reality not in general a balance of logos and flux — apokrisis

Flux contains the paradoxes. The Logos is not within it, the Logos is about the paradoxes flux brings.

balancing of stability and plasticity? — apokrisis

Yes he got it. Nothing was dropped out of the vocabulary. The river and the not-river both are, or neither are.

Antinatalists don't claim their lives are horrible, and you've got to stop insinuating there's some personal judgment going on. It's not relevant to me whether someone claims they have a good life individually - the argument is about lives to come. — AmadeusD

But the argument is that the lives to come will be full of suffering, and the evidence that the lives to come will be full of suffering is gleaned from those living now, who are suffering. So the judgment: "my life and those of others, are full of suffering," IS relevant. The argument is made FOR lives to come (or for NO lives to come more precisely), but the personal experience of lives now is one of the premises of the argument.

If you suffer too much, whether you're preoccupied with it isn't relevant. Those who aren't have the 'polly anna syndrome' and those who are are simply in touch with reality (this being a take - not my position on every human's psyche lol) — AmadeusD

Seems like you are basically saying either you know your life is full of suffering, or you are living in LaLa land. I don't know why we would speak so generally about billions of lives in such simplistic terms, especially to support a logic that ends procreation as if it was just some other behavior.

Look, I agree that suffering is everywhere that there is a living conscious being. I disagree the suffering is all of the time for every living being. And I think the non-suffering is well worth the suffering, for the vast majority of living beings. So I would need to be tortured and watch my family tortured for a few days at least before I would throw away all of human history and its future. I know there are those who have been tortured for years. I know for many, anxiety and depression are worse than physical pain - mental illness may be the deepest and sharpest of all suffering there is (and it can be accompanied by physical pain and physical sickness).

But still, for most, much of the time, life is worth it. It's not LaLa land to take your suffering medicine like a badge of honor and greet each new day, each new birth, as something better, again, and again and again.

Just using your words.

“build a social system that is on average fair and just?”
— apokrisis

Three things: fair/just, unfair/unjust, and on average.

Without any one of these, all three drop out. That’s what average is built of, and what the extremes build.

The resolution is not a new unity that dissolves the others. Its paradox, that is the impossible that is actual.

Heraclitus’ Logos did not resolve the paradoxes; it simply related them to each other. Identity, truth, the one/many, motion/stillness - these paradoxes relate to each other as spoken in a Logos. The logos can’t resolve the paradoxes (nor would he seek to resolve them.) “It rests with change” mean what it means without redefining “rest” or “change” - the opposites remain. The rest comes after change AND the change comes after rest (unchanging stillness). If we resolve this, we lose both and have said nothing, provided nothing for the Logos to speak of.

Yeah, nah. — apokrisis

Too extreme?

a discussion of moral extremes — apokrisis

Then what are we in the middle of? How is it a “middle”? Between extremes?

towards the balancing middle — apokrisis

Middle? Middle of what?

You can’t say “middle” anymore without saying more than the middle, and you wouldn’t say “mid” if not in between two others. Three things where there is a middle. You need them all to have one or the vocabulary you are using has no sense.

You can live in the middle, and never attend the extremes, but without the extremes you can’t call it a “middle”.

If evil drops out, so does the good.

baseline of a middling balance is what is "good". — apokrisis

How can you say “middling” if you place something at the far ends of the middle (where good is not evil and evil is not good), in the middle? The nuanced middle is not the same as either extreme at the ends; it’s a third thing of them both (paradox).

If good versus evil become good in the resolved middle, then what happened to evil? Why isn’t the middle just as evil as it is good? In which case good and evil have no meaning and there never was a paradox to resolve?

We don’t resolve paradoxes. If we could, they wouldn’t arise in the first place.

The mature world is no longer Good vs Evil, but a nuanced environment that can be managed by rational actors into a worldview where we can look forward to waking up tomorrow in a familiar place with new challenges to manage.
— Gnomon

Yep. — apokrisis

I agree too. But would you also agree with what follows:

That leaves three things - the good, the evil, and the nuance in between.

To have mature, reasoned nuance, and create a familiar, balanced starting point to make the simplicities and complexities out of the past and the future, even if nothing in the nuanced middle demonstrates anything that is absolute, we have to know good in itself (as best we can), evil in itself (as best we can), in order to claim some character to the nuance. The nuance can’t now be absent the good and the bad.

We still have to define or assume the form of the “good” and “evil” to fill the form of the “nuanced” to be a mix (a third thing). So there are three parts to this explanation of how to live.

What I am trying to say is that. if we live in a world of nuance, we don’t just live in a world of nuance; a world of nuance can only be so nuanced with it’s good and bad, and so these two are NOT nuanced but absolute.

And we can replace “good” and “evil” with “reality” and “appearance” (not that reality is good and appearance is evil, but utterly displacing “good” and “evil” such that reality is neither good nor evil, and appearance is neither good nor evil).

So we can say:
if we live in a world of nuance, we don’t only live with nuance; a world of nuance can only be so nuanced with its reality and appearance.

Always needing logic to make these simplicities and complexities unified in the nuance.

We can’t have the nuance without the absolute. Just as we can’t have the absolute because of all the nuance.

To have either nuance, or absolutes, we have both.

Both is a third thing. This third thing is a paradox.

So is the world fair and just? We have to find that in some senses the world is fair and just, and in other senss it is not, and we have to find what “fair” means and what “just” means (which I don’t address here in the hopes of keeping up with the conversation).

The world is fair and just if you detach everything into individuals, and then reattach them to the whole again (detach to examine and reattach to let them be them). This is a physicalist, scientific, currently predominant worldview - it is just for steel to cut flesh, for the moon to orbit the earth, as it is for the electron to orbit the proton; all is fair and just, following along as if in perfect willingness to follow every law to the letter. You cannot detach any one thing from the law. Motion and its effects can never, so will never, be denied, for any motion, against any motion, all is unfolding as it must, or all is behaving justly as each is necessarily treated fairly.

But the world is NOT fair and just if you focus on what is “fairness” and “what is justice” first. Now we set impossible (absolute) standards first and value “this one is good” and “that one is not” - and with reason and conceptualized versions of “fair” and “just” in hand, we secondly see how our reasons apply to the world of acts and mixed nuances of moving things. If we impose judgement and value on the things, the world is clearly full of injustice and unfairness. Our idealizations of “good” and “bad” are used to make our ideals of “fair” and “just”, and only now (secondly) can we see the INjustice of a particular act, or its UNfairness.

If we try to take the world first, physicalism says yes, all is just as it must be for all the same. Similar to fair, justice.

If we take the fair and the just first, this conceptualism (idealism) says no, NOT all is just, and for some, unfair portions of this injustice are born.

AND, to have this second view (where one can see the necessities of the world as unjust), one must have the three things in hand, these being absolute good, absolute bad and nuance.

In other words, we can’t even get to the question “Is the world fair and just” without there being fairness, justice, unfairness, injustice, the world, and the judge (agent), or the particular act in the world.

It’s all there in the nuances.

Is the real world fair and just?
— Gnomon
Yes. Humans, however, are too often not "fair and just". — 180 Proof

In a way, that reflects what I was saying. In a physicalist sense, yes, the world is fair and just. (In this sense you don’t really need the words fair and just anymore.)

But humans, we construct good and bad, fair and unfair, just and unjust, and act back in the same world that was otherwise beyond these constructions, and so we now add to the mix unfairness in the world, injustice in the world, goodness in the world, justice in the world, etc.

Post deleted.

I think in many ways a philosopher is somewhat of a mystic, wouldn't you say?
— Outlander

simplistically, they seem the opposite ends of a telescope or like complementary photo negatives of one another.
— 180 Proof

I do agree with both of you — ENOAH

I look at it like this. There is one subject. One object of experience.

The philosopher takes this subject, and with reason, cuts it apart to understand it.
The religious person takes this same subject, and, without understanding it, calls it God in the hope of becoming part of the subject.

The mystic, sees the subject, and leaves it be, so that there is only the subject, and not the self facing it, and that’s how the subject is experienced (not known or understood).

So the philosopher and the religious overlap in that they remain apart from the subject.
The mystic and the philosopher overlap, in that the subject can be so empty of personhood, the honest philosopher will doubt all metaphysics and language about the subject (the human understanding), and both the mystic and the philosopher might say they know nothing at all.
The religious person and the mystic overlap, in the joy that is the subject, the experience of the subject.

The scientist, like the philosopher, uses reason to break the subject apart, but then the scientist takes one part of the subject (say, the physical), and calls that part the whole subject. Like biology does not sit in physics, or physics is not “being” physics.

So the religious approach is the only that truly preserves the person, and the mystic approach is the only that truly preserves the subject.

But it’s all one conversation, just that the mystic can’t use words or even needs to speak. The mystical experience is truly singular, like the object of scientific inquiry is particular. But the mystical experience is the singular experience of “all” or “one” or “nothing” or “ing-ing” or “the infinite” and the scientific particular is as demonstration of the the universal, the laws of physics, the certain mathematical truth.

PS. I should add that the artist also deals in the one subject, but the artist takes from the philosophical, the religious and the mystical as he or she sees fit, and yields crap, or a reflection of wisdom and beauty.

It is only upon re-entry into the constructed atmosphere that variations start to project. — ENOAH

That is both spot on to me, and could easily make no sense to somebody. Re-entry from a mystical practice. In fleeting moments or longer breaths. I like it.

And if that atmosphere is constructed with a man on a cross and a dove, the one re-entering might fall back into the Catholic, whereas if that atmosphere is a Chinese monastery, one falls back into that, and we all fall back into hunger, sleep…

That’s the thing about the mystical, it doesn’t exclude anything. Or at the same time, it excludes everything besides it (and it may just as well be God). It begins when all is let go of completely, and at that exact same moment all fills up and carries away completely. It is paradox, so it is both impossible to say, and impossible to be, but it IS, sometimes, for fleeting seconds, if lucky, or blessed, if you will.

In Catholic terms, it is God not conceived as Father, or Son. Maybe the Holy Spirit, but really enough is said when the Catholic mystic conceives of God as God. The One. Like Being itself unified as one being. The not-Me (this is where God remains personal, though not “my” self.) Consciousness. It alone. Where “there-ing” is “here-ing” and “I-ing” is not. God overlaps precisely with those fleeting moments where the mystic would say the word “all” or “one” or even “nothing”; there can still be mystical behavior, without rejecting or refuting anything Catholic.

I’m no mystic. And I’m no saint. And I ain’t no philosopher, but…now I forget what I was trying to say.

I think that today genuine mysticism is more difficult than in the past, because it cannot escape the challenges coming from radical criticism — Angelo Cannata

I do see what you are saying, but I think I disagree with that. Criticism has become popular, but is not new. The mystic doesn’t make less sense today, when to simple logic, they never made any sense ever.

And in some ways, mysticism actually makes more sense now, with the total deconstruction of the “self” being a big part of philosophy of mind, and with “illusion” being the substance of any identity.

And the religion that attaches to mysticism, it seems to me, is utterly non-sectarian. An orthodox Catholic mystic might say the same thing about the mystical as a non-theistic Taoist. The differences between the churches are somewhat cleared away from a mystical point of view (which is why various churches are too skeptical to embrace it, along with the fear people will be led to confusions that obviate the need for a personal God, which is the opposite of what religion is supposed to foster.)

- People taking one aspect of another person, one impression even, and judging the whole person and their whole life based on that, and judging them to be a bad person, or a loser, or whatever.

It’s just annoyingly boring. And the comments are almost always unoriginal, stereotypical, shallow and a waste of everyone’s time.

If a guy voted for Trump, you still need to know more before you can hate them. Same for guy who voted for Biden. Sorry folks, we all need to give each other way more credit than one issue, or even 10 issues. It’s true. No two facists or communists are the same.

- And upgrades to apps that just make them more cumbersome and stupid. Fixing what ain’t broken (or its cousin, upgrades to software.). Annoys the s out of me. Just leave some shit alone for a few years once in a while.

we can — Janus

We certainly can. But too few of us do.

Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. 2000 year old quotes.

I wouldn't call this optimism. :wink: — Tom Storm

Valid observation. I’m actually optimistic. Just not in our ability to truly care for one another on any kind of scale larger than the people we happen to like in our living rooms and backyards.

There is no mental anything at the physics level. I'm talking about territory here, not map. Map is our only interface from mental ideals to territory. — noAxioms

If you say there is any level where there is “no mental anything” aren’t you pointing out a non-ideal thing, an object in itself regardless of the mental? Haven’t you admitted there is a physical (non-mental) world where objects (particles) speak for themselves?

If I reach out and touch the bark and ask how large 'this' is, am I talking about the twig, branch, tree, forest, or something else? — noAxioms

Why did we ever conceive of the notion of “object” in the first place? Why did we not always know “when I reach out and touch, I am touching one giant dinstiction-free object?”

Why would a “twig” or a “tree” confuse us when we touch “this”?

Are we constructing the problem AND constructing the objects that purport to solve the problem?

Objects are at best particles interacting with each other according to physical law. — noAxioms

Physical, not mental, basis?

And I guess the distinctions between psychology and biology and physics are ideal only?

My point is, you cannot speak, we cannot form an ideal, without some real distinctions apart from the mind on which we make any move, perform any act, posit any field, say anything like “particle”.

We may always be wrong about the separate mind-independent object, except that it is there, otherwise we cannot speak. Speaking places the ideal back into a separate world of objects (letters, words, sentences, paragraphs), where, like the other objects, they can either float freely among, or butt up against, or connect with, the world. These words only express their meaning in other minds. But they are still particles, or in a distinct field that is there regardless of my idealistic abilities.

These tropes - doom and saving — Tom Storm

I’m not pessimistic. I just mean we will never end war, end murder, end lying, end hurting each other and ourselves. We will never build a utopia, never end poverty. There will always be self-absorbed people, there will always arise a tyrant, there will always be infidelity and betrayal.

But life on balance is good, and it’s worth trying to love and live, and teach and learn, and seek to be good, and be better.

Just being realistic. All of human history so far shows nothing changes.

What’s your trope, Tom?

How can one come to know all is one? One must only be that reality.
— ENOAH

I'm not disagreeing. But I'm pointing out that it might be easy to say that, but it's very rare to actually see it. — Wayfarer

I’m not disagreeing either. (Meaning, as I jump in here, that I agree.)

But if you see it at all, you aren’t fully being it, so aren’t really seeing it.

Losing the self while becoming, which is forever a becoming the self, is rare indeed.

To realize the oneness one must lose the ability to realize anything INTO the oneness. It’s why mystics call this enlightenment of losing the self both becoming one with the world consciousness, or one with total emptiness.

And it’s why I love paradox.

And mine is another world altogether…bills to pay, children to raise, prone to any number of distractions and ordinary human foibles. I came to realise that it's not straightforward nor obvious in the least. — Wayfarer

I think it’s also ok to be distracted, particularly when the distraction is another person. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking, since it is nearly impossible to devote oneself to not-oneself as the sages and saints do.

What makes you think gods comes from the outside? Are they not human creations, as fraught and manufactured as any ideology? — Tom Storm

If God isn’t other than us, then aren’t we already doomed, right? Why would we who create the world’s biggest problems along with false ideologies to build the factions that get to kill the unbelievers think we might make the world a better place, when today is always same as yesterday anyway? Some of us live a little longer today. More time maybe per life than 10,000 years ago. Otherwise just more time to find a faction to fight and kill and live and die for among the rubble.

The only hope, I see, is something else.

Doesn’t mean this world and each one of us isn’t worth saving. Just that we can’t do it alone. More like we won’t do it alone. We all think only some of us and some of the world is worth saving, and that shows none of us are capable of doing what it might take to save any of us, let alone all of us.

God is our last hope, and not if he or she is just one of us.

Pardon, but I'm concerned with social "view of the idea of God" preached in religious traditions and actually worshipped (i.e. idolized) by congregants. It's this totalitarian "view of idea of God" that significantly affects cultures and politics and pacifies collective existential angst (e.g. excuses social scapegoating, martyrdom, holy warfare, missionary imperialism, etc) rather than anyone's speculative "view of the idea of God" (such as yours, JuanZu, or my own — 180 Proof

It is not essential to religion that it build the “totalitarian” and “social scapegoating” and “warfare” and “imperialism”.

Whatever club or faction or group of people gathers in a herd, you get the same exact risks of “totalitarian” and “social scapegoating” and “warfare” and “imperialism”.

These are essential to being a human sheep, as so many are, jumping on the bandwagon of naziism, Leninism, colonialism, communism, capitalism, etc.

How many atheists would be fine if all the theists could be rounded up and sent to some colony for the delusional for the greater good of mankind? I’m sure a leader, using the latest political science and social reconstructions could produce cheering and promote mass killing with such a plan (oh right, Russia, China).

Religion and God can be an answer to human bad tendency. I happen to think God is the only answer, our only hope.

Nothing has changed among humans in 10,000 years. Even with religion. But if you look in the rubble of human history, it’s we who destroy each other, again and again. So the only hope for us has to come from outside. Nothing has changed with regard to that either.

Agree with this. The separate mediation is apparently not a 'thing'. It is just physics, motion of material and such, having no meaning until reinterpreted back into ideals by something that isn't me. — noAxioms

So if you would admit there are two distinct people in the universe, but don’t see any distinct physical objects apart from your own idealizations, is the distinction you make between you and me only ideal, or do I have to have some sort of physics to me that you can let speak for itself?

I wonder to what extent such a non-dualistic viewpoint offers a solution to the split between materialism and idealism, as well as between atheism and theism. — Jack Cummins

I see no reason to deny the physical world, and no reason to deny that mind incorporates the non-physical in this same world.

Paradox, to me, is a unity, not a defeat of opposites or a crack in any foundation.

We are the instantiation of dualism; we are the contradiction in the universe (the one word). We are a paradox; impossible yet actual. There is one AND there are many. Parmenides and Heraclitus were both right, and spoke of the same Being, the same Natural world.

I am not an idealist, or a realist, or a physicalist. I see that all of these features are given, are present in the impossible beings that we are.

We are only bodies. AND, we are only spirits. Because spirits are bodily things, and bodies are spiritual things.

I do think there is a unity, but it is paradox, not just ideal reason and thought, and not just one physical universe unfolding, but both in harmonious opposition, as is a human being.

idiosyncratic, placebo-fetish (i.e. cosmic lollipop) of choice. — 180 Proof

Such as the value of logic. The lollipop of logic. Or the applicability of logic to explain what an explanation should be, or has to be (logically of course).

I think claiming belief and not knowledge is paradoxical. The claim to 'faith' is, to me, an indication of dishonesty or delusion. — AmadeusD

Belief operates like knowledge but is not knowledge, so I agree, it maybe paradoxical to claim a belief.

But dishonesty and delusion??

The problem with that are all of epistemological problems of knowledge in the first place. If logic tells us we cannot have faith or believe in anything absent nonsensical paradox, then, because of the same logic, and the frictions with things in themselves and absolute truth, we can’t know anything either.

There is some degree of faith, or more simply, of choice and willingness, underlying any admission one would make about the things one knows, let alone believes.

It’s dishonest for any logical scientist to say “this is the absolute truth, and all statements to the contrary must be delusion.”

We are stuck with having to make a choice, even about what we claim to know.

On the one hand, you have Analytics who, burnt by incompleteness and undefinablity, decided that, since truth couldn't be defined to their satisfaction, it simply could not exist. The rules of their "games" were thus the ultimate measure of truth, and since they had very many games there must be very many truths, with no game to help them choose between them.

Elsewhere in the Analytic camp were those who became so committed to the idea of science as the "one true paradigm of knowledge," that they began to imagine that, if science couldn't explain conciousness, then conciousness (and thus conscience) must simply be done away with (i.e. eliminative materialism, which gets rid of the Good and the agent who might know it).

From the other side came Continentals who came to define freedom as pure potency and power, and so saw any definiteness as a threat to unlimited human liberty. On such a view, anything that stands outside man must always be a constriction on his freedom. Everything must be generated by the individual. Perhaps we can allow the world to "co-constitute" with us, but only if a sort of freedom and agency, which in the end is really "ours" anyhow, is given to the world.

The result is a sort of pincer move on the notions of Truth and Goodness (and we might add Beauty here too.) — Count Timothy von Icarus

That is really good analysis. Both sides want to eliminate the cake, yet eat it too.

I’m with you, Count.

I think what you expect to find is an object unmediated by our categories, for example. But that is like saying we are going to perceive something without perceiving. Every perception involves an adaptation, an interpretation. There is no access to reality that is not mediated, but we can ask why our means are embedded in reality, and above all, we can ask why they work and what the link is between the world we are in and our categories, our language, our ideas, etc. Therefore, the world would have something ideal-ish that allows our thinking and our perception to maintain a certain continuity with the world. — JuanZu

This is exactly what I’m trying to say.

There is a reason we can speak meaningfully to each other, that we can carry ideals to other minds; there is some basis in a world separate from both of us, something ideal-ish or objective.

Just because we can’t be realists, doesn’t mean realism is not there. It’s cloaked.

An objective world, by definition, would not require a subject or its ideals at all. — noAxioms

Are you utterly isolated, perhaps the sole being there is, fabricating each of the impressions or ideals in your experience?

Or are you utterly isolated, fabricating each of the impressions or ideals in your experience using incomplete and vague data from outside of you like a sort of mental clay? So you are not the only thing in the universe, you just cannot communicate with any of the other things, and instead translate and transform those things into nice packages for your own isolated world?

Or are you one of many physical things that occasionally has to avoid being hit when crossing the street to pick out a unique and distinct sandwich to be placed in a distinct belly to relieve a distinct and localized feeling of hunger, and you just can’t explain all of that clearly because of the second option?

The only way to save any knowledge of the thing in itself is to understand that we couldn’t have this conversation without something separate from both of us to mediate it. We aren’t using telepathy. We are using material objects between us. They exist with no need to declare their distinctions. Through things physical objects, we can demonstrate mental ideals that only other minds can take up. We make our own idealistic declarations out of those separate objects like when Intake the alphabet of shapely things in themselves and make the phenomena known as “alphabet”. But we who can translate sounds and colors into “objects” know something in itself is also declared when some other mind returns with a rebuttal that is not gibberish.

The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, — Bryan Magee Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107

I agree with this. We can replace “in space and time” with the “as we understand it” from your description above.

Because the OP asked about “physical world”, I am trying focus more on the thing-in-itself part of the equation, which as empirical, is the world mediated by senses.

To paraphrase, the below three say basically the same thing:

1. The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding,

2. The point is, the whole of the empirical world as we understand it is the creation of our understanding,

3. The point is, the whole of the empirical world that we take as representation is the creation of our understanding,

The first puts the separate thing in it self in context of extension and temporality which are features of the understanding. The second focuses on the operation of the understanding upon the thing in itself (really saying the same thing more generally and not just in context of space and time). The third focuses on the operation of the thing in itself upon the senses that build the representation.

But they build the representation out of two sources - the understanding AND the thing in itself.

There is a tendency to ignore the thing in itself in the equation. Just because our understanding can only be comprised of phenomena, this doesn’t mean phenomena are only comprised of our understanding. There still is (or can be I should say) an empirical world absent perspective and sensation. Such a world-in-itself is wholly inaccessible, like each thing we would intuit about the objects created by sensation, but nevertheless must exist to build up all of this apparatus called subjective experience.

It's a view which attempts to exclude the subject and subjectivity altogether, so as to grasp what is 'really there'. — Wayfarer

I see three things:
The world which is there (for ages).
Us in it, the human subject, also there, but now there with.
And our perspectival experience the unique picture made of the other two, existing only in our head, filled with “objects” that are unlike the other two things.

Like the subject is there with its phenomenal constructions, the body is there with other bodies.

Like we can’t have phenomena without noumena taken up in the subject, we can’t have sensations without objects in the world taken up by the senses.

We need all three.

The “objective world” that is “really there” requires not just the ideals to the subject, but also the idealized thing without the subject (however that thing appears to me, or better, to us.)

Hey Wayfarer,
No interruption at all!

Schopenhauer’s philosophy is built on the premise that our understanding of the world is mediated through perception and cognition. — Wayfarer

The phenomenal veil, of our own construction, that cloaks and hides the thing-in-itself. Yes, love it. Straight out of Kant, and I like Schop too, the old curmudgeon.

However, Schopenhauer extends this idea, positing that the will is the fundamental reality behind all appearances. — Wayfarer

Yes, the objects are ideal, and they are brought about when we will, will to hold them as phenomenal objects. We not only make them by mediation of senses and cognition, but we will the sensing and the cogitating. And also, the will is preserved at the heart of the things-in-themselves that pour in the data, wiling-themselves towards our senses and cognition, as we transform this into our phenomenal experience.

He (Schop) argues that objects, as we know them, do not exist independently of our perception. — Wayfarer

I bolded “as we know them” because that is the key to me. We have objects as we do NOT know them (things in themselves), we apply our senses and cognition to those objects (and/or those objects apply themselves to our senses and cognition), and we get the objects as we know them (phenomena).

According to Schopenhauer, what we perceive are representations (Vorstellungen), which are dependent on the subject (I would add, as well as the object, as I don’t deny that objects exist). — Wayfarer

I agree with your parenthetical. The things in themselves are existing objects. They are out there and I am with them. They shape my phenomenal experience too. I see no reason to conclude otherwise. We just only know those objects indirectly, mediated - we experience objects subjected to an influence outside or beyond those objects, namely me, the subject.

But this gets to noAxiom’s question. If we can’t know the objects in themselves and unmediated, then all “objects” should have quotes around them. They are ideal only.

But we just admitted there are objects separate from me, things in themselves out of which I fashion my phenomenal veil over them.

And the OP is about the “physical basis for what constitutes a thing or an object.”

I think we have to take the “physical basis” to be another term for “thing-in-itself”, in which case we may never be able to properly have this conversation or know a physical basis for what constitutes a thing.

In the end, I can only intuit that distinctions exist in physical form, in the various distinct many things in themselves, but I think they are there, apart from me and my cognitions. But I do so intuit.

And there are also clearly distinctions between the ideal forms we make, but that is not the question, and that is easy to find, since I can make the ideal distinctions clear myself.

The overlap, to me, is the phenomenal world that we take as representing the physical form.

I am trying to equate where you said “as we know them” with “that we take as representing the physical form.”

You said “them”. Objects as we know “them.” The “them” here are the physical forms. There are now objects, and separately there are objects as we know them or as we take them to represent things in themselves (as phenomena).

So we have two different objects (things and ideals, or, in-themselves and phenomena), and call them both objects. We should only be calling one of them the object. But we aren’t having any luck at that.

Which is why I said in my first post this might be an impossible question to answer (or pose), and in my last post above I said that I am losing site of the question.

We are tasked by noAxiom with using words to demonstrate some thing, some physical object, in the act (willing) of speaking for itself.

So I posted a word of gibberish in attempt to create such a thing right here, now, for us to play with.

My only solution to poke a small hole in the phenomenal veil is to triangulate towards the thing-in-itself by comparing the ideals from other minds who together investigate the same or at least similar phenomena. We both point to “that pumpkin” and we post it our ideal of where pumpkin begins and ends, where some thing in itself over there meets human sense and cognition, where we sense something apart from the single subject, and together sense where “that pumpkin” makes sense to both of us.

This sounds like Kantian transcendence, but I see it as more than that (because if the things will, it’s own essence for itself), enough to try and answer noAxiom’s question as “yes, there are physical objects that are not the same as our ideal objects, and we can know these objects exist.”

Just takes some willingness to see willingness apart from oneself.

PS.
Maybe essence is will, in each thing in itself be it physical or not, and phenomena are these wills as object, where we attempt to capture the essence, the will of something beyond the subject. Maybe?

I think Schopenhauer’s will, taken up by Nietzsche, is an underdeveloped metaphysical wisdom. (Because Nietzsche shattered metaphysics.). It’s also in Aristotle as desire and telos.

who just wanted to justify doing whatever they wanted to do — Philosophim

Or, who didn’t want to justify whatever they wanted to do.

Classically individual morality and social morality are two sides of the same coin, not entirely separate and opposable. — Leontiskos

I would argue that all morality is social morality. Morality is sought and found among two or more persons.

Following one’s heart or not only becomes a moral question where the actions taken, the following steps, interact with or against other people.

Argument: You cannot knock out the target of practical reason (goodness) and then claim you can "pragmatically select a moral code," in order to get on in the world. This leads to an infinite regress that, in reality, must terminate in arbitrariness.

Ancillary point: abolishing the target of practical reason ends up destroying all of reason. You can't knock out this leg and still expect theoretical reason (whose target is truth) to stand. Eliminating the good ruins reason as a whole. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Full agreement.

No one will ever avoid the presence of truth and good in any statement that has a beginning an end, like this sentence. If I lie, then my falsity highlights the truth that contradicts my lie, showing it to be a lie. In speaking, about anything, you either posit a truth or good, or you attempt to distance (but not eliminate) the truth and the good.

Pragmatism and utilitarianism and any moral anti-realism simply assert we can satisfy the will to truth and good by ignoring the presence of truth and goodness (either in the truth or good of the pragmatic, utilitarian, anti-real statement, or in its looming presence in the infinite regresses you’ve made clear.)

Total agreement.

The energy beam itself (and not the gun) needs to figure this out. — noAxioms

I’m beginning to lose sight of the question (the object of your inquiry so to speak).

It’s a fictional thing, a laser gun that shoots an entire bug but leaves the shirt. The impossibility of that thing can be solved by as much fiction. The laser beam just does. Shirt is always fine. Laser beams are really cool. So is Midas’s gold. Problem solved.

It’s not the laser beam, right? Who gives a crap how ridiculous or accidentally accurate our fictions can be or can’t?

But if you are grappling with atoms and void and finding not enough void anywhere between groupings of atoms…

Or not finding any difference between atom and not-atom such that one or the other cannot exist and there can be only one…

Or are you saying a man can’t step into the same river twice, or even once, because no thing is identical to itself long enough to be a fixed object or be identified as such…

Or are you just being contrarian, because none of these problems have been solved down to a nice little explanation?

King Midas cannot avoid touching — noAxioms

Was there a before King Midas touched, when the world wasn’t gold, and then what happened to Midas’ finger afterwards?

Physical objects are distinguishable everywhere with no eyes and no words, you just can’t picture them or speak about them easily.

You guessed somewhere near my guess, and my guess now is that we could work it out. It was the black and the white where there were no words. Close enough.

I was reduced to guessing, which I did. That's the msc

That guess is likely wrong — noAxioms

We should compare guesses.

In order to communicate our guesses we have to speak words, so we will now be using idealizations for sake of communication. But my guess is the object looks like this at its borders:
h …. e with some black and white sections in the middle.

If we both guess the same, then we have the object itself as referent and the additional measurement tools of each other’s eyes.

With all of that in sight, if our guesses are at least similar, we have a reasonable basis to start using the distinctions we discover with our eyes to be brought to us from a separate physical object. Metaphorically speaking, the physical object “told” us its distinction.

If you guess z……x then we are back to square one.

How would I know? — noAxioms

You would have to use physical eyes and senses because it’s a physical thing, so you may get it wrong (as any eye would), but that’s the only way to investigate and find if you see border or edge or particular “object” if you need word for what we are talking about.

And this border is distinct from the center of “it” too at least that’s what I can see.

Making up a word with no reference is running away from the issue of a reference without a word. — noAxioms

It’s not word. Don’t idealize it.

It’s a physical pile of black and white. Can you see the border? I could go cut and paste it for you.

This is also underlined by the metaphysical problem of non-identity. — I like sushi

The problem of identity is a real problem, but if we admit this problem to the equation, then there may be no “me” who could fail to prevent suffering either.

We need to assume an agent, identify many agents, to build an ethic among them.

That’s not the issue, or we can never say anyone exists to suffer or more to the point, never say anyone exists to prevent suffering.