Reification of life and consciousness
Mayr complains that reification of life and consciousness leads to an expectation of a substantial soul of some kind.
I think this may be true of adolescents, but I don't think an adult will have a problem understanding, for instance, that the Law involves processes as opposed to being a blob of Stuff. Therefore why would life and consciousness be problematic?
"As far as the words “life” and “mind” are concerned, they merely refer to reifications of activities and have no separate existence as entities. “Mind” refers not to an object but to mental activity and since mental activities occur throughout much of the animal kingdom (depending on how you define "mental”), one can say that mind occurs whenever organisms are found that can be shown to have mental processes. Life, likewise, is simply the reification of the processes of living. Criteria for living can be stated and adopted, but there is no such thing as an independent “life” in a living organism. The danger is too great that a separate existence is as assigned to such “life” analogous to that of a soul. … The avoidance of nouns that are nothing but reifications of processes greatly facilitates the analysis of the phenomena that are characteristic for biology." --Mayr 1982
At best the point isnt one that usually needs to be made. At worst, this is wrong. Both life and consciousness most certainly do exist.
I think this may be true of adolescents, but I don't think an adult will have a problem understanding, for instance, that the Law involves processes as opposed to being a blob of Stuff. Therefore why would life and consciousness be problematic?
"As far as the words “life” and “mind” are concerned, they merely refer to reifications of activities and have no separate existence as entities. “Mind” refers not to an object but to mental activity and since mental activities occur throughout much of the animal kingdom (depending on how you define "mental”), one can say that mind occurs whenever organisms are found that can be shown to have mental processes. Life, likewise, is simply the reification of the processes of living. Criteria for living can be stated and adopted, but there is no such thing as an independent “life” in a living organism. The danger is too great that a separate existence is as assigned to such “life” analogous to that of a soul. … The avoidance of nouns that are nothing but reifications of processes greatly facilitates the analysis of the phenomena that are characteristic for biology." --Mayr 1982
At best the point isnt one that usually needs to be made. At worst, this is wrong. Both life and consciousness most certainly do exist.
Comments (79)
I think he might mean that “life” and “consciousness” should not be nouns because they aren’t persons, places and things. I don’t think it is beyond reason to suspect the grammar itself could lead to strange theories and conclusions, for instance vitalism.
Life and consciousness actually are things. Pointing out that these words refer to processes doesnt change that. A process is a thing.
So if you're right about his point, he's wrong.
The word “process” is a noun, but it is series of actions. These actions are reified into a noun. For instance the word “jog” can be used as a noun. “I went for a jog”. But is a jog a thing? I think the grammar leads to confusions and unnecessary reifications.
You don't seem confused. Who is?
I suspect Mayr's complaint is that, in line with Darwinian materialism. the notion that life and mind can be understood in terms anything other than the Darwinian has to be snuffed out. So he's objecting to the notion that life and mind are real in any sense apart from what can in principle be known to the objective sciences.
One can agree that life and mind ought not to be reified, i.e. conceived of as objectively existent things, without however agreeing with Mayr's materialism. Reification might be faulty because they transcend any objective definition. So, sure, they do not exist as entities, but in their absence, what entities could there be?
So, Mayr might be correct as far as it goes, but he shouldn't, on that account, draw any philosophical conclusions, because his is not a philosophical argument, but a methodological consideration. Excluding considerations which are not amenable to scientific analysis, does not mean that the subject of such considerations are not real.
How would we know whether they transcend definition?
Think about the objects of physics. They are the objectively-measurable entities par excellence. You can specify everything about them to enormous degrees of accuracy - well, up to a point, when it comes to sub-atomic physics, it becomes fuzzy. But that doesn’t undermine the point, which is that modern science primarily concerns itself with what is objectively measurable; that is one of the hallmarks of empiricism. But the nature of mind evades such an easy characterisation; notice that Mayr attempts to ‘ground’ the description by saying ‘well it’s simply one of the attributes of animals’, thereby attempting to ‘objectify’ it.
This whole process of ‘objectification’ and what can and cannot be described in objective terms is one of the, if not the, central problem of modern philosophy.
I agree. I think Mayr's complaint is about Christianity. It is about calling Providence a thing, an entity, and actually existing thing.
Or calling the soul a thing. It is reified, inasmuch as "souls will burn in hellfire for ever and ever" while souls have typically no parts made of matter, especially made in China. And if it's not made in China, it's not made anywhere.
Things that are not made of matter can't burn, because burning is nothing but combining with oxygen, which is material.
Quoting frank
It is not a problem for me. Yes, sometimes I am behind the rent, and sometimes I wonder why people argue with Descartes' Cogito Ergo Sum, but by-and-large, I am friends with life and consciousness.
I think you jumped over some of the text your very own self quoted.
Mayr does not deny the existence of mind, life, soul, etc. He merely says they are not entities by themselves, they are dependent on other things.
As N0S4ATOO point it out, too, processes exist but can't be treated as objects.
Car factories put together cars. The factory takes in raw materials, and puts those together to make a car. No raw materials, no cars. No putting together, no cars. So both raw materials and putting together exist, otherwise there would be no cars.
However, the putting together is a process, not a thing. This is very clear so far isn't it.
So mind, which we each experience, and consiousness, and life, are processes. When the person dies, presumably his mind, consciousness and life stops, because those processes are dependent on the body, as they are functions, or processes, in the body.
You, @Frank and @Wayfarer agree, that mind is not something material. So if it's not made of matter, what is it made of? There is nothing to make things out of in this world, but matter.
So is it a process? By process of elimination, yes, mind is a process. So is life.
I don't see any problem with that.
Oh, one more thing: the nature of process, as an existing thing without it being matter, but its existence hinging upon other things:
I went jogging. Does jogging exist? Yes, because if it did not exist, I would not happen around the block, and I would not happen to lose so much weight at once.
But can I put jogging on the mantle, or can I hang it in the closet? No.
There you go. One of the, if not the central, questions of modern philosophy solved for you, @Wayfarer. All you have to do is to get rid of the thousands of years of distilled dogma that some educators poisoned your mind (i.e. brain processes) with.
Does Darwin have an interest in this topic? An what is Darwinian materialism?
Either you are jesting with me, or else you have a closed mind. No problem, I will live with not having reached you.
You know how to completely mess things up, don't you.
Mind is not made of matter. The body is. Mind is a function of the body. You are denying this, and you are making actual material blobs into processes, which is outright false. It's like calling a brick a process.
Why, oh why do people put their religion before their reason? Religion can co-exist with reason, you don't have to deny the obvious in order to believe in a god. By denying the obvious, the religious create a resentment in the ranks of the reasonable. It would be much smoother if everyone was of the same faith, or else if philosophy was made into a secular endeavour. Neither is possible, I know, but it would level the playing field, it would remove humongous obstacles to agreement.
Quoting god must be atheistAre you saying that my body is not a collection of processes?Quoting god must be atheistIt sure looks like one at the atomic level. And then if we go deeper to the quantum level the whole thing is made up of probable and shifting locations of stuff that is sort of wave, sort or particles.Quoting god must be atheistWho said anything about religion?Quoting god must be atheistWell, actually, I don't think what matter is and what 'physical' means are obvious. The idea of 'physical' has gone way beyond bricks, to include massless particles, fields, 'things' in superpostion....
iow stuff that has very little in common with the matter we think of in everyday life (though this is also like that).
Even mass, that most physical of all sounding qualities is actually a process. It is a resistance to change in location.
Quoting god must be atheistThere is very little that is both true and obvious about matter, certainly not when it comes to bodies or when comes to considering issues of processes vs. things.
And why is the person who is representing himself as seeing the obvious and being rational using ad homs and insults? Why isn't the representative of reason, as he posits it, sticking to the arguments?
In biology, we do separate the two. When we talk about anatomy, we're talking about the blob of Stuff. We're identifying structures in it: the femur, for instance. Physiology is the realm of processes: metabolism, for instance.
Are you saying blobs should be recognized as processes?
Strange, but probably true.
Quoting frank
It is indeed, strange. Because I don't know what pre-Maxwellian means (other than existing prior to Maxwell House Coffee), Dionysian is another strange enigma for me, and I also don't know what "interlocutor" means.
So the only words you use that are more than one syllable, and they resonate with me, are "talking to myself", "lunacy", and "primitive". Bin der, done dose. Yep, familiarity breeds understanding.
This is wrong, because the state of living and a life are different things, so no need for a reification. Also a mind and a consciousness are different things. I think this sort of confusion is a result of people trying to reduce humans to the equivalent of a unicellular organism( a blob).
In fact I would suggest that he is doing to opposite to a reification to a living organism by suggesting that it is lesser a thing than a human life. Without realising that a human is a colony of individual cells. It's cells which are living and they have a life and a colony of cells is a human.
Read up on the Scottish Enlightenment. It was a big influence on Darwin's thinking. Oriented towards science, away from anything deemed 'spiritual', in line with the Enlightenment on the Continent. So, 'materialist' in the sense of considering underlying physical causes as being the sole drivers of natural processes.
Alfred Russel Wallace, on the other hand, co-discoverer of natural selection, became increasingly oriented around spiritualism later in life and never accepted that natural selection could account for what he called 'the higher faculties'. See his Darwinism applied to Man which concludes
[quote=Alfred Russel Wallace]Those who admit my interpretation of the evidence now adduced -- strictly scientific evidence in its appeal to facts which are clearly what ought not to be on the materialistic theory -- will be able to accept the spiritual nature of man, as not in any way inconsistent with the theory of evolution, but as dependent on those fundamental laws and causes which furnish the very materials for evolution to work with. They will also be relieved from the crushing mental burden imposed upon those who--maintaining that we, in common with the rest of nature, are but products of the blind eternal forces of the universe, and believing also that the time must come when the sun will lose his heat and all life on the earth necessarily cease--have to contemplate a not very distant future in which all this glorious earth--which for untold millions of years has been slowly developing forms of life and beauty to culminate at last in man--shall be as if it had never existed; who are compelled to suppose that all the slow growths of our race struggling towards a higher life, all the agony of martyrs, all the groans of victims, all the evil and misery and undeserved suffering of the ages, all the struggles for freedom, all the efforts towards justice, all the aspirations for virtue and the well-being of humanity, shall absolutely vanish, and, "like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wrack behind."
As contrasted with this hopeless and soul-deadening belief, we, who accept the existence of a spiritual world, can look upon the universe as a grand consistent whole adapted in all its parts to the development of spiritual beings capable of indefinite life and perfectibility.[/quote]
Needless to say, thoroughly rejected by Darwin's contemporaries and subsequent science, although some resonance with later orthogenetic philosophies such as Bergson and Du Chardin.
Interesting question(s) no doubt.
The analogy of 'jogging' made me think of immaterial/material entities and processes and/or metaphysical phenomena. For instance, if one thinks of jogging or rather wants to actually go jogging, somehow either the conscious mind brings it into cognizance, or the subconscious mind creates impulses and/or subliminal imagery relative to the Will (the will to go jogging). In any case, it's an esoteric, immaterial and/or metaphysical process.
If, on the other hand, it [cognition] was not a metaphysical process, then when one wants to go jogging, one could theoretically go to a library and look-up jogging, or refer to a binder somewhere showing images of a person jogging. Which in turn, naturally would involve material entities/processes; not immaterial entities/processes.
And that all would mean every time we will to do something, we would not be able to actually do anything until we were shown an objective reality of that something. In this case, a picture of something.
And even if one were to argue Emergent entities/genetic codes causing action, one would still be left with how they would occur from material reality.
what do you think?
I think when we talk about emergence, we're talking about properties of entities, not entities themselves.
IOW, liquidness is an emergent property. If consciousness is emergent, it's as a property of stuff. Properties are things, in English you have to put a "ness" or some such at the end to indicate a necessary relationship.
The nature of matter is still an unknown, despite the construction of the largest and most expensive apparatus in history to investigate it. It has lead to many prominent scientists accepting parallel worlds or multiverses. So the idea that matter provides an explanation is hardly grounded in fact.
not true. my hypothesis/theory/model under development, predicts otherwise. There is energy- Energy patterns as an entity in-and of itself. That is, in my model, consciousness, esp. the qualia kind, is pure energy create as a sort of new, and separate entity within the physical entity, yet part the system as a whole. In my model, the 'consciousness' entity is pure energy, being in a resonant whole with the cognitive and sensory/motor systems such that they are effectively a whole, unified entity with all parts in tune and sensing all other parts all at once. This is a physical 'thing' not a process b/c it is an instantaneous resonant wave system inseparable from the physical boundary and propagating media properties/constraints.
The closest analogy I can think of is a macro version of a Bose-Einstein condensate, so maybe a 6th state of matter. Can't say with confidence yet, but I currently see this, along with many other frameworks/mechanics, as a promising framework for me to achieve the qualia aspect of consciousness. For the access aspects of consciousness, I'm modeling that under a sophisticated non-verbal linguistic framework, which are mostly data-structures and processes and I do not expect those will be part of the 'qualia' experience. While I have some potential ideas to try, I have not yet given much thought on how to merge the two, mostly b/c implementing the above qualia approach in a holographic projection framework I have in mind is intellectually quite challenging, to say the least. I have worked out enough formative concepts to intuitively sense that consciousness can be created in a machine as an emergent object. In this way, I would predict that the mind is an energy pattern that is at one with the material that confines/defines, they coexist as a 3rd entity within the system. BTW, under my model, I need something like qualia to get a coherent, accurate, and comprehensive state of being (e.g., how do "I" feel [about this or that[) within the very spread out and disparate cognitive/sensory/motor system.
where does 'knowing' fit into that? How does it come about?
That seems monumentally unlikely on the face of it. If you look at the other items on your list of recent additions to the set of {things that physically exist}, they're all things whose existence has seemed necessary to meet the needs of otherwise good predictive models. The idea of 'souls' has been abandoned by many for hundreds of years with absolutely no effect on the predictive power of their models, plus, the concept was derived to fit a religious narrative, not to explain any phenomena.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but it'd be like someone having just thought of the exact notion of quantum foam 500 years ago, for entirely religious reasons, without any foundation of quantum mechanics to base it on and purely by chance it happening to fit within a model with good explanatory power.
I didn't mean to. I intended to treat it as an argument supporting the reasonableness of positing their existence. That's why I talked about liklihoods, not possibilities.
You seemed to be suggesting (and confirmed in your last comment), that dismissing the concept of 'souls' on the grounds of physicalism was unreasonable because new things gain physical existence from time to time. I disagree. New things which were previously unknown are afforded physical existence from time to time. Things which have been posited for thousands of years have shown absolutely no precedent whatsoever of suddenly being afforded physical existence as a consequence of some new scientific theory. So a person dismissing such notions on the grounds of physicalism (as you say "ruling things out that have been considered non-material") would be entirely justified in doing so by induction.
under my framework, to establish one self-consciousness we have to be able to explore all our boundary conditions that ware resonating within and their nature must be accessible/determinable wrt their form, function, or purpose in influencing the landscape that the consciousness agent in question is resonating with and within. Then, the consciousness agent in question would have to observe a time-evolution history path where their ‘thought’ could in-fact modify those boundary conditions and that had a correlated, esp. if *expected*, effect on their conscious state of being to ‘feel’ they are alive and the executive center of the (resonating) system. Then, the consciousness agent in question would have to learn and use those associations as tools to manipulate itself (the best it can) to achieve goal states of being. Towards a definition qualia consciousness, I’m thinking that the degree that the consciousness agent in question can do the above, it has ever higher orders of qualia consciousness.
Quoting Wayfarer
you can think of the resonant condition as a time-evolving holographic standing wave pattern within the agent's cognitive vs sensory/motor 'container' boundaries.
Nope, because the specific deduction I am talking about is that 'since they are immaterial, and everything is physical, they can't exist'. I really don't know how to make that clearer. Souls or ghosts are immaterial. Immaterial things don't exist. Souls and ghosts don't exist. I encounter this all the time. I also see similar ones building from the word 'supernatural'. There is a lot of hidden paradigmatic baggage in the terms. Yes, often theists and others share some of that baggage [they have a dualism and place X in the non-material], but some do not and the baggage has assumptions in it that are not justified on both sides of, for example, the Christian dualist vs. physicalist divide.
I also specifically said 'rule out.'
That's as may be, though I've never heard such a simplistic argument myself. But you actually said
Quoting Coben
... so I was just responding to that. It's monumentally unlikely, that's all. I think, in all fairness, if I said "perhaps God will turn out to be a toad called Keith" people would certainly not take such a supposition seriously on a theology forum despite it being technically a possibility.
It is technically a possibility that souls might turn out to be real but such a possibility does not have its chances affected in any meaningful way by the discovery of things like quantum foam.
I can't speak for everyone making such arguments, obviously, but I suspect by 'physical' most mean 'that which has been demonstrated by scientific evidence to actually exist' a physical thing has to have a physical effect, that's how it is identified. There's a need for it in a model which otherwise works well.
So the point about rejecting souls on the grounds of their not being physical, is not simply saying that they are not part of some set whose membership criteria is arbitrary. It's rejecting them from ever being part of that set because of characteristics which will never fit (in all liklihood).
Take quantum foam. It may or may not get included in list of 'things that exist' but we'd be wrong to reject it now, not because of whether it's on the list or not, but because good, working models with detailed predictive capabilities have posited it. It isn't currently physical, but its being posited by a good theoretical model means it fits the criteria of the sorts of things which might be.
Souls are also not currently on list, but they are not part of a good explanatory model, their presence is not posited as part of any predictive hypothesis. So unlike quantum foam, they are unlikely to ever make the list. We can already tell this from their current status.
To laymen like me (and you, but I don't mean to assume), the question is simple. Has the entity been posited by a scientist? If it has, it may well make it into the list. If it hasn't then it's not going to unless there's some very good reason for its exception.
We could define heaven as a rigid dome because that's what they thought it was, and therefore say there is no heaven.
Or we could say, as I just did, that heaven is whatever is up there. They were wrong that it's a dome, as we may be wrong in some profound way our descendants will laugh at.
It's all a matter of context. Swirl the contexts up into spaghetti and you get philosophical slop: perfect for the goals of a sophist: dazzle them with bullshit.
So, even after I point out what I was doing and it is clear in the post and then in my confirmation of it that I was not doing what you assumed - and even called such an argument a poor argument,
had I been making it -
Quoting Coben
you continue to respond as if I was making the other argument.
And then you go on to tell me things I know as if my post entails that I need this layman to layman lecture, despite this apparant need being based on something I have now said several times I was not doing.
God is an atheist made the argument implicitly by saying everything is physical a number of posts back. Most people do not write out their arguments in short syllogisms. And I suspect in part, not in this specific case, which I have no idea about, the arguments would look in need of more bolstering than they are willing to give. I take you at your word that you have no encountered this argument. Me, after a couple of decades in forums like this, I have experienced it many times.
I have also experienced people shifting my posts and the posts of other people so that they can make the points they want to make rather than respond to the posts we wrote.
It's tiring.
Usually however, after I explain what I was arguing they go 'Oh, ok.', rather than continuing to argue against an argument I did not make
and, again,
in fact, specifically said was a poor argument. I mean, I said it was a poor argument and you spent yet another post telling me why you think it was a poor argument!
We can't rule anything ontological in or out by deduction. Deduction only deals in tautologies, we need induction from evidence to rule in or out some aspect of ontology. That's the point of what I'm saying. Induction requires evidence, and there is none for souls (whereas there is for quantum foam). The which is ruled 'physical', or may yet be, will be that for which there is evidence. That which is not, and will never be, is that for which there is no evidence - despite looking. And no, this is not certain because it is induction. Induction is never certain. To invoke uncertainty in an argument about ontology is just to make a category error, it's just not relevant to the argument.
If GMBA did say something like "we can be certain that souls don't exist because they are not physical", then he was either wrong because certainty is not an appropriate term in ontology, or he's using 'certain' contextually (the context being an ontological discussion) and meaning by it just 'very justifiable belief'. The matter of whether souls might one day become listed as physical is irrelevant to the incorrectness of his argument as all ontological entities are accepted on the grounds of evidence, so a concept's 'possibility status' has no bearing on the matter.
In order to rule out souls, we would need evidence that contradicts their existence. This is deduction. It's an application of the law of non-contradiction.
No, because the concept of 'ruling out/in' by deduction is incoherent in ontology. Even if we had evidence which contradicted their existence we could not rule them out deductively. The evidence might later prove to be wrong. We can only say deductively that "either the evidence is wrong, or souls don't exist", but we can't say which by deduction alone (note deduction hasn't told us anything new here).
To say anything about souls (in or out) we have to say it on the grounds of an assessment of the evidence. Currently there is no evidence for souls, so they are ruled out. It's not certain, but the point I was making is that there is no greater certainty than that in ontology. Anyone claiming we can rule out souls deductively is 'not even wrong', ruling out things deductively is just not an activity of ontology. Same goes for someone saying we can't specifically rule out souls deductively as it implies there's things we can rule out that way, it misunderstands what 'ruling out' is in ontology.
(This is all presuming physicalist ontology, which was the context of the discussion)
No. Just no. Proceed to whatever source of insight you trust and start over.
Max Richter, one of my favourite composers/musicians.
I think you'll find the astrophysicists say it is a dome*, the ancient people might be the ones laughing at us,... if they were here.
* you know what they say when they say there wasn't a time before the Big Bang because time and space curve around. It all curves around if you go far enough.
Oh well.
There is no definition of 'physical'. If you look at what is going on in physics itself, it's riven with debates about parallel universes and many worlds and the like. People use the word 'physical' like the meaning is settled, like everyone agrees what 'the physical' is, but this is far from true. What 'physical' comes down to a lot of the time is, 'what science might agree to exist', and that excludes consideration of certain ideas and tropes, but this is as much a matter of history and social convention as it is science.
Materialism, meanwhile, really has no account of the nature of meaning, which I think is fundamental to this debate. If you read the real ardent materialists, they insist time and time again that 'the universe is meaningless' or that 'meaning' is a subjective or personal invention. But the problem is, first, that this itself is a value-judgement that is not supported by science. Scientific analysis 'brackets out' the subjective so as to arrive at a purportedly value-free perspective immune from bias and cultural influences. And it does do that for good reason - but such perspectives are always limited, by definition. They exclude factors which are intrinsic to lived experience, and then demand 'scientific proof' of such factors, having first excluded them, and forgetting that it's excluded them. And this attitude is so all-pervading in contemporary technocratic culture that it's simply taken for granted, it's the air we breathe.
So, back to 'soul' - I take this to be simply the totality of the being. Inclinations, proclivities, history and destiny - all of those factors that can't be grasped by a superficial or any obviously objective analysis. It is the 'meaning of being' considered as a whole. That can be reconciled with the perspective of 'embodied activity', which reflects the physical, social and cultural environment in which being appears and acts. We embody cultural tropes, archetypes, potentialities, and so on, that are beyond the purview of the physical sciences as such (although not necessarily in conflict with them.)
Actually there's a really profound point behind this observation. The pre-Copernican cosmology really did believe in the crystal spheres, that heaven was the literal abode of the angels, the changeless eternal realm. All of that came crashing down with the Galilean/Copernican revolution, replaced by the shocking realisation of the 'appalling vastness of space', as Blaise Pascal put it, and the notion that the Universe was simply a vast ensemble of material bodies controlled by nothing more than physical laws. For us who have grown up in the modern and post-modern age, and simply take this for granted, we forget what an enormous shock this has been.
I agree but isn't there a need to separate the object of interest from the rest of phenomena and doesn't that require one to assign a label to the collection of properties that are of concern? I mean if I wanted to study mental phenomena it would be very convenient to put the collection of mental facts and events under one banner, here mind. I'm no expert but when people concern themselves with the mind, their focus is on the phenomena that constitute mental activity. I've never heard of anyone talk of the mind as separate from mental activity which would be odd and an error but I do come across people who distinguish the mind from the body. The former would be Mayr's error of reification but it isn't committed at all and making a region of interest an object for convenience is completely acceptable.
However my point was that we are now back with a dome, well a sphere at least. All the space and time curve round before infinity is reached. There is no before the universe, there is no beyond because you always come back round in circles. This is rather prosaic and imprecise, but I think it captures the jist of it.
Likewise the soul was taken away by the materialists, leaving us with a meaningless chaotic universe. But now the soul is making a come back.
We will soon have turned full circle and find ourselves back where the ancients were. Not literally I hope.
But the universe is expanding. What is it expanding into if there's a limit?
Yes. "Mind" acts as a rigid designator.
Good point. Naturalism ends up being dependent on dualism to express what it rejects. The Naturalist binds herself to conclusions with no theory leading up to them and then demands that we limit the scope of the question. The fact that this is exactly the modus operandi of the medieval Catholic Church should signal us that this isn't science.
well said. and a bit frightening.
I was listening to a discussion on Schopenhaur and someone suggested that he would consider the scientific approach as the communicative structure of the Devine. And that struck and I am not even a religious person. But the possibility should be humbling to the naturalist.
No. Just no. Proceed to whatever source of insight you trust and start over.
Do you mean that science is the way the universe comes to know itself?
:razz:
It's true, though.
Ah well, if it's 'true' then that's alright. I never thought of checking to see if my propositions were 'true'. Where did you go to get that checked, I'll get mine checked right away?
I'm not being a jerk here, Isaac. I'm telling you that you have problems with super basic logic. Do what you will with that.
Telling someone they have problems with something 'super basic' when you know full well they are an intelligent adult just because they draw different conclusions to you is kinda being a jerk though, isn't it?
If you see that I'm tripping up on the fundamentals, tell me you think so, even if I think you're being a jerk for saying it. My ego will heal. I'll benefit from the heads up.
Cool. Well you're tripping up on the basics.
How so?
You didn't extend me the courtesy of explaining how I'd gone wrong.
Is that bad or an error?
Um, what do you mean?
What would Mayr say regarding the mind being a rigid designator?
Apparently there isn't a limit, from the inside it just keeps on expanding at the speed of light. But like a face painted on the surface of a ballon, which gets bigger when you blow it up, it never leaves the surface of the ballon. Just imagine a ballon which expands for ever. A ballon is dome shaped.
By the way this isn't my philosophy, this is astrophysicists and folk like that.
P.s. If you like Max Richter, you might like Flatlands by Roger Eno, composed in contemplation of the Norfolk landscape where I live.
If res cogitans is unreal or 'less real', then conclusions based on it are even less tenuous. Which should make people laugh, but it tends not to. It's really biting one's mother's teat rather than being grateful.
I'll check him out. May as well go through all the Eno's. :)
please provide some sort of authority for these unstated rules you have regarding the proper attachment of "thing" to entities.
you seem to make arguments for having such rules without providing any information as to what the rules are or where they can be found.
I will wait here.
What rules?
What is the basis upon which you make your claim to the non-thingness of truth, processes, and jogs.
What is the basis upon which you determine thingness/non-thingness.
So far, all you have offered is some ill-defined fear of the potential for grammatical errors and that strikes as insufficient.
These words represent verbs and adjectives that modify things in language, yet, with the addition of a suffix or something similar, they are spoken of as things. This is grammar. Thankfully nominalized adjectives are in decline,
When I use the word “thing” I mean an object. Truth is not a thing because it doesn’t have a boundary, doesn’t move as one, doesn’t have any objectivity or reality outside of the mind.
Quoting NOS4A2
So you have no criterion other than your own preference for determining thingness/non-thingness.
I respect that and I am going to adopt that.
And truth is bounded by non-truth.
Quoting NOS4A2
What does that even mean? You could not possibly come to understand anything meaningful about the world in which you find yourself in the absence of truth. If you drive to work, you can only do so because you know the truth regarding how cars work (I presume you would consider cars to be outside your mind, whatever that means), where to get gas (I presume you consider the gas station to be outside your mind, whatever that means), and the route to work (also outside your mind?). You could not make your way around in the world in the absence of truth. So even if you really do buy into this internal/external inside/outside subject/object nonsense, you could have no meaningful understanding of anything "outside your mind" in the absence of truth.
Reason and evidence is my criterion.
I’ve stated my arguments as to what “truth” means (all things that are true), and why truth does not exist beyond the skull. I believe things can be true or false, however, for instance that a car works in a certain fashion, and I personally aim to be as true and honest as possible. That’s why I do not believe there is something called “truth” because to do so would be untrue.
Everybody is different.
I am incapable of rejecting the possibility that there are deeper understandings to be had than the ones I have.
I have always been that way. It is a blessing and a curse.
There certainly are deeper understandings. I mean it would take a sheer act of will to exclude the word “truth” from the mental lexicon. It’s embedded in the language and thus in our thoughts. I am just suggesting one might be careful when reifying certain concepts at the expense of others. Might we be deceiving ourselves a bit here?
I think it is constitutive of who we are. We could not survive without an understanding of truth. Nor could most (if any) other mammals.
But for us (and perhaps other species) it goes beyond that. I see truth/untruth almost as an atmosphere in which we live our lives. So much of our engagement in the world revolves around revealing/concealing truth. And for some, just as much is to be gained by concealing as revealing. We are in the truth business.