Right! I mean, the idea that your statements 'correspond to reality' seems intuitively obvious, but when you actually consider what such 'correspondence' entails, then it gets interesting. What I'm saying is that even there, there is an implicit ability to grasp abstractions - 'this must mean that' - prior to an empirical claim. — Wayfarer
So we exist because of the development of constraints. And to understand that history of symmetry-breakings, we have to melt the rather frozen block of constraints that now compose the structure of a Cosmos which is only a few fractions from its ultimate Heat Death — apokrisis
Also, when you say "an implicit ability to grasp abstractions" it depends on what you mean to imply by that. — Janus
Isn't it possible that spirit (a different domain) is somehow part of the mind-body equation which determines the behaviour of a human organism (a neutral monist substance)? — Galuchat
A big question in its own right. There are many possible responses, but the Mahayana Buddhist analysis is instructive in this regard. — Wayfarer
Aristotle sufficiently refuted Pythagorean idealism, and the form of Platonic idealism which is basically the same as modern Platonic realism. This did not prevent the Neo-Platonists and Christian theologians from developing a form of dualism which was immune to such refutation. — Metaphysician Undercover
You say you accept a ‘four-causes’ cosmology - material, efficient, formal and final - but here the ‘ultimate Heat Death’ represents ‘the final cause’, in the sense of ‘that to which all things are directed’. Does it not? — Wayfarer
My point is that mind-body dualism should be based on a scientific, not religious (or theological), argument; and that it would be proven to be unsound on that account. — Galuchat
Actually - and I know we've discussed this quite a few times - what I'm starting to understand through research, is that the 'hylomorphic' (matter~form) dualism of Aristotle is what was incorporated into Thomas Aquinas. Now, Lloyd Gerson, whom as you probably know of, says that in his view, despite their differences, Aristotle remained broadly speaking Platonist and that regardless of their differences, Aristotle is still broadly Platonist. — Wayfarer
At issue is wholly and solely the reality of abstracts, as far as I'm concerned, and that is where Platonists of whatever stripe have a case to make. — Wayfarer
You sound like a broken record. — Uber
No obviously they do not contain the same problem, for the reasons that apokrisis explained and for the reasons that I mentioned: namely that we know about constraints on larger states of motion emerging from more fundamental states of motion. There could be some kind of metaphysical resolution there. The epistemological problem only exists when you divide reality into multiple realms and then pick and choose which causal rules apply in one realm but not the other. — Uber
Having said all that, it is abundantly clear to me that the definition I gave for physical stuff is at least empirically reliable, even though it has outstanding metaphysical questions...as any definition for anything would! — Uber
Nothing written about the epistemological problem actually addressed the problem itself. — Uber
First because it assumes that "Forms" exist when there is no evidence for them. — Uber
But more fundamentally, because you assume that any conception of time can exist separately from space, which is a categorical no in modern physics. — Uber
Nothing I have read so far warrants throwing Platonism out with Dualism. — Galuchat
To clarify, on your view:
1) Forms (both General and Particular) are not physical, mental, or spiritual?
2) It is only information which may be intelligible (pure) or substance (empirical)?
3) How does your "true dualism" address the mind-body problem? — Galuchat
I must be honest with you Galuchat, and tell you that I always have problems understanding your terminology. — Metaphysician Undercover
I will however address 3) above. The mind-body dualism of the human being is one instance of dualism. It is the example of dualism which is most evident to us because we have access to the non-physical within us. — Metaphysician Undercover
By your own definition of "physical" you have divided reality into multiple realms. You say that the physical is "any system subject to energetic constraints". By this definition you divide reality into the physical (that which is subject to constraints), and the constraints themselves. — Metaphysician Undercover
Have you read how I have addressed the epistemological problem. The same problem was really addressed thousands of years ago by Plato. Ancient dualist metaphysics has progressed far beyond that problem. — Metaphysician Undercover
The evidence is logical. The active Forms are implicated by logical necessity. Their existence is demonstrated by logical necessity. Your reliance on "the empirical" misleads you into thinking that all evidence is sensual. — Metaphysician Undercover
But this does nothing to demonstrate that the conception of time employed by modern physics is better. And please, don't turn to your "empirical evidence". When dealing with the non-physical, as space and time clearly are, it is imperative that we rely on the intellect, and logic, for our understanding, not the senses. — Metaphysician Undercover
When we conceive of Forms, mathematical objects, laws of physics, and this type of constraint, as outside of time, eternal, our principles are subject to this "epistemic problem". "Outside of time", eternal, renders the Forms as inactive, passive, and necessarily non-causal. — Metaphysician Undercover
Surely it must be the opposite to believe nature is imbued with an over arching purpose? — apokrisis
Mind-body interactions are a matter of empirical fact, not metaphysics. — Galuchat
To get a better sense of this philosophical sophistry, let's try to explain emotion. — Uber
But in the fairy tale that Wayfarer has imagined in this thread, reason has been artificially detached from the rational operations of the mind. — Uber
" ...materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself... Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this can leave nothing to be desired. But all this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space, and causality, by virtue of which it is first of all presented as extended in space and operating in time.
More broadly, here is a candidate final cause or physical objective for all life, not just humans: to avoid thermodynamic equilibrium with the rest of the natural environment by continuously dissipating away energy to that environment. The real issue for you isn't final or material or efficient causes. Those are just words that you use to fill space. It's that you don't like the specific causes being invoked to explain the world, because they do not require the prior existence of your magical realm. — Uber
The last paragraph is just false. The vast majority of physicists are naturalists, in the ontological sense of the word — Uber
I am having a hard time seeing how stasis, non-existence, the so-called ‘Heat Death’, comprises ‘a purpose’, any more than the purpose of an individual life is to be cremated. — Wayfarer
Interestingly you did not object to the substance of the argument, only that it did not apply to our discussion because we're talking about reason. — Uber
As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, 'intellect' is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal).
Intellect is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images (such as a visual mental image of what your mother looks like, an auditory mental image of what your favorite song sounds like, a gustatory mental image of what pizza tastes like, and so forth); and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body (such as a visual experience of the computer in front of you, the auditory experience of the cars passing by on the street outside your window, the awareness you have of the position of your legs, etc.).
That intellectual activity -- "reasoning" in the formal sense of the term -- is irreducible to sensation and imagination [and to emotion!] is a thesis that unites Platonists, Aristotelians, and rationalists of either the ancient Parmenidean sort or the modern Cartesian sort. The thesis is either explicitly or implicitly denied by modern empiricists. — Feser
I think it very much applies to reason as well, in the sense that explaining the rational operations of the mind would constitute a successful explanation of reason itself, if you are willing to pull it back from the metaphysical and transcendent realms. — Uber
Materialism recognizes that those operations are emergent properties of a special kind of brain (the human brain) dynamically coupled to an external world. — Uber
...materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself... Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this can leave nothing to be desired. But all this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space, and causality, by virtue of which it is first of all presented as extended in space and operating in time. — Schopenhauer
So then...you agree that naturalism can provide final causes? You are upset about what, that these causes lack the "layers of meaning" that you think philosophy should have? — Uber
....the annihilation of all *merely* human meaning.. — Janus
I think most developments in modern physics have strongly reinforced naturalism, not undermined it. — Uber
I wonder if insanity and irrationality are also hanging out there among the Forms, constantly imbuing humans with stupidity? — Uber
So let me get something straight: would you be ok with this definition if constraints were non-physical? — Uber
Good, as I said, we ought to leave "constraints" right out of this definition. How would you define "energy" here? Do you allow for potential energy? Suppose as a simple example, because I'm no physicist, that an object transfers energy to another object, through force, and this is explained by the means of a field, such that the potential energy is the property of the field. Would you say that the field is something physical because it has a finite amount of energy, even though that energy is just potential energy, and a "field" is just a mathematical construct?The definition does not imply any division at all, and in any case I rephrased it a while back to state anything that only has finite amounts of energy, in response to your initial objection. So you keep attacking a strawman. — Uber
The basic problem is that your fundamental assumptions about the world are totally bonkers. — Uber
What epic lunacy. — Uber
Beautiful nonsense, some of the most beautiful nonsense I've yet seen on this forum. — Uber
To understand metaphysics requires meta-noia, a literal change in the way cognition operates; it requires insight into one's own mental operations. It requires the intelligence becoming aware of the way it 'constructs' the world. Naturalism doesn't deal with that, because it operates at the level where that construction is itself treated as reality with a taken-for-granted nature. Questioning that is the business of metaphysics. — Wayfarer
There was no substance in your counter-arguments. Honestly and seriously. — Wayfarer
I am having a hard time seeing how stasis, non-existence, the so-called ‘Heat Death’, comprises ‘a purpose’, any more than the purpose of an individual life is to be cremated. I think the problem is, 'the immanent' in terms of which we nowadays wish to see everything, isn't the domain of purpose, so we can't see any purpose in it, other than those purposes which we ourselves project onto it. But in the original semiotic view - which actually descended from Bonaventure, I have learned, the 'signs' were actually all symbols of a higher truth. Now that the 'higher truth' is no longer honoured, then what is 'signified'? — Wayfarer
One of their fundamental criticisms is that string theory doesn't make testable predictions at all, and nor can the proposed multiverses or 'the landscape' ever be empirically demonstrated. So they are arguing that it doesn't pass muster as science. — Wayfarer
So, the nature of 'naturalism' is well and truly an open question. You can't sanguinely gesture at science as if we have it all worked out, we're just waiting for some additional details to flesh out the whole picture. We could well be on the cusp of a much greater revolution than the Copernican. — Wayfarer
None of these "master narratives" are real beyond the fact that they are believed by people. — Janus
This is the case with any "higher truth" whatsoever. Higher truths are real only insofar as people are committed to them, and they may be judged only by their fruits. I'm not saying people should not be committed to such ideals, if that is what they feel is right for them, but the fatal error consists in prescribing such things for others, even for all people. — Janus
The only end of science, as such, is to learn the lesson that the universe has to teach it. In Induction it simply surrenders itself to the force of facts. But it finds . . . that this is not enough. It is driven in desperation to call upon its inward sympathy with nature, its instinct for aid, just as we find Galileo at the dawn of modern science making his appeal to il lume naturale. . . . The value of Facts to science, lies only in this, that they belong to Nature; and Nature is something great, and beautiful, and sacred, and eternal, and real -- the object of its worship and its aspiration. ...
The soul's deeper parts can only be reached through its surface. In this way the eternal forms, that mathematics and philosophy and the other sciences make us acquainted with, will, by slow percolation, gradually reach the very core of one's being, and will come to influence our lives; and this they will do, not because they involve truths of merely vital importance, but because they [are] ideal and eternal verities. — C S Peirce
these declarations not only eloquent but entirely congenial; but they have a radically antireductionist and realist tendency quite out of keeping with present fashion. And they are alarmingly Platonist in that they maintain that the project of pure inquiry is sustained by our "inward sympathy" with nature, on which we draw in forming hypotheses that can then be tested against the facts. ...If we can reason, it is because our thoughts can obey the order of the logical relations among propositions--so here again we depend on a Platonic harmony.
The reason I call this view alarming is that it is hard to know what world picture to associate it with, and difficult to avoid the suspicion that the picture will be religious, or quasi-religious. Rationalism has always had a more religious flavor than empiricism. Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable.
In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper--namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself. I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.
My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed.
What could it mean for all individuals to honour a "higher truth"? Whose "higher truth" would they be honouring? — Janus
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