Aristotle had a system in which form is actualized by existence to form essence. But yet form didn't even exist before it had existence! This paradox was fine for students of Aristotle through the ages because their system has the ultimate reason and cause in an infinite being who was the father of the world. Many of us find a supernatural allpowerful bodiless father who watches you like a massive eyeball all the time to be absurd, so we structure reason from within the womb of phenomena and find paradox and whimsy within the world as part of what it is be to in-the-world

The "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematica" in science is about the unreasonable effectiveness of science in general. That is, if reasonableness is truly reasonable, which it isn't because.The "next step up" can seem very unreasonable

Aristotle would have popped himself if he was told that a tightened string has more mass than a relaxed one, but yet it's true. Aristotileans have never been good scientists and I would say have never been good philosophers either. There is something wrong with insisting reality being be linear. They are not open to reality being an evolving paradox and want to face life with everything "figured out". Spiritual traditions of the East probably would see this as unwise, taking into account kaons and relaxing thought itself so it can move right again

Basing a metaphysics on substance pure and simple has A causing B as the principle of all metaphysics. But there are other ways of conceiving this as infinite process and finite substance consuming itself in the flux and roll of cyclical reality. Aristotle was concerned to establish the static as all of reality but there is no necessity in believing this or any other metaphysics. Philosophy is not about proof like in mathematics, but continuing life and thoughts in a rational process

When scientists explain the emergence of mind from brain /spine action, they speak with terms that help conceptualize the concept. Using more basic atomic terms don't do it. But sometimes speaking of this with QM does get the point across! So we shouldn't sacrifice other fields of study to a desire to understand the world in one equation. That is not true knowledge and each field has its place

My point is very simple. If we explain a flower with biology terms and understandings, we use concepts that are scientific and much closer to reality than if we explain the flower with quantum physics

Substance is not easily defined. Is a pool a substance? A desk? A lamp? Ice with soda? The world is both process and substance, not either-or

For the reader:

The reason I use the musket as the example is to put the substance of gunpowder in a historical setting, apart from all the equations. This is similar to Heidegger trying to explain in various ways how phenomena comes in various shapes and sizes. Relativity combined with quantum wave theory makes people think all is process and illusion when I think philosophy can say a lot, on the other hand, about how objects differ in their essences. Several scientific fields aid in this understanding, keeping phenomena as phenomena but without being a complete blur

I used gunpowder exploding to illustrate how objects can't fully be understood through reduction. But I think we are on the same page

All truth does not reside in physics, which is why a theory of everything can not be a theory of everything. There would be much it would not explain about matter and those other aspects of science are not philosophy but fields of science. Using the term "theory of everything" makes people limit their thinking to physics alone and then they have problems like the "hard problem of consciousness". Different fields may try to reduce others to themselves, but I see this as harmful and physics is a main culprit. Reading Teilhard's book The Phenomenon of Man opened my eyes to biology but certain physicists would resist it and try to understand man by gravity. Scientific ideas have a true essence, each one of them

Let's suppose they find the algorithm that, in a quantum computer, can predict all that that happened infinitely in the past and into the infinite future with as much accuracy as is possible considering there is randomness in the universe. This equation would essentially reduce biology and chemistry to itself and those fields would then be, what? Philosophy? That doesnt sound right. Knowing the components does not mean we understand the emergence. It seems to me a ToE replaces knowledge with predictability

Is it clear that a field of study can ever be fully understood by reducing it to another?



I am not saying that consciousness is primary in this regard or that earth is special. I'm questioning if biology can be reduced chemistry and chemistry to physics



Emergence is an important phenomena which a ToE would have to take into account

Are you saying that infinite possibilities can for certain be coordinated in equations that explain how that have and how they will act in the future? Apart from the uncertainty principle, there is also the potentially infinite integral paths that particles can follow, so it doesn't seem clear to me that infinite possibility combined with uncertainty can be explained even if chemistry can be reduced to physics

Let me just clarify that my point was that a theory of everything would have to account for the energy signature of every substance in the universe. I'll get to your guys responses in a little while

I get where your coming from I guess, but if I say "everything in the universe has a cause" that is an intelligent assertion. I don't think the Prime Mover is an intelligent answer because " pure act " is a pretty ridiculous idea but I turn to German Idealism for a way to understand causality. You are saying it seems that causality is not a meaningful idea and I don't know how you reached that conclusion.

It doesn't seem clear what exactly Wittgenstein proposed and why the Philosophical Investigations were a reversal. Bertrand Russell said Wittgenstein first work was great but his second a giving up of true philosophy. As I already said, maybe Wittgenstein is not for me because I understand the words and syntax he uses but I don't get any ideas from it. Thanks for the clarification

It is about what reduces pain in life and death as you lay in a hospital bed. Foxnews says today "we're not communists, we don't like being told what to do". So their Christian heritage in the end made them prideful

As I understand phenomenology, mind is a priori in that it springs from the brain but we also do not know, and can't figure out, which is prior

Girls flock to me but I ignore them because I prefer philosophy. I buy a girl once a month and that's enough for me

Your dumpster argument is black and white

"A singular thing is actual as coming from Concept [mind] and posited [by language] as something universal in identity with itself... Concept produces itself.. and is what is mediated by and with itself. It is a mistake to assume that, first of all, there are objects which form the content of our concepts of them, through the operation of abstracting that we spoke of earlier.. Instead, the Concept is what truly comes first, and things are what they are through the activity of the Concept that dwells in them and reveals itself in them... The Concept is its own relation to self."

That's Hegel in the lesser (second) Logic talking about what phenomena is

Helping people can be a weakness. Save yourself first or you can't save someone else, I say. We all have a conscious and unconscious mind. One of them is good, the other sinful. Who you are is which "mind" you truly are

Imo the only thing Augustine "caught sight of" was that he was inauthentic

Ye "Albert the Great" (Albert Magnus) thought of the world as an emanation of God (Leibnizian) into an angelic order and then into the world we know. So there were angels and demons in everything. Aquinas draw the distinction between God and the world more sharply.

The Catholic Mass is a type of magic. Thomas Aquinas's tutor (Albert) talked about magic in nature

What comfort did religion give Abraham when it forced him to try to murder his only son? What comfort did it give Issac to know his God authorized his "hit?

Nothingness is left when you take away being, but that is not no thing (Sartre). Being and nothingness are a fabric which makes spacetime to the left and matter to the right. But to follow this to its conclusion seems to indicate that objects exist and don't exist at the same time, therefore you're right that it's hard to find the single point around which any philosophy can revolve

"Space and time are modes by which we live, not conditions IN which we live". Kant

Actually that was Einstein lol

"Becoming" is a word which resonates with Eastern and Western philosophers, but as you say language is important and Kant's use of the word "phenomena" in the context of his "analogues of experience" is important because it situates "substance" in between being and nothingness (in that substancial existence not noumena) but doesn't say the world is illusion (unlike Berkeley). We understand being in the context of everyday life and inner experience but we never find a pure Beingness because such just doesn't exist

Craig says that we can't understand the world without believing in God yet we have to understand the world in order to first have a proof for God so he is clearly wrong

Printing money with no standard helps the rich? That's interesting

I was attempting to put Wittgenstein in some context but I realize a lot of people find him profound and almost Zen. He is just too minimalist for me

Wittgenstein was a positivist, who were people who restricted reason in some type of attempt to find absolute knowledge by finding "all the angles". I think Descartes was a Platonist with more math skills than philosophical ability, but Kant on the other hand started positivism. He is the only one of them I like. He makes a lot of sense in some ways. Wittgenstein will put his arguments in weird arrangments to make them appear more profound than they perhaps are, which is a trick started by, yes, Kant when he put mathematics under the category of Aesthetics in the critique of pure reason

I should clarify that Wittgenstein makes a lot of sense to a lot of people. Descartes thought he found the one and only set of moral hierarchies and Kant thought he found the only arrangement of categories that made sense. They were polar opposites though, one believing in innate ideas which lead to analytic posterior truth and the other rejected innate ideas and argued that they were synthetic a priori ideas disguised as knowledge. All three of these philosophers seem kind of anal to me so I prefer pure German and Italian idealism

Descartes last book was Passions of the Mind. Underlying all the talk of morals, he seemed concerned whether he WANTED his theory of innate ideas to be right and that this was the cause of his previous conclusions. Now Kant's last major work was Conflict of the Faculties, in which he too seems concerned that his previous conclusions were motivated by desire and now found himself trapped in contradictions. Wittgenstein, now we can say, tried to overturn his previous philosophy by coming up with a new system, for which he should be praised. It is questionable though if he anything meaningful to say about philosophy apart from the conviction that philosophy leads to no truths. I for one don't read much at all from Wittgenstein because he doesn't try to draw conclusions and find a final Ethos

"Philosophy is conceptually comprehensive cognition..., what is absolutely concrete"- Hegel

For me to find states where thinking ceases is reaching those conditions without thought and therefore too quickly

Well unlike this thread, artichokes are da bomb

Kant first speaks of antimony ("to contradict ") in his 1763 essay on Negative Magnitude, wherein he juxtaposes logical contradictions with "real contradictions". Logical contradictions are not resolved in their proper spheres, while a real contradiction is for example two forces equally cancelling each other. The interesting thing about logical contradictions is that we get knowledge of them from the world.

Note: Kant first explains time and space as intuitions in his Inaugural Dissertation of 1770

That sounds good

Kant Cognized Accurately