Today I finished The Theory of Mind as Pure Act by Giovanni Gentile ("design and setting by Alpha Editions" 2020). It's an incredible book. The spiritual side of me says i created my consciousness but I also know my brain and spine cause conscious throughout my body. I wonder what materialist explanations there are for consciousness being material and for consciousness seeing reality objectively. I see they are talking about this on my other thread. Anyway, i recommend the book

If what you say is true then I would have to conclude that matter is not pure extension (Cartesian) and so adopt some other philosophical stance

The paradox of perception in the context of this discussion is perplexing. Mathematics obviously would seem to apply to matter. Take your childhood bicycle: you can take off a handle, then divide that into two with a buzzsaw. So you have the bicycle and two parts. How many parts total? 3. Can't you divide one of the halves too? Now you have 4 pieces. As long as there is something there that is spatial the process, to the logical mind, would descend to infinity, and putting the bicycle back would fill up WITH infinity, into... a finite bike. I know mathematics has a lot to say about this, but as a description of something spatial it is very curious. The principle of infinity seems suspended within the concept of "the finite". It's like they are two sides of each other. The number 1 can be divided to infinity, but it's much more odd when doing this with spatial objects (because space has size). So we say "real spatial objects have much more to them then mathematical relationships to themselves. These other aspects make the mathematical sides appear distorted". This sounds to me like we're on acid and are seeing a round triangle. That can actually happen! But in the real world, when the mind and intuition is clear, we can see with perfect clarity, when observing a car or bicycle, what it is. We can "know it". Yet when the mind is elsewhere, we don't seem to feel we grasp the whole thing. There seems to be more to it that we can't get to, and this increases the sense of mystery, which in turn is the foundation of a latter focus of the intuition which, then, sees the object as it is

Just a barrage of thoughts...

I don't see the relevance, we were talking about identity, which refers to things, not geometrical conceptions. — Metaphysician Undercover

You talk in completely different language than I do. Example:

But in logic the object is represented as a subject, and we predicate. The predication is made of the subject, not the object, and there remains a separation between the subject with its predications, and any possible object which is represented in this way. This separation, makes the object completely separate from anything we say about it, even spatial-temporal location, it's reality is a possibility. — Metaphysician Undercover

Huh? A subject in the philosophy I read is a conscious observer. You are saying that the subject is the object observed, and then use those words in the same way. I can't make sense of this. Are you saying the predication is made "of" the subject or "by" the subject?

Therefore at sometime your car may not have any tires, then afterwards it might have tires which are different from the tires before. The swap in parts makes no difference to the identity of the car. — Metaphysician Undercover

Whether it's an ancient ship or a modern car, the argument still holds that we don't know when exactly minimally a the object ceases to be an object.

The point though is that there is nothing necessary and sufficient, because identity is the thing itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

Huh? He was saying necessary and sufficient refers to what makes a thing a thing in itself.

I think the important point of the law of identity is that it makes identity distinct from anything we say about a thing, making it the thing itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

So the object can never be completely known? It IS very strange that I can look at a pair a shoes and know the relation there and exactly what they are and yet there on other states of consciousness I could see them in which would be a wholly different experience of their ontology

You have just taken different time frames, saying that the thing does not have the same properties at one time as it does at another, so you want to designate them as two distinct things. — Metaphysician Undercover

Where has anyone on this thread said time itself causes things to change?

That is the temporal continuity which we assume the reality of, because we've observed it. This allows us to say that a thing has an identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

So now time is what gives identity?

I think your association of the law of identity with "essentialism", and "the notion that there is some "core of you" that endures throughout your existence" is mistaken. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's just the language he was using. He uses "essential" to mean "identity". How is any of this an answer to the ship of Theseus?

I'll be honest: I have never understood a single post of yours on this forum. I never know what the heck you are even talking about :(

Your quote on Graham Harmon’s is very interesting. It sounds like a philosophical answer to Zeno's paradoxes instead of the mathematical one. In fact, it might question the mathematical explanation since the object is no longer pure geometry. Hegel thought, because of the paradoxes, objects were instanstiated contradictions and this was a huge part of his philosophy in that everything resolved into other things as if forming a complete puzzle. This is a bit much, as if objects were finite and infinite in the same respect. They may seem to be by logic, but intuition sees them was they are

George Berkeley, author of The Analyst, was one philosopher who thought Zeno's paradoxes proved idealism, as Zeno intended. Likewise William of Ockham contended against the argument for mere [potential infinity] that the parts either exist or they don't. Matter can't exist as something completely potential. Divide the object and ask "what's there"; repeat process. Together or separate, the same quanity is there. Finally, Bertrand Russell said that calculus could be done without infinitesimals. However, it is still assumed in mathematics that infinitesimals make logical sense, which is why they are used in calculus courses and in nonstandard analysis

You need to distinguish between parts as understood philosophically and parts of an object seen as geometry. In the latter an object has infinite parts. In the former, well it is debatable. That is why Aristotle failed to refute Zeno. Zeno made a mathematical point with philosophical implications,and Aristotle responded simply with his philosophy

I was raised traditional Catholic. I don't believe in Christianity anymore. Anyway, as a materialist what do you think of Einstein's religious beliefs? He said he believed in Spinoza's God and admired Buddhism (annihilation vs anatman?).

Maybe when you think of spiritual you aren't really having spiritual content in your mind. When it is experienced one recognizes that it's different from matter's psychology. Spiritual vs psychological. I assume the spiritual is where I will go when I die, since annihilation doesn't make sense from experience and doesn't really refer to anything, unless to hell. I hope to stay out of hell and loss of consciousness into eternity, so I have great interest in spiritual things. Sorry but i dont think i can demonstrate these things to you

What about matter creating the spiritual? There is an esoteric word for that but I've forgotten it. Hegel has the world coming from Spirit but even more importantly matter sublates into Spirit through the history

Well Einstein himself thought everything was eternal (block universe, B time). Entropy is like the physical equivalent of Will. Maybe philosophy is completely a chemical process and it in no way reaches to some beyond space-time. Perhaps philosophy is purely normative, how evolved creaures should think for their sake. Becoming is the constant process

"With regard to what 'truthfulness' is, perhaps nobody has ever been sufficiently truthful." (Beyond Good and Evil, ch. IV, para. 177)

"A discerning one might easily regard himself at present as the animalization of God." (para. 101)

I am very interested in Husserl

Jumping in, Parmenides pointed out that nothingness cannot be talked about or indicated. He's right in a way, in an ancient Greek way. Being is the unity of what subsists and for him thoughts are being. The world is becoming, but our thoughts are eternal. Heraclitus was like Nietzsche and Parmenides like the Socrates of Nietzsche's critique. The becoming, the fleeting, had great value for Heraclitus, as we burn like Fire amid the winds of life.

"Such seems to me, for instance, the after-effect of Schopenhauer on the most modern Germany: by his unintelligent rage against Hegel, he has succeeded in severing the whole of the last generation of Germans from its connection with German culture, which culture, all things considered, has been an elevation and a divining refinement of the historical sense; but precisely at this point Schopenhauer himself was poor irreceptive, and un-German to the extent of ingeniousness" Beyond Good and Evil ch VI para. 204

It seems the Eastern Catholics and Orthodox may be more explicit in this than the West, with their insistance on seeing God's energies. If i remember correctly, John Paul II accepted Orthodox saints as part of the Catholic community of saints and Gregory of Palamas was already considered a saint by many Eastern Catholics. Malebranche can be seen as Catholic Spinozism in allowing all human thought to directly utilize, and be, the Divine Ideas (ontologism) and Rosmini's appurtenance of God is the same. Even Protestant Leibniz has his Godly fulgurations, but there have always been those in Christianity who believe philosophy is corrupt. Martin Luther knew scholastcism but latter hated philosophy and considered it a hindrance to salvation. Instead of theology AND philosophy, these thinkers believe only in history and theology. I could never be one of those. Without philosophy, theology offers nothing interesting to my mind

Would Aristotle agree with you that we may not see reality as it is?

My familiarity with the word "ontic" is completely from Heidegger. I always assumed he meant -that which we perceive with our senses, the substance we perceive. This is contrasted with "ontological" which includes all about the object we do and do not perceive.

Hegel also denies that objects are purely bundles of properties. The core of the object is "universal" for him in that he would equate a "thick particular" with "quality". Quality comes before quantity for him, the reverse of what most people believe. Quality is the bridge, as the universal in an object, through the Notion (logos), to the Spirit's Idea. Quality is more ontologically interior to the object then quanity (reminds me of the wizard of oz for some reason) and reveals the mystic semblance of nature

Yes you can; it's called refutation by contradiction. — Michael

What prompted me to start this thread was actually this video:

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=physics+sabrine+did+science+prove+reality+doesn%27t+exist&mid=1E32ADFE1C5F389044B81E32ADFE1C5F389044B8&FORM=VIRE

It got me thinking about the general subject and I remembered what I had read and discussed about Hoffman in the past. He seems to require noumena in order to have something to interface with.. I hate these computer analogies. They are so divorced from nature and reality. That's my first objection. As to your argument, Hoffman doesn't says "let's ASSUME reality is real" and allow it to lead to a contradiction. He starts where we all start, and where the scientists in the above video also start, with the reality we've known about ever since our minds have been able to cognize. He is really saying, with language, that reality is real and then tries to show "oh but not really". It's clearly a "strange loop" (do you know the book?) that leads to an explosion of logic after which he merely assumes that reality should be treated the same way it was before it was considered non-real. At least that's how I understand his thesis. I apologive if I misunderstand him.

George Berkeley claimed that his book on vision had proven that matter doesn't exist. But you have to start with the eye, looking at an eye with your very eyes. So he is clearly wrong. You would have to try to prove the world doesn't exist from purely speculative methods, and not by starting with empirical data

Interestingly, Hoffman has a video with Deepak on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbYgh1nal5o&list=PLdrUeeBIMbrLHXpDx7Oq-8lSKq5-0qOnS

When you say existence is a state of affairs, do you mean an "event" as in Process and Reality (Whitehead)"? I struggle to process "process philosophy" and "interdependance" as emphasized by buddhism. This plant here has no relation to my cup. They are clearly not dependant on each other. But maybe in a cosmic sense

Do you still believe you see the world as it is? Hegel says properties are universals as well, while the object is an "indifferent immediate" (extended matter). He had a strange relationship with Aristotle even as he considered him the greatest philosopher. In between Cartesian extension and the Absolute Idea were his thoughts on Aristotle, and they are hard to decipher, especially in the Logics. What exactly does it mean to say a property is universal? It is held in common with many "matters" but are they independent of each other as the matters are and as within the matters? What are we adding to our conceptual scheme by speaking of universals that modern materialism is missing?

Going off on a tangent, Hegel's philosophy was akin to Schelling's (who accused Hegel of stealing his ideas) while Fichte was more in line with Schopenhauer. The Absolute Idea and the Will are to aspects of God, and two aspects of us (in my belief). Instead of one Incarnation, there has been billions of them, and these beings can do good AND evil because really they are just biological matter. The separation between the universe and God is definite, yet they are One in union.

To me the question is whether what we exprience as "matter" is purely material and nothing else. Aristotle doesn't believe forms are purely abstractions but reside inside, or maybe for properly "around" matter, as well as existing within the mind. These union of form with form in the mind is the spiritual experience of perception for him, a position rejected by latter materialists from his school, such as Strato of Lampsacus I believe. For me this is allowing idealism enter where she doesn't belong. The eyes see as material with the brain (despite what Berkeley said about optics)

As with relatavism, it's a hard thing to think about. Thinking is hard. Relativism leads to absolute idealism, or vice versa. Keeping matter merely parrelell to any idealism is how i strike the balance

They still are "forms" according to Aristotle, spiritual instantiations. It seems important to me to that with our eyes we see and recognize matter as types of extentions and not as informed by spiritual principles; while at the same time we see in our soul the world as irreducibly mystical. These are not on the same level of reality, these thoughts. Logo vs nous. The first is Cartesian matter (and nominalistic as i argue) while the other is seeing with the eyes of romanticism's idealism. One is reality, common, while the other is Reality, personal. Maybe there are levels even beyond. Nietzsche said the human experience is like an onion (a "glass onion"?) that has levels that never end



Are you really a relativist?

Why can't we just choose to say the set of all sets that do not contains themselves is the highest in order and so is not included in itself? What in math or language requires that include itself in itself?

And i also am curious why Godel thought self reference a necessary step in mathematics instead of being contingent on our will

Maybe i am an intuitionalist

Oh so youre including the barber in "all". So this is just Russell's paradox in a simple form.? All that is needed to solve it is more information it seems to me. Not enough is given to make anything out of it that is normal and helps us grow. It's too narrow of a puzzle then for me to find interesting. The right and left hemispheres or some crap get too equally balanced to see it clearly. I doubt anyone can see that clearly



Thanks for the clarification.

Your premise 1 is oddly stated. There is no "if he does.. then he doesn't". He just doesn't shave himself because he shaves only those who do NOT shave themselves. Premise 2 is just plain wrong

Matthew 20:1-16

If the barber shaves those and only those and all those who do not shave themselves then he doesnt shave himself because of the "not shave themselves" part and this leaves others who do shave themselves who the barber doesn't shave because he doesn't shave those who shave themselves. Maybe nobody shaves the barber. Or someone or everyone shaves him. Surely someone is shaved because it's about a barber. I think you are making this a tar baby toward no genuine purpose

If he says "i always lie" and he is being untruthful because he had once told the truth then his lie is now and his truth was once. "This sentence is false" doesn't say what the sentence is about so it's spurious but maybe not in infinite regress. I don't see how these paradoxes can be made into necessary paradoxes, ones entailed by logic itself

Wouldn't you agree we must assume a liar to be a liar most of the time, or is redemption possible in this logic game?

When L says he is lying, he hasn't specified what he is lying about. It's like the barber paradox. Not enough information is given so we must assume he grow his hair to hippie length. The liar may be lying that he lies about lying, but the reality of his truth or falsehoid falls somewhere. It seems different if we say "this sentence is false" because it necessarily is taken out of context and merely implies a spurious infinity and, hence, is a big fat Zero in terms of truth

If a liar says he is lying, his utterance does need to be compared to the substance of the utterance, to the lying-ness of the speaker. The "claim" of the utterance relates to he who utters before it hits our ears. To the liar, he knows where he stands. To us, when he says "i always lie", we must understand the language "game" involved. Either he HAS always lied and he is owning up to it or he is lying that he always lies, wherein he must have at least once spoken the truth.. The latter seems to be where the trouble is

Let me jump in somewhere: if a liar says he is lying, the foundation is shaky enough to allow either that he is telling the truth or that is he not (telling the truth). What exactly is he lying or not lying about? That's unclear. He is the premise, the substance, that is relative in the equation, so anything he says can either be true or false and we can't know because he, a priori, is an unreliable being. From his own perspective he may have some dialectic that tells him when and where he lies, but in our eyes we can assume nothing about what he says except that he lies most of the time.

I'm probably missing some detail or atomization

Clarification:


I'm not saying that Godel proved the mind is non-computational or that the brain is not solely a type of machine. The middle ground is to ask whether understanding Godel or having the capacity in the brain to think it proves the brain is not a computational machine. Yep

If the mind is pure matter (brain, nervous system) and it can compute Godel's truths, then maybe Hawking is right. And Penrose about microtubules?

Leibniz allegedly got his concept of a logic machine from the mystic Ramon Llull, who in turn may have been influence by Kaballah. He abandoned the this latter in life when perhaps he realized that the mind in not computational. Philosophers had known this however for ages.. Are it being said that Godel finally proved this fact about the human mind from pure mathematics?

But to my point, if Godel proved there are limitless unprovable propositions and if these propositions can be used to make theorems then they are no more than postulates and we already knew that math had unprovable postulates on which the whole structure was built (you can't prove everything). So what exactly did Godel add to our body of knowledge?

You're quote from St. Maximum is interesting although many arguments have been put forward for pandeism, pantheism, and panentheism. In the Summa Theologica Aquinas himself says that God is IN everything in His essence, although he says otherwise elwhere. To me this is panentheism, while pantheism would be an emanation of the simple God... SPINOZA himself had an argument similar to that of Alan Watts and modern non-dualists- that the essence God must be fully manifested *always in everything* (and we just don't see it in our delusion) otherwise God would not be unlimited. Matter is forms of that which can be extended (dirt, water, trees, ect) yet this an -atomistic material reality- can still have an other, unrestricted reality to it which our delusions can not fathom<>

How is an unprovable proposition different from a postulate?

As with Zeno's paradoxes where we see space dissolve into nothing (or parmendian pure being), numbers must have a basic unity that holds them from infinite divisione. If we have 1, then we have 2 halfs, which each is one, so 1 is two. This can go on forever- as with divisione of a line. Numbers are synthetic (Kant)and nah platonic (Plato). A number is not a set. 7 is not the set of 7 ones. Sets are applied by us TO numbers which WE can choose how to group

"The set of all sets that do not contain themselves". Obviously this top set could not self reference. I would say the same of Godel

My 2 cents

It seems to me that geometry/space is what has presente a foundation for all mathematics. If numbers and sets of numbers alone was the concern, could not mathematics procede perfectly fine without paradox or bothering with Godel? Looking back on itself wouldn't even be necessary. Once you start looking for ratios of angles ect. it leads to area wherein an infinite space can be enveloped by finite territory. If only manbdid not measure space, maybe numbers would never have become a problem