Poetically you could say it’s minds made out of mental contents, where the “contents” are ontologically prior to the minds that later are able to contain them. — Pfhorrest
While this is a pretty awesome way of viewing things (reality as the intersect of dreams), it ignores the successful-in-my-view destruction of the subject in 20th century philosophy. — Yellow Horse
Rather it's that everything we judge to be real is, well, a judgement, and judgement is first and foremost a mental act. — Wayfarer
Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. (On Interpretation) — Yellow Horse
The idea that spoken words directly symbolize mental experiences, however initially intuitively plausible, turns out to have some serious problems. — Yellow Horse
(CPR, A369)The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding.
I'm suggesting that language or λόγος is prior to the mental/physical distinction, which would make it the structure of the world, with this structure still being born and dying off. — Yellow Horse
Critical theorists argue that in the ancient world the concept of ‘reason’ was an objective and normative one. Reason was thought to refer to a structure or order of what ought to be which was inherent in reality itself and which prescribed a certain way of life as objectively rational. Human beings were thought to have a (subjective) faculty which allowed them to perceive and respond to this objective structure of the world; this faculty could then also be called reason in a derivative sense. Even when ancient philosophers spoke of reason as a human faculty (rather than as a structure of the world), their conception of it was ‘substantive’; humans were thought to be able to use reason to determine which goals or ends of human action were worthy of pursuit.
In the post-Enlightenment world the ‘objective’ conception of reason becomes increasingly implausible. Reason comes to be conceived as essentially a subjective ability to find efficient means to arbitrarily given ends; that is, to whatever ends the agent in question happens to have. The very idea that there could be inherently rational ends is abandoned. Reason becomes subjective, formal and instrumental.
But isn't that a good argument for universals? — Wayfarer
The fact that an idea can be expressed in different languages...but retain exactly the same meaning — Wayfarer
which is the faculty that sees meaning. — Wayfarer
t's not as if the word is one thing, and the mental experience another — Wayfarer
The issue is that in modern philosophy, reason is subjectivised — Wayfarer
the suggestion that reason is real independently of what humans deem it to be, is vigorously disputed. — Wayfarer
you can't take away the observing intelligence and leave the world. — Wayfarer
if the human reason is not trustable, what's the point to make a deduction at all? — farmer
Exactly. — Pfhorrest
That translation occurs in some sense does support the fuzzy hypothesis of mental stuff, but this same hypothesis forecloses any investigation into whether some exact meaning is communicated.
Recalling the OP, this is related to difficulty of knowing whether I or my guru is 'enlightened,' if being enlightened is understood as one and the same state potentially attainable by anyone. — Yellow Horse
Nice, for me it reads as "fantasy" is referring to ego and personality. Such feeds on symbols as it lives and builds the sense of self, society and culture. All people share a common mental faculty and world of symbols (I like to view "all people" as one being in this sense, amongst the kingdoms of nature).That's from the 'Symbols' section. Personally I like to render unto science what is science's. This might sound like 'religion is just symbols,' but this is only reductive if we underrate symbols.
What I'm saying is that anything of that kind can be written in any number of languages — Wayfarer
I agree about the dove trying to fly without air, I see a causal world in which mind is embedded. There being a common thread on which they both hang in incarnation. — Punshhh
You can break the laws that society imposes on you, does that mean they aren’t laws?
You say the true laws of nature can’t be broken. How would you prove that such laws exist in the first place, considering that we “routinely transcend” apparent laws? If they exist, why would all things follow these laws and not some other laws? — leo
You choose to believe that laws that were there for no reason at all somehow gave rise to this world. You choose to believe that laws are responsible for what you do, that choice is an illusion. You choose to believe that love and suffering and thoughts and beauty and good and evil somehow appeared out of lifeless stuff that is none of that. That’s what sounds crazy and outlandish to me. — leo
What is this language independent meaning? We never see it naked. It's always in the clothes of this or that medium or language. — Yellow Horse
I'm trying to point out that grounding language in private mental experience leads to an epistemological apocalypse. — Yellow Horse
When I say the 'idea' of reference frames is material, I mean it is encoded in books, brains, etc. The phenomena they describe are observable phenomena. But reference frames themselves are not real, i.e. they don't exist independently of us out in nature. — Kenosha Kid
Maybe giving it form is part of what makes it intelligible. Substance and form = hylo~morphe. — Wayfarer
treated as a subjective construction, a kind of social construct. — Wayfarer
It may be useful when philosophy is trying to describe the being, the one who is doing the describing and the hearing of the description, to tabulate mind, ego, personality, body, world. But as you say they are imposed distinctions. The truth of the matter is only half observable, only half of it is accessible to the limited position of that being, or the society as a whole. Philosophy must in its attempts to be thorough, accept our position as conscious beings who happen to find ourselves here. And that we are entirely ignorant of the means by which we arrived, where we have arrived at (beyond appearances), or any purposes, or end to which it occurred, or was carried out. This being the case any such philosophy can only be a work half finished in the absence of the truth being revealed, somehow.I like incarnation as a metaphor. 'In itself' the 'mental' and the 'physical' are one, or something like that. We impose useful distinctions and forget we have done so, it seems to me.
Quite, we (humanity) might well be the incarnated symbol of another, unknown being.I agree also that symbols are the glue that holds us together. If you want to know an ego, figure out what symbols it incarnates (they incarnate).
And that we are entirely ignorant of the means by which we arrived, where we have arrived at (beyond appearances), or any purposes, or end to which it occurred, or was carried out. — Punshhh
The truth of the matter is only half observable, only half of it is accessible to the limited position of that being, or the society as a whole. — Punshhh
It may be useful when philosophy is trying to describe the being, the one who is doing the describing and the hearing of the description, to tabulate mind, ego, personality, body, world. But as you say they are imposed distinctions. — Punshhh
That's what I'm suggesting. The separation of language (for instance) into substance and form happens within language. — Yellow Horse
Whereas, I'm inclined to say that it is of the nature of concepts to mediate these apparently-separate domains in such a way that they're not separate. — Wayfarer
Or put another way, language is not merely self-referential. It conveys information we might not have found by any other means. — Wayfarer
To stay on topic, if one is arguing theism in a philosophical context, then one can only argue from facts (uncontroversial propositions) towards interpretations as candidates for facts (that God makes sense as part of an interpretation of the facts.) — Yellow Horse
"real” should not be restricted to “actual” objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or “potential” realities, that have not yet become “actual.” These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are “ontological” — that is, real components of existence. ...
The quantum concept of a “probability wave,” describing the likelihood of different possible outcomes of a measurement, was a quantitative version of Aristotle’s potential, Heisenberg wrote in his well-known 1958 book Physics and Philosophy. “It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.”
What I'm trying to argue for, is the concept of degrees of reality. I'm trying to show that certain kinds of intellectual or intelligible objects are real but not material. — Wayfarer
You see, I don't think modern philosophy, generally, has room for the notion of 'degrees of existence'. I think that we think that something is either real or it isn't - reality is a univocal term. So I think that's significant. — Wayfarer
I was harking back to your comment about the concept of 'reference frames' (I'm not a physicist, but have a rough idea) as being 'not real'. Because, you see, I am trying to show that proper concepts are real, and not simply because there's someone around to entertain them. — Wayfarer
I suggest that we already do accept degrees of reality in a loose way as suggested by various distinctions in language.
The difference is perhaps that you want to make such a distinction primary or foundational. — Yellow Horse
I think I do sometimes meet with the attitude that I think you have in mind, and I think of it as the collapse of objectivity into objects. — Yellow Horse
The phrase 'Everything is relative' is spoken emphatically by the very people for whom the atom or its elements are still the ultimate reality. Everything is relative, they say, but at the same time they declare as indubitable truth that the mind is nothing but a product of cerebral processes. This combination of gross objectivism and bottomless subjectivism represents a synthesis of logically irreconcilable, contradictory principles of thought, which is equally unfortunate from the point of view of philosophical consistency and from that ethical and cultural value. — Some Geezer
The case of mind is different; it seems to be an independent substance implanted within the soul and to be incapable of being destroyed. — Yellow Horse
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