It's so much easier to critique stuff you haven't understood. — Banno

A fresh, unprejudiced perspective is supposed to be healthy, right? :grin:

I mean if you can incorporate this topic to Susan's Haack's "Innocent Realism", then the thread can stay of topic as it concerns the nature of reality and how it sometimes appears in parts. Thus a story may contain parts of it that are true - events that actually happened in the world, with events that did not happen, which would make it fictitious. And there may be exaggerations and so on.

I doubt that in such short periods of time, which for our history as a species is nothing, would show noticeable changes in gravity or any other fundamental force of nature. At least I haven't seen any evidence for it.

As for the other options, maybe. But given the fact that we can distort stories quite severely in a day, myths going back thousands of years are prone to be extremely exaggerated. I'm not saying that they couldn't contain some elements of truth in it, but the further back you go, the harder it is to believe in aspects of stories which by today's would be impossible.

So again, if you can keep the topic within a metaphysical framework, that is, covering one of the many aspects of metaphysics, then this can be discussed. But if that's not possible given what you want to expand on, then going to another thread would be better.

I was reading some of your replies, quite interesting. You work in/with quantum physics?

If you go through some of Russell's works such as The Analysis of Matter or An Outline of Philosophy, I think you could find some connections to metaphysics with sound scientific basis.

I mean if you can incorporate this topic to Susan's Haack's "Innocent Realism", then the thread can stay of topic as it concerns the nature of reality and how it sometimes appears in parts. — Manuel

Precisely. The underlying assumption that leads to us thinking that stories of days past are myths i.e. are hyperbole/meiosis is that how it's now is how it was in in re factors relevant to actions/events that we suspect are exaggerations/understatements. On the face of it, this assumption might seem rather benign with respect to truth in that it doesn't distort veritas but then one only needs to compare the present (2021) with the past (say 3000 BC) to realize how wrong it is to think/assume that nothing relevant to the argument that stories/tales from long ago are simply myths can change.

Take the mutli-purpose, now ubiquitous cell phone complete with all the support infrastructure it needs, go back in time to 3000 BC [Pharoanic Egypt]. Wouldn't you, who did that, become a legendary sorceror, a hero even if you play your cards right? Your story, if it survives the test of time, would be treated as a myth in 2021 but you of all know it's the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In short, to dismiss tales/stories from the ancient era as nothing but myths [veridically suspect] amounts to ignoring some possibilities, like the cell phone scenario above, that might very well have been true. I guess at some point those who study/read stories/tales of yore simply can't deal with the multitude of extremely complex possible scenarios that could be true and take the easy way out - just treat these narratives as myths, problem solved! Thus, in my humble opinion, we would be doing ourselves a great favor by reminding ourselves that the word "myth" is a synonym for "it was just too complex".

It must be mentioned that the above cell phone scenario is meant to just give you an idea of how what reality means can undergo radical modification depending on technology demonstration across different ages/time periods with the aid of time travel machines

There's another, far more interesting way with which myths can be...er...explained. Change in metaphysics itself i.e. change in fundamental substances, and the laws of nature (have I left anything out?) could greatly alter the landscape of the possible, impossible, probable, and improbable.

I mentioned that if gravity were weaker, superhuman feats would be child's play and if one factors in differences in muscle mass between individuals, a Hercules ("myth") is plausible.

How do myths, viewed with an open mind as I did above, matter to metaphysics?

There's no good reason at all to think the metaphysics of the past is identical to the metaphysics of the present or that the metaphysics of the present will remain constant as we enter a future age. After all, what we think are myths could have been, under my interpretation, facts; it's just that our present metaphysics doesn't support the storie/tales of our distant ancestors but the metaphysics back then might have.

So, for instance, consider the matter of human souls. Souls might've been real and there might've been plenty of evidence for them thousands of years ago. Over millennia, the metaphysics might've altered in such a way that souls became nonviable entities and disappeared [species have gone extinct when the environment transformed and became hostile to them (fossils)]. Thus, what was true in the past is false in the present.

As you will have realized by now, my objective is to raise doubts about the well-hidden assumption that the metaphysics of the world doesn't change. If the laws of nature, the fundamental substances, the fabric of reality can alter, and there seems to be no good reason why not, we have to radically change our approach to metaphysics, this change in perspective can be summed up as anything's possible! or if you prefer the negative formulation, nothing's impossible!.

If you go through some of Russell's works such as The Analysis of Matter or An Outline of Philosophy, I think you could find some connections to metaphysics with sound scientific basis. — Manuel

I'll grab those, thanks :) In the meantime, anything in particular you had in mind (while I'm being a tad kinder to metaphysics than usual)?

In general that the "new physics", as it was when Russell wrote about these topics, renders the ideas of objects as not being tenable. He thought we should think of the world as being composed of "events". This "new physics" was also the final nail in the coffin of our idea of impenetrable matter, and "has become as ghostly as anything in a spiritualist séance."

This combined with his view on how little we know about psychology prompts him to say that we don't know if "the physical world is, or is not, different in intrinsic character from the world of mind".

That's a general outline. I assume that some of what he says is outdated, but he did interesting work.

Thus, in my humble opinion, we would be doing ourselves a great favor by reminding ourselves that the word "myth" is a synonym for "it was just too complex". — TheMadFool

I mean, many myths are about how the world was made by Gods. Whether Amaterasu in Japan or Brahma in India, so sure these are complex. But these contain little factual truth.

On the other hand, Haack mentions the Legend of King Arthur. Some parts of that are based in history others not. But I tend to be of the mind that everything is quite complex. And absolutely taking cell phones back to the past would've been akin to magic or miracle.

Over millennia, the metaphysics might've altered in such a way that souls became nonviable entities and disappeared [species have gone extinct when the environment transformed and became hostile to them (fossils)]. Thus, what was true in the past is false in the present. — TheMadFool

I'd only modify that but saying souls were approximations of what they thought was true. Now we much more accurate approximations, but we can translate the word "soul" in Plato or Descartes intelligibly in many instances.

As you will have realized by now, my objective is to raise doubts about the well-hidden assumption that the metaphysics of the world doesn't change. — TheMadFool

Clearly, it must if when we are trying to articulate metaphysics, we use the concepts and ideas of our time. And these must change, if our knowledge has changed. So it's likely that metaphysics is constantly changing itself. So we must rediscover or restate what it is, every so often. Peter Strawson argued for something like this in Individuals.

In general that the "new physics", as it was when Russell wrote about these topics, renders the ideas of objects as not being tenable. He thought we should think of the world as being composed of "events". — Manuel

Thanks Manuel. I am sympathetic to the above. Less so to:

This "new physics" was also the final nail in the coffin of our idea of impenetrable matter, and "has become as ghostly as anything in a spiritualist séance." — Manuel

Scientific progress rarely throws ideas in the bin. Science is self-correcting, which means that old ideas about matter (among other things) are iteratively adjusted on the basis of new findings. Traditional ideas of matter are still accounted for, however they are not fundamental. The laws of physics explain why your tabletop is hard, rigid, doesn't change its shape, doesn't allow your cup to pass through it. These are old ideas of matter, but while the theories about them change, our predicted everyday experiences don't.

I see a lot of discussion on here about the nature of the material world in modern physics. Traditional ideas had to be reworked here and the notion of the material world doesn't really help anymore. The rigidity of your tabletop is largely due to the property of electric charge: that's the important bit for discussing the material properties of your table. But in terms of celestial dynamics, charge isn't very important at all, rather mass is what's paramount. While most particles that have mass have charge, not all do (e.g. neutrinos), and on a more elementary level, other properties are far more important than mass.

For this reason, physicists tend to talk about the physical world rather than the material world. All of these headscratchers disappear when one moves from categories refined for describing everyday experience to categories refined for describing the universe generally at any scale.

In this sense, the notion of the material *world* (but not materials) has been dropped, but the concepts that notion is associated with have not. The everyday usefulness of the material world would be ambiguous to a modern physicist: the first thing they'd have to ask is what you mean? Are you asking about the properties of condensed matter, or the properties of the cosmos, or the properties of particles, if so all particles or just massive ones, or just charged ones? Do you care about the structure of atomic nuclei? The physical world is unambiguous: this covers all particles in the standard model, all universal constants, and spacetime, i.e. all the objects and parameters of quantum mechanics and general relativity.

This combined with his view on how little we know about psychology prompts him to say that we don't know if "the physical world is, or is not, different in intrinsic character from the world of mind". — Manuel

I'd have to read it, but this stinks of bias. I've never seen a logical argument for the primacy of mental content from physical considerations, and strikes me as driven by a preference for, rather than an understanding of, what the universe is fundamentally like. From what I do know of Russell, that seems unlikely.

Thanks again for the synopsis. My reading list is large!

Sure. I am not sure that I phrased the last part quite well. Russell was not giving primacy to the mind, I think he was highlighting our general ignorance of it. This is were he developed his idea of "neutral monism", which states that the world is neither mental nor physical as we understand these terms.

Thanks for your reply, it was quite comprehensive. :up:

Ah yeah tbf that is consistent with your previous post too, I just didn't really nail my objection well. Perhaps the context of Russell's idea is dualism as much as physicalism, which would make some sense of introducing the mental world even if to refute it. The habit of dualism is more ingrained in philosophy. There's obviously interesting theories about the role of mind in measurement in some interpretations of quantum mechanics, but the either/or/neither is uncommon in physics at least.

Anyway, the stuff about events sounds very in line with my own way of thinking. I wrote (and will shortly update) a trilogy of threads on determinism and quantum mechanics with some counterfactual examples that demonstrated my view to some extent: that events, particularly creation and annihilation events, are what matters; classical ideas of trajectories are underdefined for good reasons. I will fast track some Russell reading asap!

Ah cool, keep me updated on that, it will be interesting to read.