John 14

"Trust in God; trust also in me... my Father's house... I AM the way and the truth and the life... If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have SEEN him... Anyone who has seen me has SEEN the Father... Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?... The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him... On that day you will realize that I am in MY Father, and you are in me, and I in you." Jesus (my emphasis)

Judaism fractured because of this renegade's life. It's never been the same

Could it be said that all systems of philosophy try to be as exact as mathematics, but fail?

To my understanding Kant became a dualist because of the arguments by Hume that physical "laws" cant be known and that the world is a-mechnical. Kant thought this was a strong position if the world is just as we experience. But if there is phenomena between the thing-in-itself and us, then laws do apply to everything we do. Now someone can argue against him and ask "why shouldn't phenomena be capable of any change? Why can't a monkey suddenly appear next to you if its all mental." The concept of laws, physical laws, mean that instantaneous change in that sense is not possible. It seems to me Kant was protecting his sanity by he insistance on a noumena.

Also i'd like to say that if a positivist says he is not an idealist, why won't he just call himself a materialist then?

When you say you dont consider yourself to BE something "necessarily", are you speaking of anatman?



Do you know of Nishida Kitaro?

If you try to understand what your cup of coffee is, you will find that you always bring up uses and situations of cups of coffee, and also what others told you about it from when you experienced being young. What the cup is "to itself" is another question (Kant's question). So maybe people who are telling you the representation is all that's practically needed are the true idealist. All they need is what their thoughts "see" around them. This can come apart even further though when analyzing our own thoughts, the very structure of them, as we think of the parts of objects. What does it mean to say atoms exist? The word atom is said in the mind and images are brought up and combined with pure thoughts one has about research into atoms. The thoughts don't stand alone without the images. But if the images are wrong, completely not applicable to reality, how much reality is left when it's asserted atoms "exist". Hence Bohr as already been quoted in this thread. Some founders of QM were into idealism as well. To say we only know what we say about the world and not the world in itself is idealism. So who is the real idealist?

My point was to learn from the discussion and your aggression is unwanted. Why dont you provide your philosophy here on AI right now? Not factodes, but philosophical thought. I'll comment

I didn't say i knew anything about the topic. It's interesting to see others views on the subject while on the forum. Again this was posted over a year ago.

I think that consciousness is awareness and we dont know how that reaches in nature. The ability to do calculations which AI has is divorced from the heart and intuition. Not everything can be analyzed by science.

Eternity if not before time temporally because it is the absence of time. Although, philosophy can posit a Tao that acts without being acted upon, science is more positivist and speaks of what is in time. How the first moments of time arose is subject to debate by Hawking and others.

The original singularity of our universe would be considered uncaused and self caused at the same time, according to how science approaches it. Nothing is posited before it yet it acts (expands) according to the laws of its matter, spacetime, ect. To visualize this you need to keep both in mind. There can be no separation between a god and the universe

Is nothing one or many? Can there be several nothings? The mind can see similarities between objects and make categories of them (such as species and genus). If Spinoza's principle that “all determination is negation” is true, then the further we abstract from things of the world, the more we reach a single concept of being. For Spinoza this ground is one and the concept should accord to one. Being and nothingness have aspects in common such that a painting paint brush has to the canvas; it takes what is potential and makes it something. The potential is limitless. And all nothing knows how to do is determine as time rolls on and the world operates according to it's basic laws

"Although the mind’s status as a substantial form may seem at risk because of its meager explicit textual support, Descartes suggests that the mind a “substantial form” twice in a draft of open letter to his enemy Voetius:

Yet, if the soul is recognized as merely a substantial form, while other such forms consist in the configuration and motion of parts, this very privileged status it has compared with other forms shows that its nature is quite different from theirs (AT III 503: CSMK 207-208).

Descartes then remarks “this is confirmed by the example of the soul, which is the true substantial form of man” (AT III 508: CSMK 208). Although other passages do not make this claim explicitly, they do imply (in some sense) that the mind is a substantial form. For instance, Descartes claims in a letter to Mesland dated 9 February 1645, that the soul is “substantially united” with the human body (AT IV 166: CSMK 243). This “substantial union” was a technical term amongst the scholastics denoting the union between a substantial form and matter to form a complete substance.

Surely Descartes maintains that mind and body are two substances but in what sense, if any, can they be considered incomplete? Descartes answers this question in the Fourth Replies. He argues that a substance may be complete insofar as it is a substance but incomplete insofar as it is referred to some other substance together with which it forms yet some third substance. This can be applied to mind and body as follows: the mind insofar as it is a thinking thing is a complete substance, while the body insofar as it is an extended thing is a complete substance, but each taken individually is only an incomplete human being...

This account is repeated in the following excerpt from a letter to Regius dated December 1641:

For there you said that the body and the soul, in relation to the whole human being, are incomplete substances; and it follows from their being incomplete that what they constitute is a being through itself (that is, an ens per se; AT III 460: CSMK 200).

The technical sense of the term “being through itself” was intended to capture the fact that human beings do not require any other creature but only God’s concurrence to exist. Accordingly, a being through itself, or ens per se, is a substance. Also notice that the claim in the letter to Regius that two incomplete substances together constitute a being through itself is reminiscent of Descartes’ remarks in the Fourth Replies. This affinity between the two texts indicates that the union of mind and body results in one complete substance or being through itself. This just means that mind and body are the metaphysical parts (mind and body are incomplete substances in this respect) that constitute one, whole human being, which is a complete substance in its own right. Hence, a human being is not the result of two substances causally interacting by means of contact and motion, as Gassendi and Elizabeth supposed, but rather they bear a relation of act and potency that results in one, whole and complete substantial human being."
https://iep.utm.edu/rene-descartes-mind-body-distinction-dualism/

No, the issue was what you and i mean by ego. Is it the soul, body, or both. And as i said the article gives the general opinion but goes on to cite all the other interpretation. Descartes believed we own a body and soul. Animal spirits are truly ours. But alas ive repeated myself over again. I dont know how you became a moderator

. And I don't believe any of that supports this contention: — Wayfarer

Well we have the body on one side with the animal spirits and imagination, and then soul on the other. Soul has ethical obligations with how it uses it's body. So this ethical duty to use soul, animal spirits, and imagination in moral coordination. would amount to a personality. Which is why I provided the SEP link on his ethics on passions and such. This is what I meant by "ego". What did you mean by it?

Where do they say this? If you claim to have been reading the Summa since you were 12, why can't you provide any citations for your opinions? — Leontiskos

What citations do you want? I said that some of what Aquinas wrote on this I don't find philosophically meaningful but when you take the meat from it, you have the same Descartes, a body and soul, with different presentations of it. Am I not allowed to take what I want from Aquinas or must I accept all of it. The spiritually significant reality is the truth of body and soul. Cartesians and Thomist use to condemn each other. Maybe they can live in harmony. But the SEP list given in above post shows how distinctions can lead to skepticism

While it’s true that the description of his position in terms of other schools of though might be a matter of debate, Descartes’ dualism is a fact of his philosophy. — Wayfarer

Here is what the SEP says:

In the secondary literature, one finds at least the following interpretations.

1) Descartes was a Scholastic-Aristotelian hylomorphist, who thought that the soul is not a substance but the first actuality or substantial form of the living body (Hoffman 1986, Skirry 2003).
2) He was a Platonist who became more and more extreme: “The first stage in Descartes’ writing presents a moderate Platonism; the second, a scholastic Platonism; the third, an extreme Platonism, which, following Maritain, we may also call angelism: ‘Cartesian dualism breaks man up into two complete substances, joined to another no one knows how: one the one hand, the body which is only geometric extension; on the other, the soul which is only thought—an angel inhabiting a machine and directing it by means of the pineal gland’ (Maritain 1944, p. 179). Not that there is anything very ‘moderate’ about his original position—it is only the surprising final position that can justify assigning it that title” (Voss 1994, p. 274).
3) He articulated—or came close to articulating—a trialistic distinction between three primitive categories or notions: extension (body), thought (mind) and the union of body and mind (Cottingham 1985; Cottingham 1986, ch. 5).
4) He was a dualistic interactionist, who thought that the rational soul and the body have a causal influence on each other. This is the interpretation one finds in most undergraduate textbooks (e.g., Copleston 1963, ch. 4).
5) He was a dualist who denied that causal interactions between the body and the mind are possible and therefore defended “a parallelism in which changes of definite kinds occurrent in the nerves and brains synchronize with certain mental states correlated with them” (Keeling 1963, p. 285).
6)He was, at least to a certain extent, a non-parallelist because he believed that pure actions of the soul, such as doubting, understanding, affirming, denying and willing, can occur without any corresponding or correlated physiological events taking place (Wilson 1978, p. 80; Cottingham 1986, p. 124). “The brain cannot in any way be employed in pure understanding, but only in imagining or perceiving by the senses” (AT VII:358, CSM II:248).
7) He was a dualistic occasionalist, just like his early followers Cordemoy (1666) and La Forge (1666), and thought that mental and physical events are nothing but occasions for God to act and bring about an event in the other domain (Hamilton in Reid 1895, vol. 2, p. 961 n).
8) He was an epiphenomenalist as far as the passions are concerned: he viewed them as causally ineffectual by-products of brain activity (Lyons 1980, pp. 4–5).
9) He was a supervenientist in the sense that he thought that the will is supervenient to (determined by) the body (Clarke 2003, p. 157).
10) The neurophysiology of the Treatise of man “seems fully consistent […] with a materialistic dual-aspect identity theory of mind and body” (Smith 1998, p. 70).
11) He was a skeptical idealist (Kant 1787, p. 274).
12) He was a covert materialist who hid his true opinion out of fear of the theologians (La Mettrie 1748).

So you are taking one interpretation of Descartes and since that is how other Descartes articles on SEP interpret him, you think it must be correct. Is it because it is the majority opinion?

So I found the SEP article I was looking for. This section tells how the nature of Descartes position is much debated.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pineal-gland/#BodySoul

The Church rejected Descartes but it's long overdue "ecumenically" -so to speak- for Cartesians and Thomists to see each other's avenues and understand the power of their explications on philosophy, physics, and theology. The language Aquinas was used to was different from the later Descartes, who tried to write philosophy in a new language. Descartes should never have been on the Index of forbidden books however. As I said above, a Thomist will say that his arm is not his soul and in fact he will say that the soul is simple and therefore nowhere in space (and yet the body is in space). Descartes "Passions of the Mind" makes clear that the human being, for him, was a complete personality, not a divided ontological contraction, and this is dispayed in practical reason
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-ethics/

Does not a Thomist say his arm is his body, not partly his soul?

Ive read the Summa since i was 12 years old. My point was that for Descartes held the soul and body to be held by one ego, one I, so that they are perfectly united. Sometimes he says they are two substances, but clarifies that they are in perfect union. Wayfarer was arguing that Aquinas had a more subtle explanation of this, but prime matter and extention are not different so I apply Wittgenstein here.. The soul forms the body for Aquinas while Descartes the ego is completely united by the pineal gland with all the rest of the entire body. Any differences are in language and presentation, not concept

You posit something there is no answer to: a formless piece of matter needing a soul? That's the solution to the invisible interaction problem? Descartes stated things simpler but I was uniting traditions but you want to separate for doubt's sake. There is no bridge between body and soul. No need. Descartes doubted too much on this matter

That's just a word salad. Distinctions where none are necessary. You commit the scholastics' mistake. There is body and soul, one alive spirit.

You're not answering my objection. Why is there a problem with interaction in either description of the human person by Aquinas and Desacrtes? The same doubt should apply to both. Should we assume a priori that soul shouldn't unite with matter? And more precisely Descartes said the human person was two substances united as if to be one

You would have to convince me that Descartes said something different from Aquinas. How can soul have anything to do with body we can still ask. Descartes described a human as one substance composed of body and soul. I dont where this ghostly sense about it comes from. And a body IS prime matter. Matter just forms differently according to its source

I dont see why the interaction problem would apply to Aquinas any less than to Descartes. The soul is the same for both. Aquinas has prime matter vs Descartes's particularized extentions. The difference is the act of the soul on the "body" is more complete with Aquinas. But i can still ask "HOW can the soul interact with prime matter". Matter is all matter in principle, by definition

The 5 ways of Aquinas are all different linguistic formulations of a single assumption: namely that only the highest good could complete the symmetry of the world. The fourth way doesnt even provide an argument for God but it tries to bring out an instinct that the universe cannot simply be an eternal series without the greatest good as its grounding.

What Krauss provided was a modern physical description of creation. Creation is seen as something supernatural in the religions. But what do they mean when they say God has the "power" to create from nothing. What does power mean but "from itself". But what is God? The MIND asks this. Or maybe this God can't produce from himself because he can not be imitated. This is the God that the atheists fight against. Then this God's action of creation was truly magic

What do you think about "something from nothing" in terms of physics?

I find the idea of will instead of substance causing reality very interesting because it's so abstract

If there are levels: intellect, reason, understanding, subconscious, then unconsious, Schop's knowledge of Will would come more from the Unconcious then from any experience of "free will". Some type of compatabilism is needed to reconcile fate and freedom. When Kant said that the thing in itself causes phenomena, he knew already that he placed causality within phenomena; so it's only by analogy that we speak of Will's action. There is no "why" to pure will. It's fated freedom. Schopenhauer called his dog Atman and so presumably Schop was the Brahmin in that context. Schop wrote a lot about body and physical things. But ultimately he wasn't an atheist, or a Hindu perhaps, but more likely Buddhist. Will is not a person or a substance. It's too free to be either. And this is very consistant with Buddhism.

That is to say, to posit that we reason is a given. To posit that there is Will is the thing to be explained. However, my question was more about to why Will has to have a multiplicity. — schopenhauer1

What multiplicity? Schop says multiplicity is one because Will is one and Representation is Will. Will is not "a being" so to speak. Will is unity indivisible, without separation. For concepts alone, it is not-Will. Concepts stop in order to let in Will, "the Beloved" as mystics call it

However, why is it that entailed in willing is this superstructure of the PSR, objects, space/time/causality as this aspect of Representation? — schopenhauer1

There is no reason for the world. It just happened says Schopenhauer. How did it happen? But what happen? There is no multiplicity because Will is all and Will is one. So nothing has happened. What you see is Maya

So Will in Schopenhauer: the point is that Will chooses everything for us and we are Will. If you have a bad life, Will choose that. Will is completely free. Do you realize Will is willing? It doesnt choose what we want or think we need. It's on its own and has no one to take it to account. Reason brings in ends and "my life should be different". The Will for Schop can do no wrong. You might as well call it random, but it is choosing. Will acts. I remember that Descartes thought God was Will

Ff

I answered your objection. If reason comes from will than reason can NOT give an account of Will as you try to do. Reason inly knows reason. What is prior to reasoning is beyond reasoning.

Religious is an ambiguous term. Schop like the religions of the East

I'm more inclined to wonder "how" reason can be Will. "Why" implies there's a teleology before mind, which Schop denies. Kant advocated for blind faith in God. Maybe understanding Will takes some faith since it's beyond reason. You don't seem to be satisfied with this line of thought nevertheless. Sorry

Kant didn't say if the thing-in-itself was an object or subject. Schop said it was Will but mind understands the Forms, not Will. So the thing in itself is unknowable for him and also how reason comes from will. I know you like to think of it like two sides of a coin, but doesnt Schop say *everything* is will? So reason is somehow will I'm guessing

Maybe Schopenhauer would regard a rational world emerging from Will as a kind of miracle. The Greek gods had trials and yet were gods. We are Will and yet have trials oriented to a purpose (on the secondary level). Isn't the problem of pain part of the PSR?

So you would regard all of neo-Platonism to be a waste of time?

We are all Will because it is everywhere and Will is beyond us because it is nowhere. Only an infinite method can grasp Will, so only no method can. The finite cognition can never understand the infinite. Science assumes will must be in a brain because science is a finite method. With regard to Schopenhauer's idea of Will's atemporality, I quote Heraclitus, "In the case of the circle's circumference, the beginning and end are common." Fire apply depicts the Will, and while Heraclitus thought the fire was also Logos, Schopenhauer was seeking to reject the PSR as ontologically basic. For him we can approximate what the Will is like by comparing different manifestations of will. Perhaps he thought Will randomly or whatever chose a rational world. So his grounded reason finds it has no ground. Nirvana?

The PSR is a concept of the mind, which has intuition and reason. Intuition is the source of our knowledge of the Will. Reason is the consequence of separartion and time. The mind and forms are all illusions. The only way we can talk about the world and noumena is through the categories however. Complete personal individuality is denied by German idealists, as it is in philosophies of India and the Islamic world, and yet freedom rather servile piety is teleogical end. But ye speaking of any teleology or forms is strange and can only be strange from the position that Will is fundamental.