What about the 'limit' of there seemingly being a zero-sum balance of opposites, or no absolutes, or as no intrinsic properties such as with relationism? — PoeticUniverse
Or maybe freewill is just a cultural meme - a faulty characterisation of a human social construct as something metaphysically fundamental?
(Spoiler: That is indeed all it is.) — apokrisis
You don't seem to have any idea what the concept of free will encompasses. Ever look it up? — Metaphysician Undercover
Which one were you thinking of? — apokrisis
A provocative set of ideas. First, I should say that the reason I want to give rationalism some presumption of favor is that individual identity insists. The self, even the most basic, reduced self in, say, some deep meditative state in which thought has been suspended altogether, is still constitutively a rational entity, not a blooming and buzzing infant. To sit, and make a dramatic move into the "eternal present" (Kierkegaard, Buddha?) free of what Husserl calls predelineated determination (memory) still requires an implicit language world that is always, already there, making, stabilizing, normalizing all things. This language structure is not something that can be put down, for one would have to put down "the world". Of course, languages are each one arbitrary, but the logic that makes it even possible, this is my interest here.But language systems can be mathematical. Ordinary language is speech from some social point of view - developed to (re)construct the society that is speaking it. And now - through the practice of metaphysical-strength reasoning - modern humans have constructed a culture of technical speech that is rooted in the habits of logic and arithmetic. We have language that is designed to transcend our social being and so move towards some conception of "ultimate reality" - as the limit of this new displaced and third person point of view. We "see" the world through the "objective" eye of axiom and measurement. — apokrisis
So Hegel got that to the degree he developed a logic of dialectics. This was the intellectual project that got modern rationality and science going back in Ancient Greece. Hegel tried hard to update it in the age of Newtonian mechanics. But he bent his arguments away from the third person and back towards the first person to the degree he placed God, spirit or goodness at the centre of his metaphysical scheme. Too anthropomorphic. Although that was an understandable cultural response in an age where the pendulum had swung too far from the very idea of points of view - Newtonianism being understood as the view from nowhere ... rooted in the nothingness of a void, rather than in a plenum of possibilities. — apokrisis
And then mathematical reasoning and scientific method arose out of the development of a new metaphysical language - one that ends up speaking in numbers rather than words, and dialectical logical structure rather than an everyday causal grammar based on a narrative tales of who did what to whom. — apokrisis
There is a proper way to talk about ultimate reality. Or at least the relevant community of inquirers have agreed much about the current state of the art in this regard. Nature is symmetry breaking and thermodynamics. A dialectic of constraints and uncertainty. Or as Peirce said, synechism and tychism. — apokrisis
The problem here is that there is no point just swinging the pendulum between the dialectical extremes of the third and first person point of view. — apokrisis
But since Anaximander first argued for the spontaneous self-organisation of an Apeiron, a metaphysics of sense-making rationalisation - a dissipative structure - has been kicking about in the back room of organicism. We can certainly see it in Hegel and Peirce, as well as others, — apokrisis
The self, even the most basic, reduced self in, say, some deep meditative state in which thought has been suspended altogether, is still constitutively a rational entity, not a blooming and buzzing infant. — Constance
Our world is structured in time, so called. Of course, one could fill a library just on the way this single idea has been worked out in the past two centuries, but I say, deep meditation does much to undo the world's most familiarizing features, and when familiarity falls away, philosophy becomes revelatory. BUT: revelation is structured revelation, or, requires a structured self to receive it, assimilate it with the rest of the implicit composite self, and this is where Hegel has his place. Experience at all requires native logic. — Constance
as Heidegger put it the intended object; our language's vocabulary does not stand for things in the world, it "stands in for" things (and then, this "standing in" gets diffused in "difference" but never mind this). — Constance
Speaking in numbers? If so, these numbers would have to be valorized, have meaning beyond the number, just as with plain language. — Constance
Right, you don't think there is ever some asymptotic approach to God's self realization, — Constance
But any intimation of a deeper sense of the world is bound to the logical construction of experience, and, as Wittgenstein told us, it is nonsense to think otherwise. — Constance
And then, what is the nature of the Apeiron? Is this not a "ground"? It just pushes the can back itself. — schopenhauer1
It ain’t my problem if you feel you must employ an inferior brand of metaphysics when better ones are available. — apokrisis
And then, what is the nature of the Apeiron? Is this not a "ground"? It just pushes the can back from ground in the mind to ground in the beginning of the universe and time.
The "fun" part of post-Kantian idealism is its antimonies... The first eye that opened was when time began, but empirically time goes further back than that, etc. The ground is the cognition. The infinite monads or the unified Thing-in-Itself(s) are the "behind the scenes" and "actual" reality.
With this sort of realism you propose, triadic form self-organizing is kicked off somehow from a distant past Apeiron. What is "this"? You describe the theoretical and postulated "form" but not whence or what, which is the leap of faith metaphysics part. — schopenhauer1
I csn’t make sense of your additions. — apokrisis
Vagueness is defined by the principle of contradiction finally giving out and failing to apply. — apokrisis
Vagueness vagueing is pretty vague if that's your answer, but it's just as oddly metaphysical as any other metaphysics. — schopenhauer1
We are biological beings before we are we linguistic and socially constructed beings. So we start from that neurological level of world modeling like any animal. Although human babies are engaged in linguistic culture and even mathematical culture from the earliest age. Rationality is being shaped just by being raised in a carpentered environment where chairs, doors, light switches and now iPads are the natural form of the world. — apokrisis
I’m not seeing anything to do here with the question of ultimate reality as a claim about the world or the thing itself. Just some hazy, culturally specific notions of selfhood and subjectivity,
So are you simply saying that ultimate reality is phenomenological and you are uninterested in the scientific method and pragmatic reasoning - the hunt for ultimate reality in that sense? — apokrisis
Well, language is the semiotic tool that constructs a self-world relation in the first place. It doesn’t get in the way. It is the way. As modern educated folk, we are generic selves, neurological selves, social selves and mechanical selves - the four levels of semiosis, using the codes of genes, neurons, words and numbers. — apokrisis
Well at all levels, semiosis is about information being used to regulate the material physics of the world. So it is about harnessing the world in a way that works for the self - the organismic view of things. — apokrisis
Well not if my science-informed view is claiming the asymptotic approach is instead towards the Cosmos’s Heat Death. And that mid-era complexity in the form of life and mind arises as a clean-up squad for lumps of free energy that the universe wants degraded back to background heat as soon as possible - as part of its grand project of eternalised expansion-cooling. — apokrisis
Sure. Peircean semiosis warns us that the self is as much part of any modelling as the world that stands as its “other”. So we can’t develop views of either poles of being without understanding them as pragmatic co-constructions. — apokrisis
The difference was Peirce could say this clearly rather than mumble indistinctly. He showed how the mechanics of logic are rooted in organismic being and so how the rational structure of the Cosmos was natural and inevitable. — apokrisis
The ultimate level of reality description for him is pansemiotic. Which is why I highlight the degree to which science has arrived at a pansemiotic model of the physical universe - one involving things like dialectical symmetry breaking, law as universalised habit, quantum potential as a logical vagueness, etc. — apokrisis
Language comes first, for it is in language that biology is conceived. — Constance
Well, a pansemiotic model is not going to be some "ultimate" or absolute description. That would be impossible staying within the bounds of pragmatic truth and epistemology. Truth is made, not discovered. — Constance
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