Materialist metaphysics and immaterial causality

Deleted User

Objects, particulars, possibly perceptible (eg as taste), changing in properties:
A(x), x = salty, square
B(y), y = sweet, square

Through perception (the first heirarchically) and linguistic communication we abstract out knowledge through association. Context determines, in each moment, the shifting meaning/reference conveyed in the name/property abstraction. For example:
Name A could mean y or x depending on context, and the same applies to name B. Within their contexts respectively, numbers lead to the success of empirical science and its ability to inform discussions of substance, with input on theoretical unobservables and from new physics.

Knowledge is structured by the experientially actualized innate (to all substance, eg a brain; or, not as substance, to a simple phenomenological perceiver) categories of efficient causality, part whole dynamics, and extension. These apply even if we were to take various skeptical hypotheses seriously, which I do not here due to lack of sufficient evidence for their inductive arguments. Numbers, one category of such knowledge, lead to the success of empirical science. Logic, another form of this knowledge, informs philosophy to some degree (nothing more on this is to be said here). So, given this epistemology, modern discussions of substance invariably are materialist causally and ontologically. But, this material substance must be noted to be formless, unified, beyond causality, without identity, perceptible, suitable for life, and knowable as shifting meaning (the essence of this writing, meaning) in any here now; so, it is beyond subject object duality, and reference and context problems, and is neither experiential nor abstract. It could have to do with immaterial causality which is known mystically through direct experience (eg miracles), but this is in a sense beyond the confines of regular philosophy and should be treated more phenomenologically.

As association is the key to meaning, it is important to point out that the persisting sense of self, the willer, is merely a product of association in the same way its body is materially-chemically (also the willer). Thought, including imagination, leads to language; emotion is related to body awareness and is not qualia, body, self, thought restricted.

The way we live should be arrived at from personal experience with suffering. Lastly, for reasons I hope to understand better in the future, I tend towards some form of determinism at the moment.

Metaphysician Undercover

It could have to do with immaterial causality which is known mystically through direct experience (eg miracles), but this is in a sense beyond the confines of regular philosophy and should be treated more phenomenologically. — Nasir Shuja

How is the topic of immaterial causality beyond regular philosophy? Isn't this the essence of free will?

Deleted User

True. I actually just learned that use of the term. I was using it from what I vaguely remember of medieval philosophy I guess, I figured you all would at least know what I meant. I was told it has to do with anything like values, numbers, thoughts, feelings affecting our actions (immaterial causality). That's a simple point and makes sense, as it relates to the will as it is "conventionally placed." I don't know what to really say about the will. My goal with this post was just to describe a simple epistemology that leads to a description of causality and substance (the iffy part) that suffices for modern empiricism but works with my experiences with spirituality.

Deleted User

I start from the origin point of simple experience. This subject perceives sensory properties - for example, a child tastes a sweet square then a sour square. This child learns taste and shape through association and abstraction; this awareness becomes linguistic, resulting in names and accounts for the objects or particulars.

The sensory world is always changing. In the abstract linguistic realm of discriminative/linguistic knowledge, we find unchanging truths such as those of mathematics and logic. From thes proceeds the success of modern empirical methods and their contribution to modern philosophical accounts of causality and substance.

Skeptical hypotheses do not have enough evidence to be taken seriously, but we can learn from them that there are foundations to our knowledge of the physical world which are rooted in conceptions of causality, part-whole dynamics, and extension.

How does this give insight into metaphysical substance and causality? All intellectualizations can contain associative meaning only within their particular linguistic contexts. So in the simplest, most abstract epistemology, meaning or truth is a shifting here-now dynamic, with real content and unity, but which is incomprehensible in its whole essence.

The point I extract from this is that any metaphysical or ontological account must admit that causality, part-whole dynamics, and extension in the world are always changing. There is a shifting, incomprehensible unity called meaning or truth within the linguistic project; we usually think in the contexts of mathematics and logic using the aspects of cause, part-whole, and extension; but we must see those conceptions as being valid for sensory and intellectual understanding only, not truth or meaning as it corresponds to our physical reality as it actually is, in context. So we must include the negations of those extension/part whole/cause categories in our account of truth and meaning - formlessness, singularity and pure difference, and unchanging-ness as the dynamics.

Materialist metaphysics and immaterial causality

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