It is worth reflecting on what sort of answer might satisfy those who ask these "why" questions and whether there might be way of rephrasing them to exclude the "why". In other words, what is the actual question here? Are they asking how such things are made possible? Or are they simply expressing wonder at these facts? Or something else? — Luke

A nice issue to bring back up. 'What is the question?' mumbled Gertrude Stein who lay dying. Young Wittgenstein had his own version. I think the 'why' is often enough lyrically indeterminate. It's not how but that the world is that fucks us up. Or fucks those up who're in a mood called 'wonder.'

Can you think of any more examples of this sort of "why" question in philosophy? — Luke

A version that occurs to me is the apparent inescapability of brute fact in any grand narrative. A child might ask why there is a world in the first place and be told that a god created the world. Then this god is a brute fact, until the same child recognizes the contingency of this god as he did of the world.

If only because, through scientific reasoning, we were able to invent streetlights. — Wayfarer

I take this metaphor to gesture toward the exploitability of quantitive pattern finding that maps from uncontroversial observables now to uncontroversial observables later. Finally prognostication was made reliable, at the cost however of any poetically satisfying Explanation.

Simple once you see it. — Wayfarer

I agree, so we meet there and perhaps diverge on what we make of this recognition.

The only, the sole, point I'm always making is that 'number is real but not material', where 'number' amounts to a kind of token for 'rational intellection' or the operations of nous. It's hardly a new idea. — Wayfarer

I can join you at a certain level of blurriness. We live in a lifeworld with something like a layer of significance, and language including math is part of that.

How can we explain the astonishing progress of mathematical physics since the 17th century? Why is it that mathematical reasoning has disclosed previously unknowable aspects of the nature of reality? That is the subject of Wigner's Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. The 'fictionalist' accounts seem to have no answer to that. — Wayfarer

I agree that it's a fact that deserves speculation and investigation. One immediate reaction I have is to stress the simple genius of just counting things and looking for patterns in what happens without trying to explain (poetically) why they happen. Stuff just is attracted to stuff according to an inverse square law. It's like looking for your keys under the streetlight. Fortunately we found something there. For all we know there's a wealth of yet unexploited patterns invisible to us because our hardware and/or softwhere is just not tuned for it. Neural networks are finding such patterns in our own chatter, so that translation becomes automated. Amazing! But the models are 'black boxes' in their complexity, with billions of parameters.

I'm not a fictionalist, by the way. I haven't settled on an 'ism,' though I do like aspects of structuralism.

It's not anywhere, obviously - but there are things within it, the natural numbers, and things outside it, like the square root of minus 1. So, 'domain', 'inside', 'outside' 'thing', and 'exist' are all in some sense metaphorical when it comes to these 'objects'. They're more like the constituents or rational thought, they inhere, or subsist, in the way that we reason about experience. They don't 'exist' - they precede existence, that is why they inhabit the realm of the a priori. — Wayfarer

I don't disagree that they are part of our softwhere, and of course I myself emphasize the centrality of analogy or metaphor in human cognition. The so-called 'a priori' is often the product of a previous generation's creativity. Note that math has evolved over the centuries. As I'm sure you know, zero and negative numbers and imaginary numbers and Cantorian set theory were all controversial once. Folks were outraged and swatted them away like horseflies. This is an argument against their priority to experience. Why couldn't our faculty of immaterial reason immediately grasp them as real?

...we may be surrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to nor derives from them in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined by nature, or by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual I.' — The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy, Alfredo Ferrarin

To me this is just a fancy acknowledgement that the human world is not just stupid junk. We can talk about our talk about our talk. I do of course agree with and have been emphasizing reason's transcendence of any individual 'I' that it arguably makes possible in the first place. The 'ego' is a ripple, one might speculate, upon the surface of our shared semantic field, a sort of layer of our lifeworld. Even those junky ordinary objects mentioned above imply the breaking up of the world into little unities, presumably in a way useful to creatures such as ourselves. This 'softwhere' is nowhere in particular, any more than a dance lives in any particular dancer.

Of course one can always imagine that 'things could be completely otherwise' - but they're not. I find those kinds of arguments entirely void of merit. — Wayfarer

Consider, though, that taking this attitude to the extreme is a sanctification of whatever the tribe happens to believe at a given time. Philosophy is and ought to be haunted by possibilities.

But when I ask for evidence, the honest thing to reply is, "I don't have any, its just a belief of mine," I would accept that. — Philosophim

I understand where you are coming from. I imagine a kind of continuum that runs from the especially abstract to the relatively concrete. On the abstract or speculative side of this continuum the 'evidence' we can provide is more like rhetorical support. For instance, mathematical platonism cannot be proved or disproved by looking behind a moonrock and seeing whether or not 23,546 is hiding there. (I argue against mathematical platonism by (trying to show) contradictions or plotholes in the story it tells.) As I understand @Wayfarer, he'll defend a metaphysical theory of the subject but not any traditional religious beliefs. (He can say more.) I guess the point is that we're stuck on the abstract end of the spectrum where even the concepts of evidence and reason are not solid and unchanging.

Have good dreams!

Metaphysical Solipsism : True by definition.
Methodological Solipsism : Unavoidable.
Psychological Solipsism : Dangerous and unhealthy, avoid at any cost. — sime

Here's my adjustment.

Metaphysical Solipsism : 'true' only by contingent, encrusted, congealed habits in our blabbering

Methodological Solipsism : a game that was played until the pieces melted together and the board evaporated into a purple haze

Psychological Solipsism : (happy with what you said)

I believe even fundamental particles posses elementary love and hate, and these could be the eternal beings like the gods. But still... if they are made with intention (or by accident as in my story...) seems somehow to give them more meaning. — EugeneW

Fair enough. Are you influenced by Empedocles?

But somehow eternal dead shit isn't dead and has to have gotten a divine spark to be farted into existence. — EugeneW

You made me laugh, friend.

Wayfarer is literally telling me Santa exists, and when I persist on a definition of who Santa is and how I can know he exists, he can't. — Philosophim

I think a softer version of @Wayfarer's point would be something like: our world is intelligible. We can talk about stuff. Our physical theories themselves are 'meaningful.' Some people come across (correctly or not) as denying the existence of 'meaning' or 'consciousness' and talking as if only 'dead junk' exists. Any comprehensive map or theory of our reality has to acknowledge that mapmaking itself and the conditions of its own possibility.

To the assertion that thought is a modification of matter we may always, with equal right, oppose the contrary assertion that all matter is merely the modification of the knowing subject, as its idea. — Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea

I'd change this to 'with equal wrong.' 'Mound' and 'mutter' are two sleights of the same con.

The argument for platonism in that article is given in brief by James Robert Brown: — Wayfarer

You did not actually quote an argument.

One of the more famous challenges to math platonism is the question of which set theoretic construction of the positive integers of many possible is the correct one, the one that exists immaterially? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benacerraf%27s_identification_problem

One might also ask where 'really existing' platonic entities end and stuff we cook up from them begins. For instance, are the real numbers just synthetic mush that we invented using the genuinely angelic technology of the rational numbers? Fair question, since the measure of the computable numbers (the ones we can talk about individually) is zilch.

Math platonism looks like a leap of faith. How can we see around our own cognition and check if numbers are 'really' there, assuming those signs have sense ?

Thanks! I can relate to where you are coming from. 'No finite thing has genuine being' suggests a similar point to me. Our signs form an interdependent system. This system has no bottom or first element. Opposites come in interdependent pairs.

Well, I wonder why I have to accept that the territory is real and somehow the map is not. The whole distinction is a map making exercise, done in order for us to navigate better, but reifying this distinction as something that is a really really real distinction is actually what you are warning us against doing. — Tobias

I've also pondered the map-territory distinction as part of the map (which deconstructs the distinction.) A softer version interprets the 'territory' as the looming disutility or obsolescence of any given map. The map or the sign or structure itself is perhaps impossible to finally define. “The sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: ‘what is...?’”

I would therefore also think that 'reality at its beginning' is a square circle. — Tobias

Could you elaborate?

the identity of thinking and being stipulates that the categories of thought necessarily mirror that which we find in our world. That is at least what I take to be Parmenides' point, read charitably. — Tobias

I think this also fits with what is perhaps my own misreading of 'the real is rational and the rational is real.' Our shared lifeworld is structured by our social symbol slinging. The intelligible 'spine' of reality is our quilt of maps which functions for the most part as the territory itself, since most interpretations are so shared and automatic that they count as facts.

Eternal beings. The universe is eternal too but too stupid too create its own basic stuff. Eternal intelligent beings don't need a creator. — EugeneW

Good reply. Some might question whether eternal beings are sufficiently intelligible. And the existence of these eternal gods seems to function in your theory as a brute fact. In other words, you seem to suggest that there simply are eternal beings, for no particular reason. Is this not just as weird as the idea of there being dead junk for no reason that eventually evolved so that it talk about itself ?

Intelligence, be it ant-like or human-like, are basically all the same, except that we can talk about it. The basic stuff is not intelligent. Where did it come from. This thread gave me a wonderful idea for a short story. I send it in when finished. — EugeneW

Cool. I look forward to checking that story out.

Only through other pieces? — EugeneW

Yes. So the more standard pieces are essential to the ghost king.

I duuno though if this ghost piece is proof of gods. — EugeneW

I wouldn't say it is. It plays on the idea of incarnation or possession.

I had another piece, a real bloodthirsty fellow, who could capture friendly pieces (as many in a row as possible) in order to grab an enemy piece. This allows for spectacular surprise attacks at great cost/sacrifice. Potentially you could sacrifice almost all of your pieces on a single move. If you play chess, you know that sacrifices are a big part of the drama, the bigger the better.

For example, after the end of ancient Egyptian civilisation, and before the translation of the Rosetta Stone, nobody knew what Egyptian hieroglyphs meant. — Galuchat

To me a good question is what does it mean to know what a text means? I'd say it's something like weaving it in to the dominant background text of the collective 'consciousness' or exploiting an otherwise dormant or merely potential utility. I imagine the rings of trees which were always there and then at some point an exploitation of various correlations and implications of said rings. But can we not also include the automatic reactions of organisms to their environment as a kind of reading? To understand is perhaps best understood as reacting appropriately (which brings it issues of the goals or values of an organism.)

Can't bring themselves into existence, nor the matter they are about. So it needs intelligence to bring them about. Gods, that is. — EugeneW

A classic objection to this approach is to ask where the gods come from. If stupid physical laws need a creator, why not those more-complex creators? If a watch needs a watchmaker, why doesn't a watchmaker need watchmakermaker? And why doesn't a watchmakermaker need a watchmakermakermaker? End so end end so end?

So is it the case, that ultimately, any faith-based or belief-based proposal has AT BEST, the same status as a scientific hypothesis and is no more valid than any other human musings such as a faith in the proposal that Harry Potters ancestor, also conveniently called god created the Universe using the spell (first revealed here folks, on this very thread) 'Creatus Universeearse!' — universeness

Well said.

For me a big difference between a theological speculation and a scientific hypothesis is that I expect the latter to offer me a map from uncontroversial observables to uncontroversial observables. In other words, it counts something we can all agree on and predicts something we can all agree on. It may use postulated entities like quarks or flamperpoofies or whatever in its calculations, but its rubber should meet the road somehow. Falsifiability is an imperfect criterion but a gesture in the right direction. If I can't be wrong, I may be practicing self-hypnosis and nothing more.

The existence of the universe and all creatures in it is the evidence of gods, considering it has no intelligence to create itself. — EugeneW

The brilliance of the theory of evolution is that it makes the emergence of complexity and intelligence from the simple and unintelligent surprisingly plausible. On Youtube you can find videos of genetic algorithms that create little pieces of artificial intelligence that get more adaptive and complex over time. Obviously they are simplified models, but I think they provide insight.

Chess-like? Curious... — EugeneW

There's a huge family of chess like games. I toyed with my own variants (still do at times.) Some pieces, like the |||, could only move through other pieces. They are like ghosts or electricity. I view game creation as kind of sculpture. Playing them can be a blast too ( I prefer fast versions like bullet chess.)

What is the case generally, is that what makes a subject difficult to understand is that special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. This is no different from mathematics, physics, chemistry, or biology for example. — Metaphysician Undercover

So traditional metaphysics is comparable with physics, biology, and mathematics ? Why not mention astrology, phrenology, and numerology ? Why not theology, an especially obvious choice? Could not the theologian insist on the same point? 'There is a proof of God, but people don't have the patience to grok it. I swear! '

According to the "phaneoroscopy" or "phenomenology" of Peirce, manifestation itself does not reveal a presence, it makes a sign. One may read in the Principle of Phenomenology that "the idea of manifestation is the idea of a sign."There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence. The so-called "thing itself" is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of reference, to be separated from itself.“ — Joshs

Excellent quote of Derrida, sir.

due to the materialistic bias of our common language. — Gnomon

Let's not forget the intense mentalistic bias of forum philosophers who won't/can't ingest any criticisms thereof, attached for the usual reasons to go stories.

Those who are not inclined toward making the effort to understand metaphysics tend to try and dismiss metaphysics with faulty principles. — Metaphysician Undercover

That kind of comment, like Gloria's famous knife, cuts both ways.

Those who are not inclined toward making the effort to understand criticisms of traditional metaphysics tend to try and dismiss criticisms of traditional metaphysics with faulty principles.

What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.
...
Work on philosophy -- like work in architecture in many respects -- is really more work on oneself. On one's own conception. On how one sees things. (And what one expects of them.) — Witt

III matches 111 rather nicely. — EugeneW

It does, but I was going for |||.

It's a symbol I used for a piece in a chess-like game I once made up.

I have followed the findings of Quantum & Information sciences, to the conclusion that ultimate reality is in-substantial & immaterial. — Gnomon

I'll follow you down this path. It's maps all the way down. 'No finite thing has genuine being,' because the bubbles of our pragmatic babble are systematically interdependent. One notices that every stab at something 'behind' appearance depends on still-actually-mentalistic items (for instance, electrons are calculus scribbles on black boards). So matter is really just mutter which is obviously Mind, right?

So, it seems possible that our massy world is constructed of weightless-but-meaningful relationships, such as mathematics & logic. Of course, that possibility is not amenable to empirical investigation. So, like Einstein riding on a light-beam, we must use the telescope of imagination to explore the unseen & intangible foundations of Reality. — Gnomon

But (consider thou the beetle in the box) the same realization is available in this direction, where all the talk of secret interior recesses is shown dependent on that which is 'public' or social. The ghost is a hole in the donut. The life of signs is enmeshed in the worldly. No matter, never mind. Our maps are as 'material' as they are 'mental.' We have equivalence classes of strings of tokens whose differences do not make a (practical) difference in this or that context. From this we should not infer an informagical kernel and an 'immaterial' ghost or faculty that grazes upon it. Or, if we insist on such speculation, we can remember that it's an invention and not a discovery.

Speaking in tongues (glossolalia). — Agent Smith

No, I've seen glossolalia, and there's no software for translating it.

Well stated, and I agree. — Galuchat

Thank you!

He's therefore questioning the normally-assumed primacy of the objective - that the so-called 'objective domain' is the fundamental reality. — Wayfarer

The 'objective domain' is perhaps best understood as that realm about which we can reliably make objective (unbiased) claims. Noumena (things in themselves) are just as useless as qualia epistemologically. The problem with solipsistic idealisms is related to the self-cancelling 'it's all just opinion' thesis, which pretends to be an opinion-transcending fact. Any 'critical' or 'rational' dialog tacitly presupposes a shared reality about which one can be (something like) righter or wronger. The 'primacy of the objective' is best understood not as the primary of dead junk external to and perhaps an illusion of dreaming ghosts but as the most general context of serious inquiry. What does doing philosophy presuppose? If there are no others in a shared world, then the babble is self-tickling onanism (ignoring for the moment that the concept of a self depends on the concept of the other.)

Don't know about that. I still see the basic distinction between inorganic matter, living things, and rational beings that goes back to Aristotle. — Wayfarer

I see the distinction too, which like most distinctions has its use. 'Rational beings' is presumably reserved for humans? No doubt we are spectacular, but in the context of more biodiversity and the continuing presence of various missing links, I expect it'd be hard to draw the line. Which pre-human was rational? Or was it exactly homo sapiens who crossed that line ? Or imagine in our exploration of space that we come upon a species not quite as clever as us but seemingly using language beyond the abilities of a Koko. Finally we might ask at what age a human being becomes a rational being. A grown pig is surely more intelligent than a sufficiently young baby.

That inherent materiality of language makes discussion of immaterial topics confusing. "Mind" is defined below in terms of an indivisible material substance (like a Democratean atom). — Gnomon

This is the 'substance abuse' of mutterphysics I mentioned previously (we are too easily imprisoned by our own grammar.) Why indivisible and how material? Why do human beings have only one mind each ? Have we fished out mindnuggets from their abandoned snailskulls and do we always find exactly one?

But another way to define the "subjective Mind" is as a holistic-system-of-brain-&-its-functions, that when divided into parts, no longer functions mentally. Chop off a piece of brain, and it may still have some neuronal activity, but its cognitive mental functions don't work in the absence of the rest of the system. A mind without a body/brain is metaphorically*2 known as a Ghost. We can imagine such a thing, but mustn't take as real. — Gnomon

We start to agree at this point, but we need even more context, for we must include language. For this we need a tribe that coordinates struggle in the real world through semantic conventions. I suggest that mentalistic language developed as part of this system of conventions (along with physicalistic language.) We use 'fictional' or conventional entities like 'thoughts' and 'feelings' and 'qualia' to predict and control that part of our environment which consists of us. We distribute goods and duties, affix praise and blame, mete out justice, and wage war with their help. In short, we can think of the 'mental / physical' distinction as a convention and acknowledge that we never have known and probably never can know exactly what we are talking about when coughing up these magic words.

Nice! That inspires this hypothesis: We zijn vlekken in de luiers van drooling reuzen.