Anytime that you talk about the way things are, which includes peoples' emotional state, you are speaking objectively. — Harry Hindu
Due mainly to Protestantism, which 'internalised' the entire vast salvific machinery of medieval religion. — Wayfarer
So I think it's quite reasonable to portray science as 'the quest for the absolute'. And I think that scientific realism still generally maintains that aspiration. — Wayfarer
And really part of that is the aspiration to arrive at an understanding of the absolute, an answer to the question of 'what is behind it all?' — Wayfarer
If we can use feelings as explanations for peoples' behaviors, then aren't feelings objective? Anytime that you talk about the way things are, which includes peoples' emotional state, you are speaking objectively.
The subjective is a subset of the objective. Your feelings are part of reality as much as the waves of the ocean are. They are effects and causes. — Harry Hindu
And what is the religious theory of time? — Terrapin Station
"Sound is defined as "(a) Oscillation in pressure, stress, particle displacement, particle velocity, etc., propagated in a medium with internal forces (e.g., elastic or viscous), or the superposition of such propagated oscillation" for example — Terrapin Station
Your evaluation of it is independent of the fact that I explained it. — Terrapin Station
Even in Protestantism the 'salvific machinery" still consists in a communal context: the church. Protestantism does also allow, though, for the individual's relationship with God; it brings the experiential dimension of religion into play. — Janus
The absolute is the idea of how things are absolutely independently of us, and I think any intelligent scientist would realize that science, as a human practice, deals with the world as it is experienced by humans. — Janus
Not many scientists would imagine that we can exhaustively know the nature of things — Janus
My post was in response to the remark 'The space for the unknowable and the mysterious is the privatized conscience' which I said is very characteristic of Lutheranism. — Wayfarer
I very much doubt that. — Wayfarer
I would have thought that you were in favour of privileging personal experience over dogma. And I think it is simply true that the "unknowable and the mysterious" are the province of personal contemplation; since they obviously cannot exist in the public space. — Janus
"A single brain" isn't an abstraction, because I'm not talking about the concept of a single brain, our our knowledge of it, or anything like that. — Terrapin Station
Almost everyone in this thread, with the exception of Sign, likewise is so bound to a basically realist (scientific or naive) viewpoint, that they can't even comprehend criticism of it - when they respond to criticisms of it, it's obvious that they haven't the first idea of what was intended. — Wayfarer
A true scientist does not want the world to be any way (in the ontological, as opposed to the moral sense of course), or if that is impossible to achieve at least aspires to attain a state of not wanting the world to be any way, she wants to find out the truth about the way the world is. Can you honestly say that you don't want the world to be any particular way, that you wouldn't mind if the world turned out not be spiritual but merely material, in other words that you are not emotionally biased and have no desire to get beyond those emotional biases? If you cannot say that then you are not operating in accordance with the scientific spirit; the desire to know the truth, whatever it turns out to be. — Janus
I'm invisible, or maybe my viewpoint is incomprehensible. — Metaphysician Undercover
A true scientist does not want the world to be any way (in the ontological, as opposed to the moral sense of course), or if that is impossible to achieve at least aspires to attain a state of not wanting the world to be any way, she wants to find out the truth about the way the world is. — Janus
I'm invisible, or maybe my viewpoint is incomprehensible. — Metaphysician Undercover
It seems to me the problem is that you count all realism as "naive realism' — Janus
Remember that I'm a direct/"naive" realist. — Terrapin Station
A true scientist does not want the world to be any way (in the ontological, as opposed to the moral sense of course), or if that is impossible to achieve at least aspires to attain a state of not wanting the world to be any way, she wants to find out the truth about the way the world is. — Janus
I do think the relationship between ontology and epistemology is deep indeed. — sign
I think we can all meet on this common ground. I suggest that the move basic to both 'true' science and religion is against the 'bad' subject, the irrational or ungodly or greedy or superstitious or alienated subject. 'I' strive to transcend what is merely 'I', perhaps by finding some 'kingdom of God' within this 'I.' The 'I' strives towards its 'substance.' What I seem to strive for is some kind of communion (with God or nature) or community of [synonym for good] people. Of course this has to be vague in order to point at a general structure, but I think the vagueness allows for a common ground. — sign
The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. (Mind and Cosmos pp. 35-36)
I'd like to hear more about the religious conception of time. — sign
Heidegger was influenced by this and did some great work with it. — sign
Sorry MU it wasn't a reference to you. — Wayfarer
We can begin with the most simple, what is the most evident to us, and that is that there is a fundamental difference between future and past. — Metaphysician Undercover
Not only is time fundamentally the substantial division between past and future, which is the present, but it is also active. Add to this, the idea that the past consists of actualities while the future consists of possibilities. So the realm of physical existence, whatever it is that has real (actual) physical existence, is the past, what has come to be, and this physical existence (the past) is continually coming into existence at the present from the possibilities which the future hands us. — Metaphysician Undercover
So Neo-Platonist philosophers and Christian theologians studied this problem of how it is that the physical world comes into being from the realm of possibilities, at the present, as time continually passes. — Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, I've read quite a bit of Heidegger, and though his terminology is difficult, he does focus on this problem of the nature of time, and offers some good insight. — Metaphysician Undercover
The confusion is the worst aspect because it causes a philosopher to write one thing, then later write something else which is inconsistent, so they tend to write precious little, having not resolved the problems. Then to the reader it might appear like the writer does not have a clue, when in reality the writer is just trying to work out some very difficult problems, and provide some sort of picture for the reader. — Metaphysician Undercover
Isn't the point about all forms of idealism, that they're actually pointing to the fact that knowledge of the world is something that implies and requires an observing mind? — Wayfarer
Galileo accepted that Plato's 'dianoia', which is mathematical knowledge, is of a higher order than empirical knowledge, in the sense that the mathematically-quantifiable attributes of the primary qualities of bodies can be known with great certainty. You can also see how that dovetails with Descartes understanding of the apodictic nature of rational certainty and mathematical proofs. This is the origin of modern mathematical physics — Wayfarer
So this mathematical method provided a way to transcend or 'bracket out' the merely subjective and idiosyncratic. It was a radical break with medieval science, because it also eliminated telos and intentionality, and much else besides. — Wayfarer
So the kind of 'self-negation' that modern science engenders, is nothing like the 'self-abnegation' of the contemplative traditions which is based on the transcendence of ego. It is more rooted in the tradition of liberal individualism, the pursuit of progress and the common good. And again, it's a very 'this-wordly' enterprise. And hey, there's a lot to commend that. I really don't like the Green/Left disparagement of science and democratic values. I owe a hell of a lot to it myself. But there's a spiritual vacuum at its core still. — Wayfarer
In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to one’s surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirit’s antagonism to nature–even as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including man–frequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of man’s continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature. Regarding reason as a natural organ does not divest it of the trend to domination or invest it with greater potentialities for reconciliation. On the contrary, the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the ‘useless spiritual,’ and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity. The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy. — Max Horkheimer
I can imagine intelligent life arriving to find our remains and putting together the narrative. — sign
It is my opinion that the problems in understanding these aspects of reality, will never be resolved until we release the scientific representation of time, and return to the religious ideology for guidance. — Metaphysician Undercover
Did your emotional state cause you to behave a certain way? Close friends and family can read you better than you can sometimes. Having a more objective perspective of someone can give you an insight into that person that that person doesn't have of themselves, because people have a habit of fooling themselves.In a kind of 'absolute' sense I can see where you are coming from, though: the feeling I had this morning actually happened, it was real, it really felt like whatever it felt like, and in that sense you might say it was objective. But 'on the ground', so to speak, what is objective is what is available for inter-subjective scrutiny and confirmation. — Janus
Indeed. And what do you think of the idea of the primacy of the future for human beings? We 'incarnate' the future, acting in the present in terms of a desired or fear possibility? — sign
This is a deep issue. Memory seems fundamental here. The past exists as memory, one might say. But surely it's not so simple. I'm interested in the accumulation of meaning. The past is learned from. Experience is synthesized. The 'living' past along with the future experienced as possibility seems to govern our interpretation of the present. — sign
This is indeed a great issue. I'm looking into Derrida lately, and he seems to be questioning the presence of the present. I'm still making sense of his difficult work. It seems like a radical thinking of becoming (which may subvert the idea of 'becoming.') — sign
This is very good point. I've been looking into Husserl lately, and it seems he was always developing his thought. As you may know, he also tackled the problem of time. He saw that the present was 'thick' and not point-like. Anyway, the deep questions are indeed just difficult. One struggles to find the words and often has to invent some. — sign
Reality also appears to be unified and invariant. — Janus
But the religious perspectives are far more insightful for giving us guidance toward understanding the nature of time.. — Metaphysician Undercover
That's not a definition, it's a bunch of incoherent nonsense. Look, you class "oscillation in pressure" and "particle velocity" together within the same definition. This is clear evidence that your so-called example of a definition of sound is nothing but incoherent nonsense. Clearly you just copied that off of some random website, — Metaphysician Undercover
Beautifully put. But Wayfarer himself emphasized detachment. I think we can all meet on this common ground. I suggest that the move basic to both 'true' science and religion is against the 'bad' subject, the irrational or ungodly or greedy or superstitious or alienated subject. 'I' strive to transcend what is merely 'I', perhaps by finding some 'kingdom of God' within this 'I.' The 'I' strives towards its 'substance.' What I seem to strive for is some kind of communion (with God or nature) or community of [synonym for good] people. Of course this has to be vague in order to point at a general structure, but I think the vagueness allows for a common ground. — sign
What are some examples of that then? — Terrapin Station
It's the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) definition, from the American National Standard on Acoustic Terminology document, which is also quoted on Wikipedia, yes. — Terrapin Station
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