I understand the concept of "7" denoting seven, but it is not itself a seven.
End of the test. you get 0/10. — Banno
The answer is that an event doesn’t occur into a vacuum , but into an exquisitely organized referential totality. That is precisely what an event is, a way that this totality of relevance changes itself moment to moment. So there is a tremendously intricate and intimate overall coherence from one event to the next. Each event is a subtle variation on an ongoing theme, and it’s very appearance shifts the sense of this theme without rending its pragmatic consistency. — Joshs
Another way to make this point, one which is phenomenological, but also resonates with William James's thought (see Taylor, 1996), is to assert the primacy of the personalistic perspective over the naturalistic perspective. By this I mean that our relating to the world, including when we do science, always takes place within a matrix whose fundamental structure is I-You-It (this is reflected in linguistic communication: I am speaking to You about It) (Patocka, 1998, pp. 9–10). The hard problem gives epistemological and ontological precedence to the impersonal, seeing it as the foundation, but this puts an excessive emphasis on the third-person in the primordial structure of I–You–It in human understanding. What this extreme emphasis fails to take into account is that the mind as a scientific object has to be constituted as such from the personalistic perspective in the empathic co-determination of self and other. — Joshs
We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about (Stroud 2000, 27). This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either (Putnam 1978, 1). — Joshs
There are five spoons on the table. How could any paradox, any alternate paraconsistent mathematics, make it the case that there are not five spoons on the table? — Banno
Presumably the spirit counts the spoons when no one is around in the quad. I hadn't fully understood that you were so close to Berkeley. — Banno
Even if you imagine an empty universe before there were any subjects to observe it, that empty universe, even if characterised by scientific and empirical rigour, is still a mental construction, to the extent that you reference it or contemplate it. — Wayfarer
According to scientific realism, an ideal scientific theory has the following features:
1. The claims the theory makes are either true or false, depending on whether the entities talked about by the theory exist and are correctly described by the theory. This is the semantic commitment of scientific realism.
2. The entities described by the scientific theory exist objectively and mind-independently. This is the metaphysical commitment of scientific realism.
3. There are reasons to believe some significant portion of what the theory says. This is the epistemological commitment.
It is 2 that I am calling into question. It puzzles me that you apparently cannot grasp that basic distinction. — Wayfarer
Do you deny that it seems obvious that there are temporally persistent objects? Is the door always where you expect it to be or somewhere else? Your front steps? Your driveway? Your car? — Janus
All that is objective, extended, active— that is to say, all
that is material — is regarded by materialism as affording
so solid a basis for its explanation, that a reduction of
everything to this can leave nothing to be desired
(especially if in ultimate analysis this reduction should
resolve itself into action and reaction). But we have
shown that all this is given indirectly and in the highest
degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively
present object, for it has passed through the machinery
and manufacture of the brain, and has thus come under
the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which
it is first presented to us as extended in space and
active in time. From such an indirectly given object,
materialism seeks to explain what is immediately given,
the idea (in which alone the object that materialism
starts with exists), and finally even the will from which all
those fundamental forces, that manifest themselves, under
the guidance of causes, and therefore according to law,
are in truth to be explained. — Schopenhauer, World as Idea 35
I do understand your perplexity about this point. — Wayfarer
As I said, we can imagine the universe with no humans in it - which was empirically the case until a couple of hundred thousand years ago. But that doesn't take into consideration the sense in which even such an 'empty universe' is also an intellectual construct. — Wayfarer
BUT, this is a severe digression within Banno's thread, so I will cease and desist. — Wayfarer
Do you deny that it seems obvious that there are temporally persistent objects? Is the door always where you expect it to be or somewhere else? Your front steps? Your driveway? Your car? — Janus
And if you don't reference it or contemplate it, then there's no subject of discussion. — Wayfarer
I'm not saying that, therefore, the table or the spoons cease to exist when not observed, but that whatever you say, believe, or think about what exists or doesn't exist, depends on a framework of judgements which is a product of the mind. — Wayfarer
Why wouldn't it 'drop out', like a boxed beetle? — Banno
At about age four or five a child stops having to count the dots and sees four. — Banno
I think we are in agreement, right up until:
And if you don't reference it or contemplate it, then there's no subject of discussion.
— Wayfarer
I might read this in either of two ways. Perhaps as the tautology that if we do not talk about it, then it is not the subject of discussion. With that I agree. Alternately, that if we do not talk about it, then it isn't there. With that, I disagree. — Banno
Traditionally, the discipline of Physics charts only the primary qualities of objects, events and processes i.e. their mathematical interrelations, where the relationship of their primary qualities to their secondary qualities (i.e. qualia) is ignored and undetermined. The reason why the secondary qualities are classically ignored by physics is as a consequence of traditional physics treating it's subject matter to be independent of any particular observer, which is itself due partly to convenience and simplification, and due partly as a consequence of the objective of physics to model the causal relationships that hold between action and consequence irrespective of the contextual nuances and discrepancies of any given observer.
Strictly speaking, the propositions of physics are senseless, like an unexecuted computer program, until as and when the propositions are used by an agent and thereby become grounded in the agent's perceptual apparatus in a bespoke fashion, at which point Locke's secondary qualities become temporarily welded to the physical concepts.
Classical physical concepts are therefore by design irreducible to mental concepts; something has been a central feature of physics rather than a bug, at least up until the discovery of special relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which show that even the Lockean primary qualities of objects are relative to perspective. — sime
At about age four or five a child stops having to count the dots and sees four.
— Banno
But that is due to the innate ability which is unique to human children. Some animals can recognise up to about 2-3, but I think the point stands. In any case it's a very simple illustration, humans can recognise all manner of complex symbolic relationships, something which to some extent is learned by experience, but unless the innate capability existed, then they would have no chance of learning it. — Wayfarer
there is something temporally persistent there which is reliably appearing as a door to both animals and humans. Sure animals don't conceive of it in human language, in English for example as a door; but, judging from their behavior, they certainly see it as a kind of affordance, as something like a "to be walked through". — Janus
Recognizing 4 dots as the number 4 is just pattern recognition , not a mathematical ability.
— Joshs
If that were so then the position of the dots would make a difference.
It doesn't. — Banno
What you see in a die is irrelevant. As are Husserl's armchair musings. — Banno
...these results do not confirm the existence of a dedicated neural system for subitizing that is not involved in counting. The previous hypothesis that sub- itizing and counting are two qualitatively different mechanisms based on two separate networks does not receive confirmation from the present study.
You’re going to have to refute them... — Joshs
Same holds for most of what philosophers like to call innate abilities. — Banno
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