What I have in mind is more the kind of uncritical acceptance of science as the 'arbiter of reality'. This is the view of many of the popular intellectuals and science writers who comment on philosophical questions. It is also pretty close to the attitude of many academic philosophers. Of course there are also scientists that doesn't apply to. But you can't say it isn't a very widespread element of modern culture. Why, I have even seen you criticize it from time to time (except for when I criticize it, in which case then apparently I'm attacking straw men.) — Wayfarer
I would say that the future is manifested within us as anticipation. — Metaphysician Undercover
I would like to see a separation between "experience" and "future". — Metaphysician Undercover
So what happens when "experience is synthesized" (as you say), memories (experiences) are contextualized at an actively changing present, in relation to the future. So what it is which is synthesized, i.e. produced by our minds at the present, contains elements of experience as well as elements of anticipation. Therefore this cannot be properly called "experience". Our being at the present is a synthesis of memories (past) and anticipations (future), experience being proper to the former but not the latter. — Metaphysician Undercover
Simply put, the future appears to us in the form of possibility, which is the general, universal, conceptual. But the past is revealed to us as the existence of particulars. — Metaphysician Undercover
the trend in modern presentism is toward a dimensional, or 'thick" present. I call it the second dimension of time, "breadth". The issue is that the "present" is defined by our presence. — Metaphysician Undercover
Reality also appears to be unified and invariant. — Janus
I don't understand why you would say this. Don't we confront many distinct possibilities at the present, implying the exact opposite. — Metaphysician Undercover
I agree with you that the most important things are communion and community; which in some senses are the very same things. For me both consist in dispositions which are based more in feeling than in intellectual understanding; they are more poetry than science, that is. Good poetry can well do without science (although it may benefit greatly from scientific insight) but good science ( that is, beneficial science) cannot do without poetry. This signals to me that nothing is more important than feeling, and love is the primary feeling that both binds and releases. — Janus
Where we probably differ the most is that I don't believe any aesthetic, ethical or mystical experiences can tell anyone anything definite about the metaphysical nature of reality. — Janus
I think you, on the other hand, think there is some esoteric, higher, intellectual objective knowledge, and you see science as a threat to that. — Janus
His work is opposed, as he once put it, to “the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand.” Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face.
Right. You deny that anything meaningful can be said about metaphysics proper. — Wayfarer
I think perhaps your approach to these very questions is very much influenced by cultural Protestantism - which is not an ad hominem, it's not something particular to yourself, but I think it pervades current culture. — Wayfarer
So do you think he too was 'attacking straw men'? — Wayfarer
"Religion," George Berkeley once remarked, "is the virtuous mean between incredulity and superstition". — Wayfarer
Ah yes, I remember that thread. I'd just like to emphasize that I don't at all deny meaning. Indeed, I am playing with a theory that radically prioritizes meaning. Both 'mind' and 'matter' are just meanings. 'Concepts' ('subjective') and 'objects' ('out there') are both just 'formed non-form.' This 'non-form' might be called 'sensation' or 'emotion,' except these mislead us into taking the subject as prior to meaning rather than one more meaning. To be sure this is 'speculative.' No one could live by it. The continuity of meaningformed nonmeaning gives rise to a sense of being an 'I' in a world with others and objects. Some of these forms are more or less pure form. At the level of the bit ('pure' unity), we can have a science of 'ideal' information. IMV it is only math's exclusion of metaphoricity ('meaning-bleed') that allows it its exactness.Regarding your question about 'how meaning is able to be constant' - have a look at this OP which I started last year... — Wayfarer
I said that nothing definite can be said about the metaphysical nature of reality, not that nothing meaningful can be said about metaphysics. — Janus
science has no business denying or pretending it can explain (away) aesthetic, ethical and mystical experience. All these are based in feeling, and those feelings constitute the richness of human life. — Janus
Religious experience, for example, cannot tell us whether or not there really is a God, or Karma, or an afterlife, whether reincarnation or resurrection. — Janus
Is the 'spiritual' determinate? — sign
That's your personal view. Religious people will obviously take issue, as there are many who believe exactly that. — Wayfarer
But these matters are also considered in philosophy. — Wayfarer
religions contradict one another as to what is told. — Janus
you don't really engage with them. — Janus
So I have conveyed meaning or information to you. I get it wrong, or you misunderstand it, and nothing is conveyed and it doesn't work. — Wayfarer
So the symbolic form and the information is not exactly the same thing. The text encodes meaning, but that meaning is something other than the physical form. That I find interesting. — Wayfarer
As for how this relates to idealism: the rules of thought - logic, maths, syntax and so on - actually provide the structure within which meaning becomes intelligible. Without them, all we would have is gestures and sounds. And that belongs to a different order, - as Platonists would argue, a higher order than the physical order, an which is only visible to a rational mind - the 'intelligible order'. So the 'structure of thought' is also a reflection of, or interwoven with, 'the structure of the world'; which is why mathematics is predictive (among many other things.) — Wayfarer
The question might be phrased in terms of whether translation is ever perfect. And can I even read same text twice? I can of course scan the same words. But can I have exactly the same 'meaning experience'? The text is grasped as an abstract unity. It's the same river and yet it's not. — sign
What does "empiricism" mean? As a psychological disposition, it means a tendency to emphasize the value of experience and to distrust abstract reason. But it is as a philosophical conception, not as a psychological mood, that is discussed here. As a philosophical conception, empiricism means a theory according to which there is no distinction of nature, but only of degree, between the senses and the intellect. As a result, human knowledge is simply sense-knowledge (or animal knowledge) more evolved and elaborated than in other mammals. And not only is human knowledge entirely encompassed in, and limited to, sense-experience...; but to produce its achievements in the sphere of sense-experience human knowledge uses no other specific forces and means than the forces and means which are at play in sense-knowledge.
Now if it is true that reason differs specifically from senses, the paradox with which we are confronted is that empiricism, in actual fact, uses reason while denying the power of reason, on the basis of a theory that reduces reason's knowledge and life, which are characteristic of man, to sense knowledge and life, which are characteristic of animals.
Hence, first, an inevitable confusion and inconsistency between what an empiricist does -- she thinks as a human, she uses reason, a power superior in nature to senses -- and what she says -- she denies this very specificity of reason.
And second, an inevitable confusion and inconsistency even in what she says: for what the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients -- sense-knowledge in which she has made room for reason without recognizing it. A confusion which comes about all the more easily as, on the one hand, the senses are, in actual fact, more or less permeated with reason in man, and, on the other, the merely sensory psychology of animals, especially of the higher vertebrates, goes very far in its own realm and imitates intellectual knowledge to a considerable extent.
the "reason" that Dennett imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.
It was precisely the philosophy of mathematics that lead me to study mathematics. Its attempt to capture the continuum and the infinite led to a foundational crisis and even a schism. — sign
Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates trusted theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, physics hasn't made a major breakthrough in more than four decades. The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: observation has been unable to confirm mind-boggling theories, like supersymmetry or string theory, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria. Worse, these "too good to not be true" theories are actually untestable and they have left the field in a cul-de-sac. To escape, physicists must rethink how they do physics. Only by embracing messiness and complexity can science discover the truth, not as one might prefer it, but as it is.
To those who propose that knowledge or meaning is 'encoded in the brain' or is identical with 'brain states', what I'm trying to argue is that the faculty that grasps meaning cannot be physical. There's actually no physical analogy for whatever that faculty is (other perhaps than computers, which are after all built by us). But the fact that it's not physical, means that, for most people, then it must be spooky or spiritual or far-out or something. Whereas I'm saying in some sense that it's 'hidden in plain sight'. We actually don't understand something fundamental about our own abilities in this regard. — Wayfarer
And of course 'abstract understanding' is just crude or partial or incomplete understanding, an understanding that only grasps opposites and doesn't see their unity (to oversimplify.) I also note that Hegel does indeed identify his thinking with (rational) mysticism in the shorter Logic.First, then, comes the development of doctrine; secondly comes its fixation. Only after that does the opposition of believing and thinking, of immediate doctrinal certitude and so-called reason, enter in. Thinking reached the point where it relied only on itself; the first thing the young eagle of reason did was to soar as a bird of prey to the sun of truth, from there to declare war on religion. Then, however, once more justice is done to the religious content also, in that thinking finds its completion in the concrete concept of spirit and enters into a polemic against abstract understanding. — Hegel
was it Georg Cantor who had more or less a nervous breakdown? — Wayfarer
Coming to think of it, have you heard of the book by Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math? — Wayfarer
Well yeah. What are you talking about when you make any claim about how things are?So is "objective" the same as "fact" and/or "truth" on your view? — Terrapin Station
This is akin to saying that we cannot determine objectively what causes nuclear bombs to explode. We don't see atoms. We see objects. We don't see minds. We see bodies. If we can get at the existence of atoms through the behavior of macro-sized objects, then why can't we get at the existence of minds and their contents through the behavior of other bodies?It is objectively true that emotions motivate behavior; I have not denied that at all. But we cannot determine objectively precisely what emotion motivated precisely what behavior at some specific time and place. We cannot determine that in any way that could be inter-subjectively confirmed by observation, and I am even skeptical that we could determine such a thing precisely even in relation to our own behavior.
This is true even with ethology; we can only approximate even with observations of animal behavior and how much more is this true of human behavior? There is thus a subjective element even in some of the sciences (not to mention the subjective element in all the sciences due to the fact that they are human practices; which is a different subject again). — Janus
I do try, Janus. Our dialogues usually end up at this point. I get we have a divergent 'meta-philosophy'. Let's just leave it that. — Wayfarer
I think this touches on a problem you've already mentioned, the difficulty of finding the right words. We have different conceptualizations of the future. In one conceptualization, the future is exactly what can't be here yet. In another, the future is possibility that exists 'now.' In this second sense we can say that human experience is primarily 'futural.' — sign
While I like this conceptualization (which is new to me), I feel the need to complicate it. Why should the future be only conceptual possibility? Can I not have a detailed fantasy or fear of the future? — sign
And a point that you didn't respond to (which I didn't stress much) is the idea of the 'living' past. This 'living past' is not our memory of what happened. It is what obscurely governs out interpretation of the present with the help of the future as possibility. It is 'invisible' as what we take for granted. We might call it the distortion of the lens which we cannot see through that lens. It is our 'pre-interpretation' of the situation, the one we don't know we have as we employ it. It can become visible in retrospect. We can see later that we were thinking 'inside the box' the box of this 'living past.' I suppose this is a metaphorical use of 'past,' since it is not what is usually intended. — sign
I often try and explain things to you, in particular, which is often greeted with 'you haven't answered the question' or 'you're not able to explain yourself'. — Wayfarer
It's not just neural processes that are involved with emotions. There are also chemical processes. This combination is what correlates to your model (the emotion you feel) of those processes. Emotions model those processes. The emotion you feel is a model, just as the color you see.You're missing the point which is that physical processes can be mechanically modeled; whereas volitional processes, whether emotional or instinctive, cannot. You could never even say precisely what neural process caused what behavior, let alone determine precisely what neural process is correlated with what emotion. — Janus
Well yeah. What are you talking about when you make any claim about how things are?
If you were to type "I feel happy.", do those scribbles refer to a real state-of-affairs, like your emotional state, that I can glean accurate information about some state-of-affairs independent of my own mind? If they do, then you are speaking objectively. If not then your are speaking fiction, or lying. What is subjective is your arrangement of sensory data that makes up your conscious state (working memory). Your view is subjective because it is unique. The world (objectivity, truth, the way things are) is made up of subjectivities in a sense, which is why I said they are subsets of objectivity.
If you were to type, "Harry Hindu is wrong.", do those scribbles refer to a real state-of-affairs, like me actually misinterpreting my sensory data, your intent, etc. where my mental representation of the world isn't accurate, or truthful? Another word for my worldview would be "fictional", maybe even "delusional". — Harry Hindu
But this contradicts the objective fact that mass delusions exist and that large groups of people can take fiction as fact. Take the belief that the Earth was flat and the center of the universe, for instance. What is factual isn't what is normative. What is factual is that norms exist and can be maintained for a long period until more efficient norms are established.One thing that's unusual about divvying up the terms that way is that usually something being a fact and/or being true is seen as normative, in the sense that people should ideally agree with things that are true or that are factual. — Terrapin Station
On your view, where subjectivity is a subset of objectivity, which is the same as truth/fact, a comment like "Frank Zappa was a better composer than Mozart" is thus objective, is true and is a fact. — Terrapin Station
Yes, that is how I would circumvent that. Value statements (statements that use "better", "worse", "good", "bad", etc.) are statements about your conscious state, not about something that exists independent of your conscious state. "Goodness" and "betterness" are not things that exist independent of your mind. But that isn't to say that they aren't part of the world. Your mind is part of the world and anything your feel would be an objective fact. Mistaking your conscious state as the state of the world would be making a category mistake.You could circumvent this, though, by simply saying that "Frank Zappa was a better composer than Mozart" always has an implied "<Harry feels that> Frank Zappa was a better composer than Mozart," and I'd agree with that idea--there's always an implied <so-and-so feels that> with statements like that. — Terrapin Station
But this contradicts the objective fact that mass delusions exist and that large groups of people can take fiction as fact. Take the belief that the Earth was flat and the center of the universe, for instance. What is factual isn't what is normative. What is factual is that norms exist and can be maintained for a long period until more efficient norms are established. — Harry Hindu
But that isn't to say that they aren't part of the world. Your mind is part of the world and anything your feel would be an objective fact. — Harry Hindu
On your view, where subjectivity is a subset of objectivity, which is the same as truth/fact, a comment like "Frank Zappa was a better composer than Mozart" is thus objective, is true and is a fact. As is "Mozart was a better composer than Frank Zappa." If something being true or a fact implies that we should agree with it, then we should agree both that "Frank Zappa was a better composer than Mozart" and that "Mozart was a better composer than Frank Zappa." Although of course, agreeing with both of those "facts" poses a bit of a problem. — Terrapin Station
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