Does the act of measurement create the state of the particle, or does it reveal a pre-existing but unknown state? I had the idea it was the latter. — Wayfarer
The term "create" seems to me to lead to confusion towards the thought of a creatio ex nihilo.
:up: Yes, I agree. I also never agree with materialism as it removes the observer -- the sentient being -- from the narrative.Isn't it because of the influence of materialism? That was the philosophical view which sought to understand the Universe as aggregations of physical particles. (As you probably know I'm generally critical of materialism, hence my OP The Mind-Created World.) — Wayfarer
the problem is the Kantian assumption that the world is "out there," as something we need to map "in here" in the first place. — Count Timothy von Icarus
In my view Wheeler and especially the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics are the pinnacle of (logical) positivism. Hence we have these models that puts the human observing something in the center of everything. Because ...it's us humans making the observations. — ssu
The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.
I've heard this said elsewhere but I don't think that's an accurate description. I take Kant to be pointing out that the mind is an active agent which dynamically constructs the experiential world through synthesis of perception, judgement and inference. It is not a blank slate, a tabula rasa, which passively receives impressions from an existing world. Kant describes the sense in which the mind creates the world (although creation might be a problematical term due to its historical association with divine creation - 'constructs' might be a better choice of terms.)
If the mind creates the world, did the Moon exist before minds? — Count Timothy von Icarus
*Nor for transcendental idealism....Whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.
Hence there is no need for me* to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject — a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object. — Wayfarer
If rationality doesn't exist in the world, then the entire scientific project and empiricism is doomed from the outset. — Count Timothy von Icarus
if rationality emerges from how our mental structures organize and interpret our sensory experiences, leading to consistent and coherent knowledge, then isn't rationality contingent? — Tom Storm
No, because it has to exist in the first place, in order for us to know anything — Wayfarer
. I see you are saying rationality exists independent of human perception. (A condition of experince but independent of experince. Kant) Can we say this? Could it not be the case that although reason allows us to do things, it's capacity to work is subject entirely to the human point of view. — Tom Storm
It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'.....In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts. — Bertrand Russell, The World of Universals
Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. — Edward Feser
In the Aristotelian scheme, nous is the basic understanding or awareness that allows human beings to think rationally. For Aristotle, this was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which other animals can do. For him then, discussion of nous is connected to discussion of how the human mind sets definitions in a consistent and communicable way, and whether people must be born with some innate potential to understand the same universal categories in the same logical ways. — Wikipedia
What would Joshs say about the status of reason. — Tom Storm
They are 'in the mind, but not of it' - that is, intelligible objects. — Wayfarer
there is no conceptual space in which there can be real abstractions. — Wayfarer
I would guess he would say it's contingent, as postmodernism generally does. — Wayfarer
What would Joshs say about the status of reason.
— Tom Storm
I would guess he would say it's contingent, as postmodernism generally does — Wayfarer
empirical substrate — Joshs
The power of reason that can produce both the empty universality of mathematical objects and the meaningful sense of real objects is in its anticipative construing of never before seen events in terms of likeness and difference with respect to previous experience, rather than in some ready-made internal capacity to apprehend ready-made external forms. — Joshs
In other words, number, and the pure geometric forms which depend on it, is universal because it is not tied to anything but itself. It is not a special universal sense but the absence of meaningful sense, thanks to the peculiar intentional relationship to things that creates it. — Joshs
Very briefly, it revolves around the metaphysical assertion that Ideas (whether construed as forms, principles or universals) are only graspable by a rational mind (nous) but they are not produced by the mind. They are 'in the mind, but not of it' - that is, intelligible objects. — Wayfarer
human reason is substantially a function of pattern recognition occurring in our brains, and that notions like forms and universals reflect a neurologically naive attempt at making sense of the results of such pattern recognition occurring in our brains. — wonderer1
I think a more realistic way of looking at it is that human reason is substantially a function of pattern recognition occurring in our brains, and that notions like forms and universals reflect a neurologically naive attempt at making sense of the results of such pattern recognition. — wonderer1
The problem there is that we wouldn’t recognise patterns, let alone have neuroscience, or any science, were it not for the ability to abstract, compare, contrast, equate, and so on. — Wayfarer
Rationality doesn't exist in the world tout courte. It is derived from the consistency of the relationships between ideas and experiences. (Even ChatGPT agrees!)
Numbers aren’t actually ‘objects’ in any sense other than ‘the object of thought’. — Wayfarer
….the entire scientific project and empiricism is doomed from the outset. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.