If you fail to explain the connection you think you see. or address the difference I noted, in a convincing way, it isn't my fault is it?
Edit: I apologize, I misread you. I thought you were saying something else: and I think see what you were getting at now — Janus
Then the question becomes "Is God" and the answer is "No" or "God is...not". Or if you are a fan of dialetheism, the answers to the question would be "Neither yes nor no" and/or "both yes and no", and then " Both "Neither yes nor no" and "Both yes and no" and neither ""Neither yes nor no" nor "Both yes and no"". And then...see where this is going? Where does this leave us...and God?
Is Apo phat or phin or in crisis? — Janus
Why so prejudiced against dogs? — Enrique
rationality is without a doubt material — Enrique
More to the point, it's the problem of objectification which is the major issue. Through the sensory abilities, we know about things that exist as objects for us. And that 'objective field' includes - well, pretty well everything that we can conceive of, from the sub-atomic to the galactic. If it's not part of that field, then it must, the reasoning goes, be 'in here' - an artefact of thought.
As if the two domains are totally separable. — Wayfarer
There really is no problem with the apophatic technique if you will allow me to call it such. Nagarjuna's tetralemma comes to mind. — TheMadFool
There can be nothing wrong with it because there is nothing to it. QED — Janus
Humans are capable of thinking and imagining in extremely versatile ways, especially as it relates to generalized concepts (the universals you guys are talking about), but commonly refuse to or shrink away from doing so. I think this constant, arbitrary stereotyping of conceptual categories shows that rationality is without a doubt material, rooted in the body.
If the so-called immaterial is to be understood, it must be via reconfiguring physical knowledge to account for its material and physiological foundations in novel ways. — Enrique
I think it follows that if God is not anything then God is nothing, to put it slightly differently if God is not any thing then God is no thing. Of course that just means God is not a thing, so then the thing is, what is a thing? But then maybe God is a thing; maybe God is a feeling. If you have a feeling, is that, or is that not, a thing? You know the colloquialism as expressed in examples like "Wearing red, is that a thing?". Meaning is given by use, right? — Janus
Generally being affected by feelings is considered as being irrationally affected. — Janus
I understand categories as being abstracted from perceived differences of material and form, so I think of them rather as material than immaterial. — Janus
Are you saying that one example of say five objects cannot ground our understanding of number? — Janus
So all the abstract attributes of the number six can be perceptually shown. — Janus
Hopefully I'm not misunderstanding you and addressing something you weren't talking about. — Janus
The problem is, that when we follow "the material" all the way down, to its most fundamental constituents, as we are prone toward doing in scientific reductionist practices, we find that what is there, what supports the material world is the immaterial. — Metaphysician Undercover
but it has been demonstrated that consciousness of anything is firmly attached to brain structure — Enrique
As for meaning is use, I haven't really grasped what it is Wittgenstein wanted to convey. — TheMadFool
Such may be common practice, yes, and may be true under the auspices of certain cognitive theories. It’s all a matter of answering the age-old question......where to begin with metaphysical inquiries: do we begin with that which is given to us, or do we begin with that which is in us, that it is given to. — Mww
So saying, there is nothing contained in the mere perception of six objects, that some relation exists between them. There must be a relation between the objects and us, but when we perform operations on numbers, it is the relation between them alone that makes possible the operations we perform. — Mww
There is nothing whatsoever given from, e.g., 29, alone, that says it is a prime number. That is it a prime, can only arise from some relation it must have. That it must have that relation comes from us, and what that relation is, can THEN be perceptually shown. — Mww
In the case of the tree trunk, the distinction between the ideal and the real is easily inspectable with vision, while in the case of subatomic matter, its structure morphs at a rapid rate and in such complex orientation that we are mostly reliant on an indirect process of manipulating ideal concepts for any empirical comprehension we can achieve (though techniques such as electron microscopy give us some direct insight). But subatomic matter is no less material than a tree trunk, we simply don't have sense-perceptual insight at the subatomic scale to make this obvious. — Enrique
A fairly simple idea: how people use words shows their meanings. — Janus
You've lost me. I have no idea what it could mean for words to "have essences".
"Water" doesn't have one essential meaning , but various associated meanings according to what people use the word for.
Consider these:
" I had water on the knee" referring to some fluid not H2O
" I need to get the dirty water off my chest" referring to ? Mucous? A bad feeling?
Of course these usages are related to the usage of 'water' to refer to H2O. That's why Wittgenstein uses the notion of family resemblances. — Janus
On the contrary, consciousness determines 'brain structure', not vice versa. For instance, in patients who suffer brain trauma, the brain is reorganised in such a way as to compensate and re-organise its activities to compensate for the trauma (this is one of the discoveries of neuroplasticity).
Besides, on an abstract and general level, it can be shown that symbolic forms and logical relationships are not dependent on any particular material configuration, because they can be realised in many different material and symbolic forms. The meaning of a sentence can be preserved exactly across different languages and different media, so how could the meaning be determined by the material form? — Wayfarer
I still think W's notion of family resemblances is more accurate to the facts of usage than the ancient idea of essences. But each to their own I guess. — Janus
Human meaning in all cases, whatever the medium, reduces to brain structure. — Enrique
Meaning is essentially determined by interpretation, and as such is subjected to massive amounts of illusoriness — Enrique
Or the physical universe might somehow encode information about everything that has ever happened which a human brain can sometimes inexplicitly access ( if everything is at the quantum level "entangled" for example). — Janus
I regard an ontological proposition that the immaterial is a fundamentally distinct substance from physical matter as fallacy.
If what has traditionally been referred to as immaterial is a distinct substance in some sense, it at least has to have causal principles in common with conventional matter by virtue of interaction, and the entire range of phenomena becomes part of one theoretical edifice modeling a single reality, which will presumably be a revised physical reality of matter in various forms. — Enrique
How can symbolic code be 'represented' by neural events? Don't you think there's a possibility you're confusing the two levels, neurophysiological and semantic? The basis of meaning is the perception of meanings which remain stable between different people and cultures. Do you think that's reducible to neurophysiology? — Wayfarer
There is no reality to where the electron, as a material entity, a particle, is
The real world is completely different from how it appears to our senses, and the intellect demonstrates to us that the intelligible forms are far more reliable in giving us the real world, then are the senses. — Metaphysician Undercover
Therefore the dream of "a single reality" where everything behaves according to a single, consistent and coherent, set of causal principles, because it is composed of a single substance, is just that, a dream. — Metaphysician Undercover
If there is no reality about what the electron is and quantum physics is purely a functional method utilized by technological practice, how can you say that the intelligible form of the phenomenon is more real than the sensible? — Enrique
When the past and future interact they are causally unified such that certain events could happen and alternate events couldn't. — Enrique
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