What does "not directly physical" mean?
You seem to be confusing subjective concepts with physical objects. In the typical bar magnet illustration of a magnetic fleld, you never sense the field itself, only its effect on iron filings. Your cause-seeking brain fills-in the gaps between lines with an imputed force. This is also how optical illusions work : fill-in the blanks. The field is not an actual thing, but a metaphorical creation to represent something invisible, similar to gravity imagined as the "fabric" of empty space.Like magnetic field, liquidity, or acidity is physical. I explained all this the first time around. — Zelebg
You seem to be confusing subjective concepts with physical objects. In the typical bar magnet illustration of a magnetic fleld, you never sense the field itself, only its effect on iron filings.
As Kant noted long ago, we never know the ding an sich. only our ideas about them. "Reality" is the name we give to our beliefs about ding an sich based on our mental images of them. Reality is mathematical relationships, not physical objects. — Gnomon
You seem to be confusing subjective concepts with physical objects. In the typical bar magnet illustration of a magnetic fleld, you never sense the field itself, only its effect on iron filings. — Gnomon
As an aside.....Kant didn’t know about fields, his natural science having to do with forces alone, without the conception of field associated to them.** So I wonder if he would have considered a field as a thing-in-itself, given what he actually did consider that way of things in general. I suspect not, for things-in-themselves are real objects of sensation to which our representations relate, but fields in and of themselves have no such reality of that phenomenal nature, in as much as their representations are actually representations of something else that is phenomenal, such that the conception of them becomes empirical. And, as we understand, representations of representations, are more commonly known as abstractions. — Mww
If matter makes the clay that makes the bricks, what consiousness made the matter?
(Or maybe the easier question is how did matter make consciousness?) — 3017amen
Could one argue that abstract things have their own independent existence? — 3017amen
Could one argue that abstract things have their own independent existence? — 3017amen
On the one hand, fields are real and modeled mathematically: — Mww
Yes. The intrinsic Either/Or aspect of our apparently dual "Reality" is what Einstein was talking about in his Theory of Relativity. What's real depends on who's looking. That's also why my personal worldview is based on a complementary Both/And perspective. For all practical purposes (science), what we perceive as concrete objects and physical effects is what is Real. But for theoretical purposes (philosophy), our perceptions of those objects are mental constructs. So discussions about Consciousness must make that distinction clear, or else, by reifying Consciousness, we run into the paradoxical "hard problem".And on the other, fields are completely abstract and quantitatively incommensurable directly: — Mww
↪ovdtogt ↪Mww
...well, of course the old debate over whether mathematics' has an independent existence or a human invention, rears it head again here: — 3017amen
That is irrelevant if you understand the distinction between the things I labeled “physical/actual” vs things I labeled “abstract/virtual”.
Those are two distinct categories of existence as I described, and you may label them as you wish or think about them whatever you want, but as long as we agree the distinction exists, then the question still stands whether qualia belongs in one or the other category. — Zelebg
For all practical purposes (science), what we perceive as concrete objects and physical effects is what is Real. But for theoretical purposes (philosophy), our perceptions of those objects are mental constructs. So discussions about Consciousness must make that distinction clear, or else, by reifying Consciousness, we run into the paradoxical "hard problem". — Gnomon
what Einstein was talking about in his Theory of Relativity. What's real depends on who's looking. — Gnomon
But so dichotomizing doesn't so far make sense to me. This because I do not deem actual, concrete experience to be the same as physicality. It almost seems that you believe in experience's equivalence to physicality. Can you better explain this, or how this is a mistaken interpretation of your view? My bad if I've missed this explanation somewhere in the thread.
I do consider mathematics as a kind of fundamental law of nature independent from human experience. — ovdtogt
As for me, consciousness - as in "that which is aware of" - is itself other than information - as in "that which informs". The former is informed by the latter. — javra
f you think math is independent of human experience, how would you explain how we came to be in possession of it? — Mww
If you give 4 peanuts to one monkey and only 1 to another, that one will get pretty pissed off. — ovdtogt
This is the mereological fallacy- ascribing to parts activities that can only be undertaken by the whole. So, isolated parts of an organism are not conscious, as the signals that they process are not being interpreted by a conscious agent.A photo-receptor cell is 'conscious' of light. A cochlear hair cells is 'conscious' of sound...etc — ovdtogt
Qualia, (as Dennett described it) is basically non-physical/Metaphysical abstract phenomenon. — 3017amen
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