I think I can make sense of that. I've taken a vow not to be sucked into commenting on anything quantum. I'll only make an ass of myself. But I can't resist complaining that I don't see why the absence of a observer with a clock prevents physical processes proceeding with their various changes relative to each other, resulting in the universe that we now observe. True, we now deduce that those changes were proceeding while we were not present, but there's nothing remarkable, to common sense at least, in that.The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271
Western philosophy, from Parmenides to Heidegger, sought the essence of being—eternity, phenomenon, givenness—relying on the formula "Being — is," rooted in a language where "is" fixes being. Even the understanding of God—from Kant's highest being to Heidegger's mystery of being—followed this logic. — Astorre
Aristotle sometimes gets lumped in as a key purveyor of "static being" or "substance metaphysics," but, were I forced to lump him into either category, I'd probably place him on the "process metaphysics" side. Hegel would be another example. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The absence of the copula "is" makes the question "What is being?" alien. — Astorre
The Russian language disrupts this logic. In the present tense, the copula "есть" (is) is not obligatory: "Сократ философ" (Socrates philosopher), "Он доктор" (He doctor), "Я студент" (I student). Being does not demand confirmation; it simply is present. — Astorre
which points to the world as a flow where everything is born and transforms. — Astorre
In further sections, we will endeavor to philosophically clarify whether this distinction is truly rooted in ontology or if it is merely a grammatical intuition. — Astorre
stemming from the Problem of the One and the Many. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Being, in our view, becomes through the establishment of boundaries, through the interaction of presence and change. The question "Being — is. How?" is replaced by another: "Being — becomes. How does it become?" — Astorre
Can there be certainty without stasis?
Kant realized that Hume’s world of pure, unique impressions couldn’t exist. This is because the minimal requirement for experiencing anything is not to be so absorbed in the present that one is lost in it. What Hume had claimed— that when exploring his feeling of selfhood, he always landed “on some particular perception or other” but could never catch himself “at any time without a percepton, and never can observe anything but the perception”— was simply not true.33 Because for Hume to even report this feeling he had to perceive something in addition to the immediate perceptions, namely, the very flow of time that allowed them to be distinct in the first place. And to recognize time passing is necessarily to recognize that you are embedded in the perception.
Hence what Kant wrote in his answer to Hamann, ten years in the making. To recollect perfectly eradicates the recollection, just as to perceive perfectly eradicates the perception. For the one who recalls or perceives must recognize him or herself along with the memory or perception for the memory or impression to exist at all. If everything we learn about the world flows directly into us from utterly distinct bits of code, as the rationalists thought, or if everything we learn remains nothing but subjective, unconnected impressions, as Hume believed— it comes down to exactly the same thing. With no self to distinguish itself, no self to bridge two disparate moments in space-time, there is simply no one there to feel irritated at the inadequacy of “dog.” No experience whatsoever is possible.
Here is how Kant put it in his Critique of Pure Reason. Whatever we think or perceive can register as a thought or perception only if it causes a change in us, a “modification of the mind.” But these changes would not register at all if we did not connect them across time, “for as contained in one moment no representation can ever be anything other than absolute unity.”34 As contained in one moment. Think of experiencing a flow of events as a bit like watching a film. For something to be happening at all, the viewer makes a connection between each frame of the film, spanning the small differences so as to create the experience of movement. But if there is a completely new viewer for every frame, with no relation at all to the prior or subsequent frame, then all that remains is an absolute unity. But such a unity, which is exactly what Funes and Shereshevsky and Hume claimed they could experience, utterly negates perceiving anything at all, since all perception requires bridging impressions over time. In other words, it requires exactly what a truly perfect memory, a truly perfect perception, or a truly perfect observation absolutely denies: overlooking minor differences enough to be a self, a unity spanning distinct moments in time.
"The Rigor of Angels: Kant, Heisenberg, Borges, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality."
Think of experiencing a flow of events as a bit like watching a film. For something to be happening at all, the viewer makes a connection between each frame of the film, spanning the small differences so as to create the experience of movement. But if there is a completely new viewer for every frame, with no relation at all to the prior or subsequent frame, then all that remains is an absolute unity.
But information theory deals with "what something is," and not "that it is," essence but not existence. It skips the former. We can see this in the fact that a perfect set of instructions to duplicate any physical system would not, in fact, be that system. A perfect duplicator, call it Leplace's Printer, needs both instructions and prior existent materials — Count Timothy von Icarus
Here is how Kant put it in his Critique of Pure Reason. Whatever we think or perceive can register as a thought or perception only if it causes a change in us, a “modification of the mind.” But these changes would not register at all if we did not connect them across time, “for as contained in one moment no representation can ever be anything other than absolute unity.”34
Sheer change and difference wouldn't really be "change." If one thing is completely discrete from another, if there is no linkage or similarity and relation, then, rather than becoming, you just have sui generis, unrelated things (perhaps popping in and out of existence?). This isn't becoming, but rather a strobe light of unrelated beings. So, leaving aside the difficulty that the past seems to dictate the future, that things seem to have causes, or the difficulties with contingent being "just happening, for no reason at all," it seems hard for me to see how there could be any sort of "sheer becoming." — Count Timothy von Icarus
It's a good question. Freedom and power were traditionally understood in terms of actuality, potency itself being nothing, and so inherently most static in that it is wholly incapable of moving itself. There is often a reversal here though. Potency becomes least static, freedom becomes the potential to do or be anything. Yet this only makes sense if potency is in some way actual, if it can spontaneously actualize itself, e.g., explanations of our contingent reality as simply 'brute face,' or of reality as primarily, of fundamentally will, a sort of sheer willing. — Count Timothy von Icarus
To witness something you only have to be present, you don’t have to think, or know anything. The best way to describe what I mean is in regard to revelation. During revelation, the person (who witnesses) is hosted by a heavenly being and witnesses something which they can’t understand, which is inconceivable. And yet they bare witness to what happened. The Old Testament is full of descriptions of people witnessing things which there are not words to describe. It is the heavenly host who enables them to witness by allowing them to see through their eyes. To become the host, to witness the event, or state and then to be returned to the world. During this process the witness, doesn’t have the mental capacity to process the information. But they know, experienced what happened in some way.If you don't identify the object you perceive, how do you know what you have witnessed?
Don’t you mean perceived, rather than identified.
To be perceived, something merely needs to be witnessed, this does not require identification.
— Punshhh
If you don't identify the object you perceive, how do you know what you have witnessed? — Ludwig V
So something is witnessed before the mind then processes the sensory information. — Punshhh
Yes you are right, I should have qualified my statement to the effect that I was considering pure being. Being unhindered by conditioning and social practice. I come to this discussion from the mystical perspective, in which my time is concerned with witness by (pure) being. Rather than language associated with experience. In the example I gave the person witnessing the inconceivable is taken out of themselves, thus leaving the conditioning behind.We “identify” based on the criteria (even habitual, unaware) of a specific shared practice (the kind of object), which is different than vision, the biological mechanism. Identification also having to do with which aspect, what you are looking at (on the object) as evidence, and the other criteria for identification (perhaps particular to this kind/type of object), not to mention how “seeing/perceiving” itself works (not immediately, wholey), instead involving focus (where we are looking), that we are usually telling someone else what we see, etc.
I think there is some ambiguity around the word perceived. (Which I realised after posting) I was thinking of it meaning something is noticed, but not identified. Whereas for Ludwig, it might have meant to identify what was seen.object? “To be perceived, something merely needs to be witnessed.”
I work with the notion of anchors (crosses), a series of which the being transcends throughout their development. From primitive life forms to the transfigured being. Each cross anchoring the being within an arena of experience.For Deleuze it is in the nature of differences that they always produce themselves within and as assemblages, collectives. The relative stability of these multiplicities does not oppose itself to change but evinces continual change within itself that remakes the whole in such a way that the whole remains consistent without ever being self-identical.
Don’t you mean perceived, rather than identified.
To be perceived, something merely needs to be witnessed, this does not require identification. — Punshhh
That also seems about right to me. The thing is, though, that identifying a difference is a rather different exercise from identifying an object. — Ludwig V
I can see how one might want to say that. But "different" is a relation, so it requires two objects to be compared. Of course, from another perspective, those objects might be dissolved into a bundle of differences, which then require a range of other objects to establish themselves. — Ludwig V
I think there is some ambiguity around the word perceived. (Which I realised after posting) I was thinking of it meaning something is noticed, but not identified. — Punshhh
The earlier philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, building on Aristotle, maintained that true knowledge arises from a real union between knower and known. As Aristotle put it, “the soul (psuchē) is, in a way, all things,” meaning that the intellect becomes what it knows by receiving the form of the known object. Aquinas elaborated this with the principle that “the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.” In this view, to know something is not simply to construct a mental representation of it, but to participate in its form — to take into oneself, immaterially, the essence of what the thing is. (Here one may discern an echo of that inward unity — a kind of at-one-ness between subject and object — that contemplative traditions across cultures have also sought, not through discursive thought but through direct insight.) Such noetic insight, unlike sensory knowledge, disengages the form of the particular from its individuating material conditions, allowing the intellect to apprehend it in its universality. This process — abstraction— is not merely a mental filtering but a form of participatory knowing: the intellect is conformed to the particular, and that conformity gives rise to true insight. Thus, knowledge is not an external mapping of the world but an assimilation, a union that bridges the gap between subject and object through shared intelligibility.
By contrast, the word objective, in its modern philosophical usage — “not dependent on the mind for existence” — entered the English lexicon only in the early 17th century, during the formative period of modern science, marked by the shift away from the philosophy of the medievals. This marks a profound shift in the way existence itself was understood. As noted, for medieval and pre-modern philosophy, the real is the intelligible, and to know what is real is to participate in a cosmos imbued with meaning, value, and purpose. But in the new, scientific outlook, to be real increasingly meant to be mind-independent — and knowledge of it was understood to be describable in purely quantitative, mechanical terms, independently of any observer. The implicit result is that reality–as–such is something we are apart from, outside of, separate to. — Idealism in Context
I think there is some ambiguity around the word perceived. — Punshhh
I was thinking of it meaning something is noticed, — Punshhh
In the example I gave the person witnessing the inconceivable is taken out of themselves, — Punshhh
Yes in the way animals perceive, is what I was getting at. This is also present in a human, because we are also an animal. There are circumstances in every day life in which this kind of perception is exercised.To be perceived is to stand out as a gestalt. To stand out as a gestalt is to be identified, although not necessarily in a linguistically self-reflective sense, since non-linguistically enabled animals are obviously capable of identifying the things that matter to them in their environments.
We don’t, normally, we just get on with our lives. I’m just identifying that all is in motion. Although I think we talk about things happening, in motion, perhaps more than we realise.But if there is nothing fixed, how do we know that we are travelling? Or rather, how do we tell the difference between our travelling and the rest of the world travelling?
There's a bit of a trap here. We certainly do identify things by applying the criteria of a specific shared practice. But that does not mean that we always do so in the same way. Sometimes, as when we are identifying a rare species or disease, it is an elaborate and conscious process. We describe minutely, looking for clues, we look up definitions &c. &c. But sometimes we do so, as one might say, unconsciously or unaware of the process. In these cases, it is a bit of a moot point whether we should really say "we" identify the specimen. It certainly isn't under our control, in the way that it is when we consciously identify something.We “identify” based on the criteria (even habitual, unaware) of a specific shared practice (the kind of object), which is different than vision, the biological mechanism. — Antony Nickles
You seem to be thinking of witnessing as a preliminary step to the processes involved in perception - and hence identifying the source.But isn’t the whole idea of witnessing that it is without an object? “To be perceived, something merely needs to be witnessed.” Punshhh But we are not witnessing “something” (even less, some “thing”), and thus not even proceeding to “perceiving”, in terms of “seeing”, and so, far from identifying, .... — Antony Nickles
(I only pick this because I know how to find it.) Clearly, Paul did not know what was happening (what he was witnessing). Yet he was aware of a flash of light - and, presumably, reported it afterwards. Does this conform to what you think of as witnessing?As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"
"Who are you, Lord?" Saul asked.
"I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," he replied. "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do."
The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. Paul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything. — Acts 9:3–9
The existence of such distinctions in the Italian language suggests that it is natural for humans to feel both a certain sense of the processuality of being and its static nature. — Astorre
"Is" lends stability to being: Socrates is not merely a philosopher; he is a philosopher, as if fixed in reality. — Astorre
What this means is that "is a philosopher" has changed from being an essence of Parmenides to being a description.
Being born in Elea, Magna Graecia is not a necessary truth of Parmenides but a contingent truth. Parmenides could have been born in Constantinople, he may not have written the poem dactylic hexameter and he may have been a statesman rather than a philosopher
In the expression, "Parmenides is a philosopher", the copula "is" is not establishing "philosopher" as a fixed and static essence of Parmenides, but rather describing a contingent rather than necessary truth. — RussellA
Philosopher isn't metaphysically necessary to Parmenides — frank
So I can turn philosopher into an essential feature by way of my intention. — frank
If I refer to Parmenides, the philosopher, then my reference will only pick out people who are philosophers. Parmenides, the philosopher is a philosopher in all possible worlds in which that object exists. — frank
I agree that Parmenides, the philosopher is a philosopher in all possible worlds where Parmenides is a philosopher. — RussellA
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