense that the mathematically-quantifiable attributes of the primary qualities of bodies can be known with great certainty. You can also see how that dovetails with Descartes understanding of the apodictic nature of rational certainty and mathematical proofs. This is the origin of modern mathematical physics
So this mathematical method provided a way to transcend or 'bracket out' the merely subjective and idiosyncratic. It was a radical break with medieval science, because it also eliminated telos and intentionality, and much else besides. Nagel puts it succinctly:
So the kind of 'self-negation' that modern science engenders, is nothing like the 'self-abnegation' of the contemplative traditions which is based on the transcendence of ego. It is more rooted in the tradition of liberal individualism, the pursuit of progress and the common good. And again, it's a very 'this-wordly' enterprise. And hey, there's a lot to commend that. I really don't like the Green/Left disparagement of science and democratic values. I owe a hell of a lot to it myself. But there's a spiritual vacuum at its core still.
It's a difficult and long process which requires ardently, and arduously, analyzing all the different aspects of time. We can begin with the most simple, what is the most evident to us, and that is that there is a fundamental difference between future and past. We find a recognition of this difference in the oldest religious material in the distinction between what has happened in the past, and what we are looking forward to in the future. Tales, myths, were handed down from the past, with the view that they would be useful for the future. At some time in the past, human beings then recognized the importance of the present, as the boundary between past and future. In the Old Testament, I believe at one point God answers the question of who are you, with I am that I am, or something like that. This signifies that at this time, these human beings recognized the importance of the present.
Following this, the understanding of time becomes even more complex. The ancient Greeks introduced the notions of change and becoming, and these concepts are based in the fact that time is continually passing. This adds a second dimension to the nature of time. Not only is time fundamentally the substantial division between past and future, which is the present, but it is also active. Add to this, the idea that the past consists of actualities while the future consists of possibilities. So the realm of physical existence, whatever it is that has real (actual) physical existence, is the past, what has come to be, and this physical existence (the past) is continually coming into existence at the present from the possibilities which the future hands us. Some might describe it as the physical world being created anew at each moment as time passes. So Neo-Platonist philosophers and Christian theologians studied this problem of how it is that the physical world comes into being from the realm of possibilities, at the present, as time continually passes. This fundamental problem remains unresolved but modern science appears to be distracted from it.
Quoting sign
Yes, I've read quite a bit of Heidegger, and though his terminology is difficult, he does focus on this problem of the nature of time, and offers some good insight. There are other modern philosophers who have taken up the question as well, but it is very complex, difficult, and confusing. The confusion is the worst aspect because it causes a philosopher to write one thing, then later write something else which is inconsistent, so they tend to write precious little, having not resolved the problems. Then to the reader it might appear like the writer does not have a clue, when in reality the writer is just trying to work out some very difficult problems, and provide some sort of picture for the reader.
I know, I just wanted to add my two cents.
Indeed. And what do you think of the idea of the primacy of the future for human beings? We 'incarnate' the future, acting in the present in terms of a desired or fear possibility?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is a deep issue. Memory seems fundamental here. The past exists as memory, one might say. But surely it's not so simple. I'm interested in the accumulation of meaning. The past is learned from. Experience is synthesized. The 'living' past along with the future experienced as possibility seems to govern our interpretation of the present.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is indeed a great issue. I'm looking into Derrida lately, and he seems to be questioning the presence of the present. I'm still making sense of his difficult work. It seems like a radical thinking of becoming (which may subvert the idea of 'becoming.')
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I agree that his terminology is difficult in Being and Time, but he is much clearer in his earlier lectures. And the first draft of Being and Time is mercifully short and to the point (80 pages or so). I preferred just rereading this one many times. Lately I've read his 'Emergency War Semester' lectures, which was his breakthrough perhaps. 'It worlds' ('world' as a verb).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is very good point. I've been looking into Husserl lately, and it seems he was always developing his thought. As you may know, he also tackled the problem of time. He saw that the present was 'thick' and not point-like. Anyway, the deep questions are indeed just difficult. One struggles to find the words and often has to invent some.
I'm tempted to say yes, but I think 'absolute idealism' is no longer this kind of idealism or attempts to transcend and include it. Still what idealism actually addresses is the problem of meaning. It's possible (although highly 'speculative' or unworldly) to see reality as (networked) meaning 'in' non-meaning.
Then 'mind' and 'matter' would just be two more signs. The 'I' is just one more sign along with the 'you.' In ordinary life the sign 'mind' plays such a huge role that it's almost impossible not to think in terms of mind and its other and of meaning in minds. I think we can imagine something like the field of meaningful 'nonmeaning' as a unity. This 'nonmeaning' would be (to impose signs on the flesh of meaning) sensation and emotion, the stuff organized by signs like 'object' and 'person.' To be sure, this is too far out to live by. But I think it's possible to dissolve the 'mind' in meaning. 'I' am a 'fiction' or an abstraction from the unity.
Quoting Wayfarer
This all makes sense to me. When I studied physics, I was seduced by the classic Newtonian stuff. The ghostly skeleton of the world was a realm subject to law, describable in exact hieroglyphics. I was learning calculus at the same time. It was all very seductive, especially since movement itself was being captured in a quiet eternal language.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree. That bracketing was perhaps a blessing and a curse. It allowed science to ignore the most mysterious and difficult aspects of existence and concentrate on the prediction and control of objects. Such concentration obviously revolutionized human life, but of course it just might lead to our extinction. We built a 'toy' that just might be too big for us. I can imagine intelligent life arriving to find our remains and putting together the narrative. 'These clever fools accidentally wasted themselves. They just couldn't work as a team.' And isn't that the problem facing us from the point of view of the 'species essence'?
Quoting Wayfarer
I think you are being a little unfair here. Of course I do see the 'spiritual vacuum' in some interpretations of science, but I think you are forgetting romanticism's love of nature. If I were to go back in time and become a natural scientist, I think I'd choose biology. I'd want to be out there just looking at the animals. I can't help but think that some scientists are quietly opening themselves to what is, just amazed by it. Of course this is indeed this-worldly, but it seems like a good form of this-worldly-ness.
To end on agreement, I definitely perceive an ideology out there (Dawkins and other pop atheists) which is not at all about just looking at the world but very much about imposing itself as a spirituality. The contradiction is that we are 'just apes' who are still supposed to have some trans-pragmatic respect for science as Truth and not just an implement for prediction and control. Rorty is at least consistent. He wants to de-divinize natural science but use it among other discourses (like religion) to build a 'centerless,' liberal utopia 'where love is pretty much the only law.' Angry scientism is by comparison 'still too pious.' It's the very dogmatism that it projects.
[quote=Max Horkheimer]In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to one’s surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirit’s antagonism to nature–even as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including man–frequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of man’s continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature. Regarding reason as a natural organ does not divest it of the trend to domination or invest it with greater potentialities for reconciliation. On the contrary, the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the ‘useless spiritual,’ and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity. The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy.[/quote]
Eclipse of Reason, pp. 123-127.
Quoting sign
The thought does sometimes occur to me that the reason SETI has never found signs of an advanced civilization is that none of them survived the discovery of atomic weapons. :groan:
Great Horkheimer quote. Something occurs to me 'against' the pop atheists. Let's just pretend that somehow religion was erased from the earth. Do we have utopia? No. We have ten thousand varieties of humanism clashing, just as religions have clashed in the past. While the inner experience varies, both humanism and religion are largely visible in the world as politics. There's already so much tension in the position sketched by Horkheimer above that a world full of Darwin-as-philosophy individuals would quickly schism in terms of purity and direction. Some would become radical pragmatists perhaps while others held strangely to science as an undistorted ascertainment of its Object. As I see it, we already have clashing varieties of humanism in our politics. Religion is an underdog and a scapegoat in many cases. That's one reason I like to work religious thinking into my philosophy. The alternative often enough seems to be a religion that takes itself as anti-religion and enacts the faults it projects on its scapegoat.
A brave opinion put well. I agree with it more than I disagree.
Reality also appears to be unified and invariant.
Did your emotional state cause you to behave a certain way? Close friends and family can read you better than you can sometimes. Having a more objective perspective of someone can give you an insight into that person that that person doesn't have of themselves, because people have a habit of fooling themselves.
We can only see the "surface" of anything, rocks, trees, water, people, etc. It's how our minds model the world. We use scientific experiments to explain the behavior of these "surfaced objects".
I would say that the future is manifested within us as anticipation.
Quoting sign
I would like to see a separation between "experience" and "future". I believe it is wrong to say that we experience the future, and this is a big problem with philosophies based in experience, like empiricism, these philosophies cannot account for our relationship with the future. So what happens when "experience is synthesized" (as you say), memories (experiences) are contextualized at an actively changing present, in relation to the future. So what it is which is synthesized, i.e. produced by our minds at the present, contains elements of experience as well as elements of anticipation. Therefore this cannot be properly called "experience". Our being at the present is a synthesis of memories (past) and anticipations (future), experience being proper to the former but not the latter.
Quoting sign
We did a reading group of Voice and Phenomenon here at TPF a couple years back. If you're interested, search it. We covered the book quite thoroughly (though I'm not sure we quite finished) with opinions from different people. If I remember correctly, his distinction between presence and present, might be described in a simplified way as subjective being and objective being, with a sort of transcendentalism. I think Heidegger's description in Being and Time is similar, but more Platonic in the sense that Heidegger builds on the distinction and relationship between the more general and the more specific. This is actually the heart of the issue in all of its complexity. You'll find it in Plato's Timaeus, further developed by Neo-Platonists and early Christian theologians. Simply put, the future appears to us in the form of possibility, which is the general, universal, conceptual. But the past is revealed to us as the existence of particulars.
So according to Plato's Timaeus, there must be an act which is occurring at the present whereby the universal Forms are informing the passive receptacle, matter, to produce the physical existence of particulars. In any case, this is the difficult problem, the future appears to us in the form of possibility, which does not consist of particulars, it is general, universal, though we may express particular possibilities in an attempt to understand and choose. The past appears to us as particulars, individual things with material existence. We can put this into context of this thread by saying idealism looks to the future, while materialism looks from the past. The difficulty is to bridge the boundary between them, which is existence at the present.
Quoting sign
I haven't read Husserl but I know that the trend in modern presentism is toward a dimensional, or 'thick" present. I call it the second dimension of time, "breadth". The issue is that the "present" is defined by our presence. But our presence is as described above, a synthesis of elements from the past as well as the future. The present cannot be a non-dimensional point in time which separates past from future because this would deny the possibility of us being at the present. Further, we notice that activity occurs at the present and activity requires a passing of time. So we must allow that there is a passing of time which occurs at the present; whereas this time which passes at the present is not accounted for by the timeline which represents the present as a point between past and future. Einstein's concept of the relativity of simultaneity really opens up this possibility, by demonstrating that the point which marks the present, is really a vague "zone" on the timeline. The one dimensional timeline is produced from one synthesized, or average, perspective between the two extremes of large and small existence. But to allow for the existence of this "zone" at the present, the timeline must have breadth, and this allows for numerous parallel timelines depending on the frame of reference.
Quoting Janus
I don't understand why you would say this. Don't we confront many distinct possibilities at the present, implying the exact opposite.
What are some examples of that then?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) definition, from the American National Standard on Acoustic Terminology document, which is also quoted on Wikipedia, yes.
Thanks. I think Wayfarer and I have plenty of common ground. We do have a couple of areas of disagreement, though.
I agree with you that the most important things are communion and community; which in some senses are the very same things. For me both consist in dispositions which are based more in feeling than in intellectual understanding; they are more poetry than science, that is. Good poetry can well do without science (although it may benefit greatly from scientific insight) but good science ( that is, beneficial science) cannot do without poetry. This signals to me that nothing is more important than feeling, and love is the primary feeling that both binds and releases.
I described that in my preceding posts.
Quoting Terrapin Station
As I said, the definition provided is quite incoherent. Considering that light exists as particles, that definition would class light as sound. You ought to check your references before you quote them because it's probably false that the ANSI defines sound in that way. Anyway, even if the ANSI defines "sound" in that way, this would be an instance of a business defining the term for the specific purpose of that business. That's not a good source for a philosophical discussion.
I think science is the "arbiter of reality" if by that you mean the best way to understand the natural world, the way it is, the way it works, the way it all "hangs together". Science is not best adapted to understanding and describing human behavior though; the great novelist does a better job in this than the great scientist.
So, science has no business denying or pretending it can explain (away) aesthetic, ethical and mystical experience. All these are based in feeling, and those feelings constitute the richness of human life. I don't believe science is any threat to the domains of feeling. Heightened feeling can tend to generate superstition, though, and I think science, the scientific attitude, is a threat (and the best antidote) to that.
Where we probably differ the most is that I don't believe any aesthetic, ethical or mystical experiences can tell anyone anything definite about the metaphysical nature of reality. Religious experience, for example, cannot tell us whether or not there really is a God, or Karma, or an afterlife, whether reincarnation or resurrection. Ethical, poetical and religious insights are insights of feeling, allegory and metaphor, not of any determinate knowledge. What they mean for human life is also mediated more by feeling, ideally by love, than by intellect, in my view.
I think you, on the other hand, think there is some esoteric, higher, intellectual objective knowledge, and you see science as a threat to that. This is precisely where we disagree, and that is what I mean when I say you are attacking a strawman when you attack science in defence of that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think this touches on a problem you've already mentioned, the difficulty of finding the right words. We have different conceptualizations of the future. In one conceptualization, the future is exactly what can't be here yet. In another, the future is possibility that exists 'now.' In this second sense we can say that human experience is primarily 'futural.'
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
For me we might as well include anticipation as part of experience, especially if it dominates the 'now.' This seems to be only matter of preferred terminology though.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
While I like this conceptualization (which is new to me), I feel the need to complicate it. Why should the future be only conceptual possibility? Can I not have a detailed fantasy or fear of the future? And a point that you didn't respond to (which I didn't stress much) is the idea of the 'living' past. This 'living past' is not our memory of what happened. It is what obscurely governs out interpretation of the present with the help of the future as possibility. It is 'invisible' as what we take for granted. We might call it the distortion of the lens which we cannot see through that lens. It is our 'pre-interpretation' of the situation, the one we don't know we have as we employ it. It can become visible in retrospect. We can see later that we were thinking 'inside the box' the box of this 'living past.' I suppose this is a metaphorical use of 'past,' since it is not what is usually intended.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think we are near the heart of the matter with this 'breadth.' My favorite approach to this at the moment is in terms of the smear of meaning. As you read this very sentence there is memory of what you have read and anticipation of what will follow in terms of that memory. The meaning is deferred. The meaning of what you have already read is not established until you have finished the sentence. The past is a function of the future, in this sense. And how does the 'present of reading' exist here? All of our conceptualizations of time depend as conceptualizations on this same 'smeared meaning' of reading/speaking and in that sense are derivative. 'Clock time' exists as a product of 'meaning time.' If meaning itself is 'non-present' in this way, then the traditional notion of the present seems to be shaken or troubled.
It is objectively true that emotions motivate behavior; I have not denied that at all. But we cannot determine objectively precisely what emotion motivated precisely what behavior at some specific time and place. We cannot determine that in any way that could be inter-subjectively confirmed by observation, and I am even skeptical that we could determine such a thing precisely even in relation to our own behavior.
This is true even with ethology; we can only approximate even with observations of animal behavior and how much more is this true of human behavior? There is thus a subjective element even in some of the sciences (not to mention the subjective element in all the sciences due to the fact that they are human practices; which is a different subject again).
Of course there is variation as well as invariance; I am not silly enough to deny this; it's a matter of scales. Even variation has its own regularities, though. :wink:
I completely agree. 'Feeling is first.' We need concepts and metaphors of course, but this is the 'letter' and not the 'spirit.' This spirit is 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.' The sound of language, this arbitrary 'meaning vehicle,' is something like the flesh of meaning. This flesh helps carry the feeling of the meaning and is perhaps inseparable. We use concepts to break up a unity. But we live that unity anyway.
Right. You deny that anything meaningful can be said about metaphysics proper.
Quoting Janus
In Western culture, scientism or 'science as a religion' is a threat to many things. It's basically built on a kind of hollowed-out and inverted form of Christianity. This is described in any number of books, although they're probably a bit too 'metaphysical' for your liking.
I think perhaps your approach to these very questions is very much influenced by cultural Protestantism - which is not an ad hominem, it's not something particular to yourself, but I think it pervades current culture. It often gives rise to a kind of reticence with respect to anything deemed metaphysical. Hence your frequent recommendation of Wittgenstein. However I don't think that you appreciate that Wittgenstein's silence was also a form of apophatic mysticism. Ray Monk, who wrote what I believe to be a well-regarded bio of Wittgenstein, says in his article Wittgenstein's Forgotten Lesson, that
So do you think he too was 'attacking straw men'?
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Found a nice quote:
"Religion," George Berkeley once remarked, "is the virtuous mean between incredulity and superstition".
From this interesting blog from an author that has a PhD in the philosophy of Berkeley.
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Regarding your question about 'how meaning is able to be constant' - have a look at this OP which I started last year, when I think you weren't around. And also this post (along with @Apokrisis' response to it). They're both about the relationship between language, thought, and representation.
No, I said that nothing definite can be said about the metaphysical nature of reality, not that nothing meaningful can be said about metaphysics. (I'm not sure what the function of the "proper" here is).
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't agree with this assessment in relation to myself: I have not been much influenced by Protestantism. Certainly Protestantism has had a cultural influence, no greater than the influence of Catholicism, though (which incidentally has been generally more sympathetic to scientific theories such as Evolution and the Big Bang and Catholics and also Catholics outnumber Protestants by about 1.5 to 1 I believe). So, basically I think you are vastly oversimplifying in you view of the situation.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, I agree with him in being against scientism, and you should be well aware of that if you have read my many exchanges with apokrisis.
So, the idea that "every question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all" evolves out of 'black and white' thinking; thinking without nuance. Again you should have noticed that i repeatedly say that science has no business trying to answer aesthetic, ethical or mystical questions. But those questions have no definitive solution, so it would be OK to say that every question has either a scientific solution or no definitive solution; that would be a very different, much more nuanced statement.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I would interpret that to mean that religion (at its best, mind) retains the feeling that is (often, but not inevitably) lost with incredulity, without retaining the superstitious beliefs that incredulity pits itself against.
Ah yes, I remember that thread. I'd just like to emphasize that I don't at all deny meaning. Indeed, I am playing with a theory that radically prioritizes meaning. Both 'mind' and 'matter' are just meanings. 'Concepts' ('subjective') and 'objects' ('out there') are both just 'formed non-form.' This 'non-form' might be called 'sensation' or 'emotion,' except these mislead us into taking the subject as prior to meaning rather than one more meaning. To be sure this is 'speculative.' No one could live by it. The continuity of meaningformed nonmeaning gives rise to a sense of being an 'I' in a world with others and objects. Some of these forms are more or less pure form. At the level of the bit ('pure' unity), we can have a science of 'ideal' information. IMV it is only math's exclusion of metaphoricity ('meaning-bleed') that allows it its exactness.
==
'Does consciousness exist?' sounds like a 'materialist' denial of meaning, but for William James this question puts 'matter' or 'non-consciousness' in the same bin of abstractions from the lifestream which is one and continuous.
http://faculty.fiu.edu/~hauptli/James'DoesConsciousnessExistandTheContinuityofExperience.htm
I don't think this idea will appeal to you, and I understand the value of a more determinate theology, one with fixed meanings and concepts. Nevertheless I think James' vision is profound and worth consideration. I understand him on this issue much better having grasped what I'd call the point of later Wittgenstein. (Obviously others could reject my interpretation of Wittgenstein.) I think this is the issue that divides you and @Janus. Is the 'spiritual' determinate? Is it essentially determinate? Is it propositional? Is the truth of the spiritual 'sharp' like mathematics? I relate this to 'incarnation. ' The Father has a kind of ideal unity. The son is of flesh. So despite my love of the labor of the concept and the idea of the concept as a labor of love, I do lean toward a 'continuous' interpretation of the 'divine.' Of course further experience may change this. I may be blind to something.
What you said was:
Quoting Janus
But these matters are also considered in philosophy. It is one of the things that separates philosophy from both science, and from poetry, and there is more to it than 'just feelings'.
Quoting Janus
That's your personal view. Religious people will obviously take issue, as there are many who believe exactly that. And I personally find the study of comparative religion, especially where it overlaps with philosophy, the source of many insights into such issues, which are not really known by either science or by modern academic philosophy.
Quoting sign
:roll:
What I was trying to argue with those two threads is that a given sentence or formula or proposition might have a very definite meaning, but that meaning can be conveyed in completely different forms. If I send you the recipe for a cake, or the design for a building, you have to follow those instructions exactly to create the outcome. So I have conveyed meaning or information to you. I get it wrong, or you misunderstand it, and nothing is conveyed and it doesn't work. So, it's real, in that it has consequences that are real. Get a calculation wrong and your building fails. But then, that information can be expressed in many different media or in different symbolic forms - languages, codes, or whatever. I can send you the formula in one notation or another. What doesn't change, is the meaning or the information that it encodes or conveys. So the symbolic form and the information is not exactly the same thing. The text encodes meaning, but that meaning is something other than the physical form. That I find interesting.
As for how this relates to idealism: the rules of thought - logic, maths, syntax and so on - actually provide the structure within which meaning becomes intelligible. Without them, all we would have is gestures and sounds. And that belongs to a different order, - as Platonists would argue, a higher order than the physical order, an which is only visible to a rational mind - the 'intelligible order'. So the 'structure of thought' is also a reflection of, or interwoven with, 'the structure of the world'; which is why mathematics is predictive (among many other things.)
But religions contradict one another as to what is told. Also I was not denying that someone might be convinced by a mystical experience of the existence of God, or the Universal Buddha nature or Karma, reincarnation, the trinity or what5ver else, but that mystical experiences are had by individuals and only the individuals in question really know what the 'content' of those experiences are, and so inter-subjectively corroborated kinds of knowledge cannot be had from them. This is analogous to feelings and sensation no one can know my pain. So religious experience is more akin to feeling than it is to thought; because the latter may be shared and critiqued and tested and so on.
Quoting Wayfarer
I have never said that we cannot think about religious and ethical and aesthetic experiences; I have said that no definitive knowledge is achievable in the way it is with math and science. This is a commonplace insight really, everyone knows that there cannot be "progress" in philosophy in the way there can with maths and the sciences. It seems to me that you have a kind of emotional resistance to these commonplace insights; iut;'s like you don't want to believe them; so you don't really engage with them.
If you're interested, there are many convergences to be found in them. Of course, not many are interested.
Quoting Janus
I do try, Janus. Our dialogues usually end up at this point. I get we have a divergent 'meta-philosophy'. Let's just leave it that.
Indeed. There's no question that meaning is sufficiently determinate for practical life. So please don't misunderstand my point in terms of the explosion of all meaning into mist. An easy example of what I have in mind is my thread about 'the real is rational.' Clearly these words out of context are not easy to interpret. To call them meaningless because they are ambiguous, however, is a mistake in the other direction. IMV it's the fear of interpretation that tempts some thinkers to reject spiritual talk altogether. If it's not medium sized dry goods or educated common sense it's 'nonsense.'
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course I agree, and I am particularly interested in that issue myself (hence the moniker.) Meaning is 'incarnate' in text, has text for its 'flesh.' Translation as transmigration of [s]soul[/s] meaning happens all of the time. The question might be phrased in terms of whether translation is ever perfect. And can I even read same text twice? I can of course scan the same words. But can I have exactly the same 'meaning experience'? The text is grasped as an abstract unity. It's the same river and yet it's not.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. I understand this very well. And 'interwoven' is close to a metaphor used by Husserl. For very good reasons we divide our experience into these realms and postulate faculties. The question is whether this division is sharp and absolute. Clearly mathematics is especially pure, a-historical, sharp. But even here there is trouble. It was precisely the philosophy of mathematics that lead me to study mathematics. Its attempt to capture the continuum and the infinite led to a foundational crisis and even a schism. In what way is the number 12349823489982323423432 intuitively given? We have a faith in our algorithms. Its meaning is not as sharp as that of 2, it seems to me.
Plainly, the kinds of meanings that are found in great literature (or even quotidian literature) and recipes are completely different. In the case of recipes, formulas, and the like, information is conveyed exactly. In the case of literature, then it's a completely different kind of meaning - evocative, revealing. Art reveals new and unthought-of perspectives. 'I had never thought of it that way' or 'I remember that feeling now' - revealing something about the inner life of the author or the reader.
But even though that's all true, it's not exactly the argument I'm trying to develop. To those who propose that knowledge or meaning is 'encoded in the brain' or is identical with 'brain states', what I'm trying to argue is that the faculty that grasps meaning cannot be physical. There's actually no physical analogy for whatever that faculty is (other perhaps than computers, which are after all built by us). But the fact that it's not physical, means that, for most people, then it must be spooky or spiritual or far-out or something. Whereas I'm saying in some sense that it's 'hidden in plain sight'. We actually don't understand something fundamental about our own abilities in this regard.
Jacques Maritain, The Cultural Impact of Empiricism, bolds added - something I often see here.
Note for example, this passage in Leon Wieseltier's review of Dennett's Breaking the Spell:
This point is also elaborated at considerable length by Thomas Nagel in his essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.
Quoting sign
Actually I read something about that recently - was it Georg Cantor who had more or less a nervous breakdown? There are some very interesting mathematical philosophers about. And you and I have discussed many times Wigner's essay on the Unreasonable Efficacy of Mathematics in the Natural Science.
Coming to think of it, have you heard of the book by Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math? I think we all should get hold of that. There's reviews here.
The problem is not maths per se. Maybe it's more about the absence of practical wisdom. In any case, mathematical Platonism would not necessarily culminate in these kinds of conundrums. (I've heard it said that Penrose is a Platonist, but he's way over my head....)
Oh I very much agree with you here. To be blunt, our situation is freaky, mysterious, uncanny, wonderful. And yet practical life obscures this. 'One' does not talk about certain things, question certain things. I was quite suspicious of the 'spiritual' once myself. I remember my crude bias toward it. I was still rebelling against the crude understanding that I had of it in the first place. Only in retrospect when my rebellion was complete could I finally go back and see it all in a new light.
[quote=Hegel]
First, then, comes the development of doctrine; secondly comes its fixation. Only after that does the opposition of believing and thinking, of immediate doctrinal certitude and so-called reason, enter in. Thinking reached the point where it relied only on itself; the first thing the young eagle of reason did was to soar as a bird of prey to the sun of truth, from there to declare war on religion. Then, however, once more justice is done to the religious content also, in that thinking finds its completion in the concrete concept of spirit and enters into a polemic against abstract understanding.
[/quote]
And of course 'abstract understanding' is just crude or partial or incomplete understanding, an understanding that only grasps opposites and doesn't see their unity (to oversimplify.) I also note that Hegel does indeed identify his thinking with (rational) mysticism in the shorter Logic.
Quoting Wayfarer
He wrestled with issues like that more than once. Something that fascinates me is that he absolutely hated infinitesimals. He described them as germs. At the same time he was himself offering so truly mind-bending and controversial mathematics. All of this was connected with the divine for him. The math stands on its own feet, but the man contemplated the relationship of God and the infinite.
Quoting Wayfarer
No. Haven't looked into that. I haven't really kept up with physics. I really like the tension that is already there in pure math. The real number system is eerie indeed. 'Most' real numbers contain an infinite amount of information. For this reason they must literally remain nameless. No algorithm can even approximate them with arbitrary precision. This is connected to Cantor. As you may know, there are different levels of infinity (an infinity of such levels.) Even stranger is that the proof is relatively simple. But what does this proof mean? Is this proof nothing more than symbols that have been moved around to mechanical rules? Or was something discovered about an objective realm to which we have access non-sensually? Or? I'd say that there is genuine intuitive content in the proof, but I don't know how to position that intuitive content.
I also agree with the criticism of any empiricism that refuses to acknowledge intelligibility. For me the question is what to make of this intelligibility. To deny it is to deny that such a denial is intelligible.
Well yeah. What are you talking about when you make any claim about how things are?
If you were to type "I feel happy.", do those scribbles refer to a real state-of-affairs, like your emotional state, that I can glean accurate information about some state-of-affairs independent of my own mind? If they do, then you are speaking objectively. If not then your are speaking fiction, or lying. What is subjective is your arrangement of sensory data that makes up your conscious state (working memory). Your view is subjective because it is unique. The world (objectivity, truth, the way things are) is made up of subjectivities in a sense, which is why I said they are subsets of objectivity.
If you were to type, "Harry Hindu is wrong.", do those scribbles refer to a real state-of-affairs, like me actually misinterpreting my sensory data, your intent, etc. where my mental representation of the world isn't accurate, or truthful? Another word for my worldview would be "fictional", maybe even "delusional".
This is akin to saying that we cannot determine objectively what causes nuclear bombs to explode. We don't see atoms. We see objects. We don't see minds. We see bodies. If we can get at the existence of atoms through the behavior of macro-sized objects, then why can't we get at the existence of minds and their contents through the behavior of other bodies?
We can only approximate anything using whatever method we choose - science or any other. That's not a limitation of science. It's a limitation of our own perceptions and assumptions. What separates science is that it tries to unite ALL views into a coherent ONE.
You're missing the point which is that physical processes can be mechanically modeled; whereas volitional processes, whether emotional or instinctive, cannot. You could never even say precisely what neural process caused what behavior, let alone determine precisely what neural process is correlated with what emotion.
I don't think we have a "divergent metaphilosophy"; I don't even know what a "metaphilosophy" could be! There is just philosophy as far as I am concerned.
The main point of divergence between us is as to whether religious experience (the ethical or aesthetic experience) can yield objective, which means inter-subjectively confirmable, knowledge. I've explained at length my reasons for thinking it cannot. You say it can.but you seem to be incapable of explaining how that could be possible. A good definition of superstition would seem to be 'believing in something you cannot explain your reasons for believing in"; so I remain convinced that you are not being philosophical in this, but superstitious.
On the other hand if what you believe in not objective esoteric knowledge, but ultimate mystery, then there is no problem because you cannot be called upon to explain the inexplicable. This was Wittgenstein's position; "whereof we cannot speak...".
But isn't the second sense a faulty, or even false conception of the future? We can't conceptualize the future by describing it as what is now. The future is not now, it's what lies ahead. When we conceive of the possibilities for the future, which exist now, we are really referring to the past. We consider the way things have been in the past, along with our capacities to change things in the past, and from this we develop possibilities for the future. There is no conceptualization of "the future" here. The only thing that "the future" does in this conceptualization is validate "possibilities", as real, in the sense of free will. If one does not believe in free will, then even this is removed, and "the future" here refers to nothing at all, as there is nothing to distinguish it as being different from the past.
Quoting sign
What would this consist of, the fear of something very particular in the future? I really do not think that this is possible. Consider any time that you have been afraid of a future occurrence. You could only nail down the particulars of that occurrence, to an extent, because the event has not yet happened. The rest of that event escapes the imagining of the particular. So the imagining of that future event is really more general than it is particular.
I can imagine many particular events which I will be involved in tomorrow. But since I do not know the specifics of how these events will unfold, my imagining of them is really very general. The problem is that I can name these events, and this makes them into particulars according to having been named as particular events, but in my mind when I actually think about them, there is just a general idea which is being referred to by that particular name.
Quoting sign
I don't seem to be able to understand what you mean by "living past" here.
If it can be explained by reasoned argument then it can be understood by anyone capable of reasoning. Of course this does not mean that it will necessarily be agreed with. Your implication that I would not be able to understand your argument seems like a weak excuse for not giving it, and also seems to show a kind of arrogant elitism with which I would wish to have no truck.
Seriously - I know that the arguments I put are difficult and often somewhat esoteric. They are hard to explain, and I few people who really understand them, but I do recognise when my position is challenged. But 'not being understood' is not being challenged - it's not being understood.
I don't think I'm a crank, or that I am howling at the moon. I did two degrees, one Honors in Comparative Religion and an MA Buddhist Studies, and got good marks in all my units. I make a living as a tech writer. So I don't see myself as eccentric or delusional. I often try and explain things to you, in particular, which is often greeted with 'you haven't answered the question' or 'you're not able to explain yourself'. So really, honestly, I think you don't understand what I'm trying to say, and also I don't think you *want* to understand it. I think you want to take issue with it, for the sake of having an argument. Which is a salutary reminder that posting on Internet forums might indeed become a needless diversion.
I am going to take time out over Christmas. I'm trying to learn some challenging skills for my profession, and I really need to concentrate.
All the best for Christmas and New Year, and so long for now.
You often respond obliquely--which I think is at least partially on purpose as a defense mechanism, often ignore stuff (I know I do, too, but I do it via ignoring sections of long posts, because they introduce way too many topics/subtopics, and I want us to tackle one thing at a time so we can actually "get somewhere"--this is one big reason that I prefer chatting to message boards), and you have a tendency to respond kind of like a telemarketer--as if you were resorting to a script that gave you canned responses to objections, where the canned responses often involve quoting something that doesn't really address the points that someone brought up (and sometimes that contain ideas that the person just argued against).
It's not just neural processes that are involved with emotions. There are also chemical processes. This combination is what correlates to your model (the emotion you feel) of those processes. Emotions model those processes. The emotion you feel is a model, just as the color you see.
Notice that I didn't use the term, "physical" processes. They are just processes. Why would one kind of process (mechanical) be modeled, when another kind of process (volitional) cannot?
Instinctive processes are simply built-in behaviors that occur without any intent. Those are modeled with any robot that behaves based upon it's built-in programming.
I wouldn't say it can't work to divvy up the terms that way, but it's very different than the definitions I use. (And it's very different than some conventional usages, although of course you don't have to care about that.)
One thing that's unusual about divvying up the terms that way is that usually something being a fact and/or being true is seen as normative, in the sense that people should ideally agree with things that are true or that are factual.
On your view, where subjectivity is a subset of objectivity, which is the same as truth/fact, a comment like "Frank Zappa was a better composer than Mozart" is thus objective, is true and is a fact. As is "Mozart was a better composer than Frank Zappa." If something being true or a fact implies that we should agree with it, then we should agree both that "Frank Zappa was a better composer than Mozart" and that "Mozart was a better composer than Frank Zappa." Although of course, agreeing with both of those "facts" poses a bit of a problem.
You could circumvent this, though, by simply saying that "Frank Zappa was a better composer than Mozart" always has an implied "
But this contradicts the objective fact that mass delusions exist and that large groups of people can take fiction as fact. Take the belief that the Earth was flat and the center of the universe, for instance. What is factual isn't what is normative. What is factual is that norms exist and can be maintained for a long period until more efficient norms are established.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes, that is how I would circumvent that. Value statements (statements that use "better", "worse", "good", "bad", etc.) are statements about your conscious state, not about something that exists independent of your conscious state. "Goodness" and "betterness" are not things that exist independent of your mind. But that isn't to say that they aren't part of the world. Your mind is part of the world and anything your feel would be an objective fact. Mistaking your conscious state as the state of the world would be making a category mistake.
"Normative" in this usage is another word for "shoulds." It's not denoting statistical norms. "People should ideally agree with things that are true or that are factual" doesn't imply that they in fact do agree. The idea is just that ideally, they should.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I agree with that up to the "would be an objective fact" part. But I'm using a different definition of subjective/objective than you're using..
Considering that I used to think pretty much just as you do, I don't believe there is any problem with my understanding of what you write. It's not inevitable that if someone understands your arguments, they will therefore agree with them, you know!
Anyway, I'll leave it at that and in turn wish you all the best for the festive season. :smile:
This doesn't follow at all. If there were an objective fact of the matter regarding which one of the two is the better composer, then one of the statements would necessarily be wrong.
Both could still be statements about an objective fact; people don't always get the fact right.
On HarryHindu's view, subjectivity is a subset of objectivity. Anything subjective is also objective. And in his view, objective things are the same as true or factual things.
I think all he is saying is that if you have a subjective opinion, it is an objective fact that you have that opinion.
Yeah, the paragraph after the one you quoted sorts that out.
Of course neural processes (as well as hormonal and other somatic processes) are also chemical! What led you to think I am denying that? Emotions are not models in the same sense as maps, descriptions or mathematical models are models; you are shifting the definition. This is easy to see, because emotions are not about or for the brain states they may be thought to be correlated with, they are about things in the world. Love is not for its antecedent neural state, but for the beloved, for example.
Some kinds of processes can be mechanically (propositionally or logically) modeled, others can only be descriptively (metaphorically or analogically) modeled.
You are simply presupposing that animal instinct is analogous to the programming of a robot. This is unargued and far too simplistic, in my view.
Sure, although I wasn't responding to that issue anyway, but to your fallacious argument in the paragraph I responded to.
I believe, however, that there may be some reason to favor the anti-idealist position, that I've recently come across. The argument is a little hard to articulate, and doesn't so much show a consideration against idealism as that it forces idealism to slide into panpsychism of some sort. But then again, I haven't thought much about the plausibility of panpsychism, which does not strike me as a priori absurd.
Dualism avoids panpsychism.
"Shoulds" fall into that category of value judgements. They relate to objective existence of goals. If your goal is to survive, then you should agree with things that are factual.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Have you ever used the terms in a way to refer to someone's biases and implied that the biased view is an inaccurate view, as opposed a more objective (accurate) view? An objective view would be a view from everywhere, while a subjective view is one from somewhere.
It seems obvious that there could never be any empirical evidence "one way or the other", since the empirical is what it is regardless of what we might imagine its 'ultimate' metaphysical explanation or ontological constitution or nature to be.
I can't see any reason to suppose that idealism must "slide into pantheism". By contrast, Galen Strawson claims the obverse: that physicalism entails pantheism: https://philpapers.org/rec/STRRM-2
I'm not shifting anything. Emotions are symbols, just as color, sounds, tastes, smells, etc. are. They refer to some state of affairs. Emotions are special forms of tactile sensations, or symbols, that refer to your body's state, which just doesn't include the brain. Neural and chemical processes don't only exist in your brain. If they did, then you'd only feel your brain, and not anything else. Feelings of love tend to encompass the whole body. Pain is often felt in one place and only in the head when you have a head-ache.
Sensory impressions aren't just about what is out there. It is about the relationship between what is out there and what is in here. Colors are about the relationship of the object, reflected light and your visual sensory system interacting. Love is just the feeling of attachment and ownership. Feeling love is just a symbol of that attachment - the relationship between you and what you love.
Quoting Janus
Why? Natural selection programmed the built-in behaviors of animals (instincts). Humans programmed the built-in behaviors of computers. Instincts are built-in behaviors - behaviors that arise as a result of your nature. In this sense, everything behaves instinctively in some way.
It is when we try to cross that boundary between instinctive behaviors and learned behaviors that we actually start to get at the differences between animals and robots.
Re my usage, it's not possible for someone to have an "objective view"--that's an oxymoron on my usage.
You just made an objective statement - one about how things are - that "objective views are not possible". So your statement defeats itself. Is this statement true independent of whether I believe it or not? Are you telling me how things are, or how things are for you? Isn't that the same thing? Are you part of how things are?
Subjective views are a view from somewhere and are inherently subjective. The only way to obtain an objective view is to put all of our views together into something consistent. Objectivity would then be a consistent explanation of all subjective views together, and would even include why we have subjective views in the first place.
I dont think that gives us an objective view, I think it gives us an objective standard. An objective view is not possible when the viewer is a subjectve experiencer, while the objective standard (or “measure” if you prefer) is something the experiencer has set up to be referenced as a tool in precisely the way you described.
You just made an objective claim about the nature of views, as if you had an objective view of views. Do you have an objective view of views? If so, then you contradicted yourself. If not, then is your claim accurate or biased (subjective)? Why should I, or why should I not, believe your claim?
An objective claim is not the same thing as an objective view.
You can move the conversation forward when you stop putting words in my mouth and answer those questions I posed to you.
Do you have an objective view of views? Is your claim something I should believe? Why?
A view that recognises it's origins are subjective and does as much as it can to isolate their own subjectivity from the view is about as objective as we can be. It may not be truly objective in your sense but it does usually provide us with a very different angle than we would have without taking into account our own subjectivity.
I don't think that "attachment and ownership" are what real love consists in at all. Feeling love is not a "symbol" of anything, it is simply a feeling of profound care for what is loved. The idea of love may be a "symbol" of the feeling, but I think it would be more accurate, less confusing, to say that it is the conception of the feeling: conceptions consist in networks of symbols, just as language does.
I'm not clear what the rest of what you wrote is trying to argue against, or even convey. For example, I haven't said that neural processes are confined to the brain.
Quoting Harry Hindu
It's not a good analogy, unless you assume that God was the programmer, because programming of computers is intentional. If nature is without any overarching intentional direction, then it would be confusingly anthropomorphistic to equate what purportedly happens due to what is thought to be purely random mutation and purely fortuituous natural selection with intentional programming. Also instinct can be distinguished from, but cannot be coherently, ontogenetically or ontologically, separated from, either animal or human volition and judgement.
I was talking about my usage of subjective/objective, not your usage. We use different definitions of the terms.
Quoting Terrapin Station
What's the point of discussion in a context of differing usages unless you were to discuss the virtues of the one usage over the other?
Love is a feeling that you feel - in your body. Why would the feeling be in your body, if it wasn't something about your body?
We can place ourselves firmly in our imaginations to the point where our heart beats faster, we sweat, get an erection, etc., It is when these things occur that the chemical ratios change within our bodies, and that is what we are feeling - those chemical changes. We associate those feelings with our thoughts or the things we experience, as if they are about those thoughts, or things in the world. But they are really about those chemical reactions that occur when you have those thoughts or experience those things.
Quoting Janus
But computers had to be perfected before they propagated across the planet. It was human mistakes and learning that led to the current version of computer you have on your desk. The computer evolved and continues to evolve based on human selection rather than natural selection. But humans are part of nature and part of that natural selection. We cause the extinction of other animals and promote the existence of others. We are a force of nature ourselves. In sense, computers evolved by natural selection. The more useful they are, the more of them we make. Computers are using us to procreate. Eventually they will take over the world. :gasp:
I wasn't saying anything about popularity or idiosyncrasy, and I especially wasn't implying anything normative about that or implying a value judgment in general. I was just saying something purely factual/descriptive--we're using different definitions.
And yeah, my definition is consistent within my views, if you value that.
The point for me was simply to understand HarryHindu's usage. But I'm also going to note my own different usage. I'd not at all push for everyone to adopt my usage. I just want to understand a different usage so that I can understand what someone is saying. I wouldn't participate on a board like this if I weren't interested in understanding different individuals' views, simply because they're those individuals' views. I'm interested in and value other people for their own sake.
But it wasn't factual. You were wrong to say:
Quoting Terrapin Station
It isn't very different from some conventional usages. It's in the dictionary.
Yours would be the one that is very different from conventional usage.
And I do have to care about that if I ever hope to have coherent communication with others.
The word "some" is different than the word "all."
The definition I'm using isn't different than all conventional usages. It's also different than some.
That doesn't really matter though.
Quoting Harry Hindu
When we use highly idiosyncratic definitions we can simply define them for others.
Re this, by the way: "I was just saying something purely factual/descriptive--we're using different definitions"
That is indeed factual. We're not using the same definitions.
:roll: Again, if it's in the dictionary, it can't be idiosyncratic.
Sure. And you're pointing that out because?
Had I suggested that a definition might be both idiosyncratic and in the dictionary?
Janus gave a great reply to your post earlier:
Quoting Janus
Care to define your idiosyncratic terms for others so that we can compare our definitions?
I said, "different than some conventional usages, although of course you don't have to care about that."
You said, "And I do have to care about that if I ever hope to have coherent communication with others"
The contextual implication there is that if you ever hope to have coherent communication with others, you need to be concerned with, if not use, the conventional definitions of terms.
To which I responded, "When we use highly idiosyncratic definitions we can simply define them for others."
So in other words, one can use a highly idiosyncratic definition ("highly" as in perhaps one is the only person to use the definition in question), if one simply makes the definition explicit. I was merely addressing the logical implication of "I do have to care about that if I ever hope to have coherent communication with others"
Regarding how I use subjective and objective, which isn't that unusual, I simply use them so that "subjective" refers to mental phenomena (that is, that subset of brain phenomena that is mental phenomena), and "objective" refers to everything extant that's not mental phenomena. (I've given those definitions on the board quite a few times, so apologies to folks to whom I'm repeating myself yet agin.)
That really isn't much different than my usage, or the common usages of those terms. I emphasized the parts that are similar, if not the same, as how we are using them, so I really don't see what the big deal is.
It's not a big deal. I just became curious because you were using the terms in a way that I wouldn't use them. I'd never say that subjectivity is a subset of objectivity for example. I'm not criticizing the way you're using the terms, so you do not need to keep defending it.
Didn't I just say that your usage isn't much different than my, or the common usage of these terms? Doesn't that mean that you do use those terms in that way?
Just look at what you said:Quoting Terrapin Station
You said that mental phenomena is subjective and is a subset of brain phenomena. Brain phenomena qualifies as being part of everything that's not mental phenomena (objective). Mental phenomena is a subset of brain phenomena, so subjectivity is a subset of objectivity.
Re the way I use the terms, the subset of brain phenomena that have the property of mentality is NOT objective. I use the terms so that they're necessarily mutually exclusive. I use the terms so that all you have to ask is, "Is this a mental phenomenon?" If the answer is "Yes," then necessarily it's subjective and not objective. If the answer is "No," then necessarily it's objective and not subjective.
The way I'm using the terms is similar to this:
"'Shmagel' refers to any loose rocks on a mountain with a summit 4,000 or more feet. 'Plagel' refers to everything else in the world, including all rocks everywhere else (including on lower mountains), and including every part of any mountain that's not a loose rock."
If you think of the terms in that vein, just two sounds to (a) pick out a particular sort of thing versus (b) everything else, then my usage should be clearer to you.
That isnt what I implied that you said.
You stated that mental phenomena is subjective. What is brain phenomena? Objective or subjective?
So see what I said right after that above:
So re the brain phenomenon in question. Ask the question, "Is this a mental phenomenon?" If the answer is "yes," then the brain phenomenon in question is subjective (and necessarily not objective).
If the answer is "no," then the brain phenomenon in question is objective (and necessarily not subjective).
So let's take a couple examples.
Phenomenon a, which is the brain state (that is, particular parts of the brain being in particular states) of being an idea. Ideas are mental, thus that state is subjective (and necessarily not objective)..
Phenomenon b, which is the brain state that helps regulate our respiration. That is autonomic and not mental. Thus that state is objective (and necessarily not subjective).
“Automatic and not mental” doesnt seem accurate here. What is the difference between the brain states that makes one “mental” and the other not? Are you going to say its about consciousness, or simply being aware of the brain state? Presumably you intend that anything one has knowledge of is “mental” and that which we do not have knowledge of (regardless of it being a brain state of a kind as well) is not “mental”. Is that right?
That part is definitely not right. That seems to be taking me for an idealist (at least an epistemological idealist). And I'm not at all an idealist. I'm a direct realist.
And yeah, the difference is awareness/consciousness (where I'll add that I'm not actually categorically ruling out unconscious mentality, but I don't believe there is any good support for anything amounting to phenomena that are just like mental phenomena, only we aren't (first-person) aware of the phenomena in question).
Also the word is autonomic, not automatic. Here's a definition of autonomic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system
Ah, I see. I misread that. Ok, I understand.