Another word for understanding is seeing. See? — TheMadFool
The point then is simple: no idea of God one could imagine/conceive of is "not even wrong" (Wolfgang Pauli) No such thing is even a mistake which we could correct to arrive at the truth, the right idea (of God). Apophatic! — TheMadFool
It's a squabble although I think to call it 'intellectual' is flattering it. — Wayfarer
I think it's incorrect to say the noumenal realm - numbers and universals - exists, but it is nevertheless real. — Wayfarer
Universals, and the like, do not exist, but are real as the constituents of rational thought — Wayfarer
By immanent I just mean that we have every reason to think there is real difference in the world, real patterns or repetitions, if you like, that would explain our perception of a world teeming with different species. landforms, and elements. — Janus
So I don't say there are real numbers; immaterial platonic objects or ideas, I say that there is real number, shown to us in the diversity of the world of similarities and differences that we perceive. — Janus
Immanent refer to that which is possible to experience, guaranteeing distinction from the transcendent. As such “immanent existence” refers to a thing, but does not describe the domain in which it is found. — Mww
I think there may be a problem with your characterizations, because some Platonic immaterial objects are real because they can be empirically represented, but some Platonic immaterial objects are real insofar as we are affected by them. Then it must be the case that empirical diversity and quantitative relations are not sufficient in themselves or describing them. — Mww
but some Platonic immaterial objects are real insofar as we are affected by them. — Mww
We are discussing number which can be understood as being necessarily instantiated in diversity. If you are thinking about the so-called platonic forms of objects, like for example the form of the horse; we can be affected by the empirical form of a horse or the imagined form of a horse. When it comes to a number, say five, we can be affected by the empirical form of five, five apples for example, or we can be affected by thinking about five. When it comes to the form of the good, we can be affected by an empirical form of the good, a good action for example, or we can be affected by thinking about the good. There are diverse instances of horses, instantiation of five and examples of the good, so I'm not seeing the difference you are attempting to refer to? — Janus
For example, if you have a thousand dollars in your bank account, and you need twelve hundred for your rent payment tomorrow, you will be moved toward getting another two hundred into your account. These numbers have causal power over your material body. — Metaphysician Undercover
In terms theologian Bernard Lonergan develops in his major work Insight, Krauss is caught in a notion of reality as "already-out-there-now," a reality conditioned by space and time. Lonergan refers to this conception of reality as based on an "animal" knowing, on extroverted biologically dominated consciousness. He distinguishes it from a fully human knowing based on intelligence and reason, arguing that many philosophical difficulties arise because of a failure to distinguish between these two forms of knowing. ...
It goes without saying that you cannot prove the existence of God to a materialist without first converting the materialist away from materialism. ...If we think of the real as an "already-out-there-now" real of extroverted consciousness, then God is not real. God becomes just a figment of the imagination, a fairy at the bottom of the garden, an invisible friend. However, if the real is constituted by intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation, then reality suddenly becomes much richer, and the God-question takes on a different hue.
But it is not just the God-question that we can now begin to address more coherently. There are a whole range of other realities whose reality we can now affirm: interest rates, mortgages, contracts, vows, national constitutions, penal codes and so on. Where do interest rates "exist"? Not in banks, or financial institutions. Are they real when we cannot touch them or see them? We all spend so much time worrying about them - are we worrying about nothing? In fact, I'm sure we all worry much more about interest rates than about the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson! Similarly, a contract is not just the piece of paper, but the meaning the paper embodies; likewise a national constitution or a penal code.
Once we break the stranglehold on our thinking by our animal extroversion, we can affirm the reality of our whole world of human meanings and values, of institutions, nations, finance and law, of human relationships and so on, without the necessity of seeing them as "just" something else lower down the chain of being yet to be determined. — Neil Ormerod, The Metaphysical Muddle of Lawrence Krauss
Yes, but does an apophatic conception of God entail any kind of reality or existence at all? Because if not, then God is simply the imagination of something so great that we cannot imagine it. We don't imagine the unimaginable (which would be a contradiction), we imagine that there is an unimaginable. What kind of reality or existence can we imagine the unimaginable to have? — Janus
The problem I see with saying that God is not anything you can think of, is that it follows that God is therefore...not anything. — Janus
How? A well-crafted argument would go a long way towards making your case. Remember there are two points to consider: relative limit (what we can say/think) and absolute limit (what can be said/thought).
We can think that there's an x that we can't think of but that doesn't mean we can think of x. — TheMadFool
Hey it's not a grad school symposium, it's a public internet forum, and, I think, one of the better ones of its kind. I often don't agree with what others say, but I generally don't have too much trouble understanding them. — Wayfarer
Furthermore in this Internet age, it is a fact of life that one can peruse, graze, click through, all kinds of content, extracts, bits of books, video media, interviews, and try and extract juicy morsels from them. — Wayfarer
We're trying to make sense of philosophical ideas - well, I am, anyway - in such a way that they actually mean something in my non-academic and certainly-less-than-idealised existence. — Wayfarer
If we think of God in apophatic terms as being nothing we can think of, then it follows that we cannot think of God even as being, since being is something we can think of. The same goes for the idea that God does not exist, but is real; that claim, when I think about it, makes no sense. What is the sense in saying that something is real and yet non-existent? — Janus
I'm not convinced that the idea of an immaterial being seems outlandish at all to many or most of those who haven't thought about it much (which is not say I think it necessarily should seem outlandish to have thought about it a lot)..
Naively, many of us seem to imagine ourselves as immaterial beings who "have" or "inhabit" the body.
— Janus
The immaterial, speculatively is perfectly normal of course but once you try to prove it, you begin to realize how crazy the idea is. — TheMadFool
To imagine the immaterial is nearly as nonsensical (to you) as to conceive of the inconceivable and I feel the two are related, like Cantor's infinities, one bigger than the other. — TheMadFool
Do you "feel" that the "two are related" or think it? :wink: The difference with Cantor's idea that infinities can be larger or smaller is this can be shown logically, so I don't think the analogy is really appropriate — Janus
There are diverse instances of horses, instantiation of five and examples of the good, so I'm not seeing the difference you are attempting to refer to? — Janus
I prefer the sense in which Kant and Husserl characterise the transcendent as 'that which constitutes experience but is not itself given in experience.' — Wayfarer
but some Platonic immaterial objects are real insofar as we are affected by them.
— Mww
This is an important point, as it implies that the immaterial has causal power over us — Metaphysician Undercover
I would never be so presumptuous as to impinge on your preferences, but I wonder if you might want to re-think that. Or, to be fair, show me why I should. — Mww
Well, if you fail to see the connection it isn't my fault is it? — TheMadFool
I have to keep this short, in that this is a thread concerned with Greek philosophy, of which I am rather less than proficient. When I say we are affected by immaterial objects, I mean to indicate, on the one hand rationally by feelings, and on the other epistemically by the categories. Of the former we are immediately conscious, of the latter we are not. The former is given, the latter must be synthetically derived. — Mww
You hinted at it when you said “we are discussing number”, but then you went on to give an example with A number. Exhibition of an empirical example cannot ground the validity of immaterial objects, re: it doesn’t mean anything to discuss number by invoking five, because any congruent representation would be sufficient, and any example of anything is always reducible to that which it is an example of. — Mww
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