Our "active perceptual needs" do not create the world ex nihilo. We are each of us born into a world that is not of our own making. It was here before any of us were and will be here after all of us. — Fooloso4
'Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'
Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was [that] the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.
The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.
This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood.
Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them.
But what is the thing signified? Why, that's a number! — Wayfarer
Recognize the two things versus one can be a pattern. — schopenhauer1
Your query about 'numbers' is perhaps handled by the Lakoff & Nunez idea that all 'mathematics' can be be related to 'bodily metaphors'. — fresco
The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.
Interesting. What discipline is this from? Computer science? — Wayfarer
Naive realists think that what we humans call 'the physical world' has nothing to do with the active perceptual needs of us as a species. — fresco
They don't understand that a picture of 'a world devoid of humans' is a current human construction useful for current purposes. — fresco
Are you prepared to stick your neck out and say that potential solutions to current enigmas, like 'dark matter', will not not radically change are current concept of 'physicality' ? — fresco
I'm taking a Pragmatist (Nietzschean) perspective that there is no way of seperating 'description' from 'actuality'. All we can ever have are 'descriptions' which vary in functionality according to context. — fresco
I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but
not ratiocination. (On Certainty 475)
Our language-game is an extension of primitive behavior. (For our language-game is behavior.) (Instinct). (Zettel 545)
Instinct first reason second (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology 689)
The squirrel does not infer by induction that it is going to need stores next winter as well. And no more do we need a law of induction to justify our actions or our predictions. (On Certainty 287)
As far as I am concerned, ' where concepts originate from' is just another vacuous endeavor played by ' aspiring 'realists' desperate for 'axioms'. Biological understanding of languaging as 'behaviour' needs no such 'axioms' (Maturana) — fresco
For me, this one amounts to 'naive realists' squirming on the uncomfortable hook arising from Kant's point about the inaccessibility of noumena and the subsequent ditching of 'noumena' by later phenomenologists. — fresco
Obviously, an 'objective world' is useful picture ... — fresco
... such 'pictures' are always human constructs... — fresco
The entities and systems which they conceptualize. — fresco
The lambda calculus was first described by Alonzo Church — alcontali
That is an important point. — Metaphysician Undercover
The existence of the earth prior to man and what we imagine or picture or form ideas of what that was like is not the same. — Fooloso4
Are there entities that are not part of a system of human interaction? Are entities mind dependent? Is the mind interacting with itself or with entities that are not products of the mind? Is there nothing but the mind generating a world ex nihilo? — Fooloso4
In whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each "I-the-man" and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this 'living together'. — Edmund Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences p108
It doesn't mean that 'the world is in the mind'. It's more like, world and mind arise together as objective and subjective poles, we have a shared world of meanings and common facts within which we all dwell. — Wayfarer
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