I’m not pretending to have transcendent access to absolute truth. — apokrisis
My point is that we are getting at what reality is like (the apple being either ripe or rotten) independent of our goals. It is our goals that simply determine which information is currently relevant, not whether the information is actually accurate or not. Isn't survival the greatest catalyst for seeking knowledge - for being informed about how the world really works and how your body works and how it is all related? To be better informed about the world (how it works, it's current state, etc.) is to be better able to survive in it. — Harry Hindu
What we want is the most efficient and useful image of reality. — apokrisis
If you say that it is indirect, or models, all the way down, while at the same time saying, "all we are able to get at is the model", or "all we can do is get at it indirectly", then you are saying that we are actually getting at the truth, as everything is indirect, or just models, then us having models is us having the truth! — Harry Hindu
It’s the belief in the ‘there anyway’ world which persists in the absence of any observer, the vast universe in which, today, we see ourselves as ‘mere blips’. — Wayfarer
I suggest that our own birth and the deaths of others are a big part of our belief in the "there anyway." We seem to arrive in a world after many, many generations have come and gone. We are told of human events that happened thousands of years ago. More vividly, we can see pictures of our parents before they met one another. So belief in others more or less demands a belief in a "there anyway" world. — t0m
There is a 'there anyway' world, but the reflexive and uncritical acceptance of its reality signifies the absence of philosophical reflection 1. — Wayfarer
Actually that claim is ‘transcendental realism’, in philosophy speak. — Wayfarer
Can we really present any philosophy as a consistent system in a single moment with all of the meanings of each of its terms fixed? I don't think so. — t0m
Yep. Knowledge has to bootstrap itself from axioms. We have to risk making a hypothesis that seems "reasonable". But hey, it seems to work pretty well. — apokrisis
With all philosophers it is precisely the “system” which is perishable; and for the simple reason that it springs from an imperishable desire of the human mind — the desire to overcome all contradictions. — Engels
But under "the good", the divine idea is necessarily "the Ideal", and the Ideal, being the absolute, the best, is necessarily a particular. — Metaphysician Undercover
In The Parmenides he starts to grasp the nature of time, and realizes that every particular material object requires an independent Form to account for its existence. — Metaphysician Undercover
So, when the material object comes into existence in time, it must be predetermined, in some manner, what it will be, because if it were not, there would be no objects whatsoever, simply randomness. The material object could not come into existence as an object other than itself, and that it is the object which it is requires that its Form determines this prior to its existence. — Metaphysician Undercover
The material object could not come into existence as an object other than itself, and that it is the object which it is requires that its Form determines this prior to its existence. — Metaphysician Undercover
The independent Form actualizes this particular oak tree. — Metaphysician Undercover
...the desire to overcome all contradictions. — Engels
Hah. Isn't that just showing how Hegel got it the wrong way round? — apokrisis
My approach (following Peirce) ends up saying that bare contradiction is instead what everything is founded upon. — apokrisis
The logical process itself is the ground, not some kind of further "indeterminate substance" - as Apeiron is often understood. — apokrisis
For Hegel, the most important achievement of German idealism, starting with Immanuel Kant and culminating in his own philosophy, was the argument that reality (being) is shaped through and through by thought and is, in a strong sense, identical to thought. Thus ultimately the structures of thought and being, subject and object, are identical. Since for Hegel the underlying structure of all of reality is ultimately rational, logic is not merely about reasoning or argument but rather is also the rational, structural core of all of reality and every dimension of it. — wiki
Hegel is hard to parse, — t0m
You might be closer to Hegel than you think: — t0m
I still prefer to call it naive realism in this case. — apokrisis
There is still primal material cause as well as primal formal cause. — apokrisis
From the few existing fragments, we learn that Anaximander believed the beginning or ultimate reality (arche) is eternal and infinite, or boundless (apeiron), subject to neither old age nor decay, which perpetually yields fresh materials from which everything we can perceive is derived. Apeiron generated the opposites, hot-cold, wet-dry etc., which acted on the creation of the world. Everything is generated from apeiron and then it is destroyed by going back to apeiron, according to necessity. He believed that infinite worlds are generated from apeiron and then they are destroyed there again.
His ideas were influenced by the Greek mythical tradition and by his teacher Thales (7th-6th century BC). Searching for some universal principle, Anaximander retained the traditional religious assumption that there was a cosmic order and tried to explain it rationally. — Wiki
Logical laws, numbers, and other intellectual functions, are fundamental to our understanding of reality. They are used to create our 'meaning-world'. And that understanding is in some sense all we have; we can't rise above, or get outside, of our understanding, although clearly we can, and do, alter it, enlarge it, amend it, and sometimes even up-end it.
But the reason that numbers, and the like, are 'real but not existent', is because they pertain to the very nature and structure of the understanding itself; they are that by virtue of which we know things. They're not 'out there somewhere', but they're also not simply 'products of the brain'. That's where 'Platonia' is - in the very structure of our understanding. It's not an external reality or a 'ghostly domain' as it is generally misunderstood to be. And this is the reason that numbers are predictive (i.e. 'the uncanny effectiveness of maths in the natural sciences.') Why this is so hard to see, is because it is not apart from or other to us, we can't objectify it. — Wayfarer
But when you say that they are not products of our brain, you are perhaps overlooking our apparent groundedness in our body. — t0m
The problem with "God" as an explanation is that it seems to simply anthropomorphize the mystery. — t0m
I agree that the objects of Platonia are ironically invisible to the very science that employs them. "Numbers aren't real because we can't measure them." — t0m
And that understanding is objective as it is encoded in actual material symbols. It can be written down and transmitted from one mind to another. It is replicable, and indeed evolvable, as semiotic structure. — apokrisis
It’s not embodied cognition I wish to avoid - it is ‘neuro-reductionism’. ‘Oh, that’s just your brain’s way of keeping your genomes alive’. Remember, in our world, the human mind is simply a late arrival, on top of the work of the blind watchmaker, a dollop of apparent meaning-making ability atop the robot that's only mission is to progenerate. — Wayfarer
But as I've said before, we now go to such extraordinary lengths to avoid even the suggestion, that it distorts our thinking the other way. That is one of the things Thomas Nagel, a professed atheist philosopher, has written some really important analyses of (such as his essays Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, and Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament.) — Wayfarer
Actually there's a huge disconnect here. Many mathematicians (such as Godel and, I think, Penrose, among others) really are Platonists, they believe in the 'reality of number'. But it can't be accommodated within the standard empiricist accounts so is highly unfashionable. I commented on that in this post, I'd like you to read that as I know you're a maths gun! — Wayfarer
I think the theory would only become undeniable if human behavior could be reliably predicted on a gene-computer. — t0m
I've read some of Penrose.... — t0m
I'll check those out. — t0m
The fear of religion leads too many scientifically-minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism. Dawkins, like many of his contemporaries, is hobbled by the assumption that the only alternative to religion is to insist that the ultimate explanation of everything must lie in particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional laws govern the elements of which the material world is composed.
It seems contradictory to say that an ideal or an absolute is a particular, Can you support this contention? — Janus
The form of material objects is not fixed, but is something which evolves over time. It is hard to see how it can be "independent" if it evolves over time, as that would make it dependent both on its interactions with other forms, and on time itself. — Janus
If nature were rigidly deterministic, then what objects will be, the forms they will take, would be predetermined by nature itself. If this were not the case, then the future would be open, which would mean that the evolution of the forms of objects would not be predetermined, but instead would be subject to novel circumstance. I can't see why the absence of predetermination would preclude the existence of objects. Can you give an argument to support that? — Janus
Of course no object could "come into existence as an object other than itself" whether nature were deterministic or not, determined by God or not, the very idea of such a thing is meaningless, like the idea of a round square. — Janus
Again, I can't see that you have provided any argument to support this assertion, or even any explanation as to what it could mean. — Janus
Can you support your claim that there's equal reason to take the opposite sort of alternative seriously? I've been unable to find a satisfying argument along those lines, but I'm interested in reasonable suggestions.As much reason to take the fantasy of mind emerging from "physical" seriously. — Rich
I'm not sure I follow.I have no idea what you mean by physical things doing mental things. Are they little humanoids? — Rich
As I understand them, these claims are neither fantastic nor metaphysical, but phenomenological and empirical, and I'm not sure what it would mean to deny them without denying the whole world of appearances. — Cabbage Farmer
Perhaps a solipsist may find some way to argue consistently with his principles that the world disappears when he sleeps. I'm a skeptic, not a solipsist. It seems to me that solipsism of the present moment indicates a point of maximum certainty from the first-person point of view, but I see no reason to suppose such certainty is required for knowledge.I generally share this phen. grounded approach. But I think it's fair to add that the physical is also grounded in the mind. The world disappears when we sleep dreamlessly. We might speculate that this inspired the whole problem to begin with. Privately mind grounds matter, but publicly matter grounds mind. We experience the world after the deaths of others but seemingly not after our own. — t0m
I think the theory would only become undeniable if human behavior could be reliably predicted on a gene-computer. And I mean the computer should print off the next philosophical masterpiece or great work of literature, before it would have otherwise been written. Until we get that kind of concrete prediction, we really just have faith in a paradigm. — t0m
It’s not embodied cognition I wish to avoid - it is ‘neuro-reductionism’. ‘Oh, that’s just your brain’s way of keeping your genomes alive’. Remember, in our world, the human mind is simply a late arrival, on top of the work of the blind watchmaker, a dollop of apparent meaning-making ability atop the robot that's only mission is to progenerate. — Wayfarer
Genes can't predict culture.
It's like imagining that you could predict what sort of cultural artifact an intelligent robot would make loosed upon the world from just it's circuit diagram. — Marchesk
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