No; PI.

So wouldn't that give us an account in which the process stoped, as opposed to the substance of body and spirit being split asunder?

Realism doesn’t entail there is one cup in the sense that you outlined. If we sense objects, then it is meaningful and correct to say that there is a cup-in-itself and a cup-that-we-perceive because there is a gap between them. — Bob Ross

Here's a small chance, a chink in the wall of Kant*. What if talk of the cup perceived and of the cup's ding an sich are talk of the very same thing? Perhaps there is just one cup?

* Yes, that's a Kant/cant joke.

My purpose is of course to try to restore metaphysics' reputation to a certain extent. — Leontiskos

I don't think it was under threat, at least not from me. Metaphysics is inevitable. But I lack your forbearance.

Sure. So, where? What?

...nuances... — J

One man's nuance is another's sophistry, perhaps.

You can substitute "noumena" for my Capitalized Phrase if that helps. — J

I can't make much sense of "noumena", either, for reasons already given.

It's not a surprise that continuity of self is problematic for any form of spiritual understanding.

...responsiveness... — Fooloso4

But a corpse is viscerally different to a sleeping or comatose body. "All our reactions are different".

Please elaborate. — Benj96

I linked to a substantive elaboration from Wolfram MathWorld.

Of course, this is... close to "fan fiction" writing of the nature of reality and the universe. — Christoffer

That's a pretty close analogue. Is it harmless? It's not philosophy, not metaphysics, and not physics.

Their your teeth...

Edit: Just to be sure,

See how metaphysics leads one astray? — Banno

...was a joke directed at Metaphysics as an Illegitimate Source of Knowledge, another thread in which Bob questioned Metaphysics on the grounds that it was, at it's core, imaginary stories. The aim, roughly, was to draw attention to Bob's apparent change of heart, given his endorsement of the two-worlds view of Transcendental Realism. It was a crude attempt at asking how Bob might reconcile these apparently incongruous views.

Thank you for not recognising this, Leo, and putting me to the task of making explicit this vital aspect of the discussion.

Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process. — E.B. White

Yes, you caught me out, I appealed to both metaphysical realism and to common usage. One does not generally ask for two cups of tea, the perceptual and the numinous. It's not a knock-down argument, and if Bob wants to think in terms of there being two cups, that's up to him, but it seems to me to be good reason to discount transcendental idealism, at least in its two-world form. You can decide as you will.

I get the impression you are not laughing at my jokes.

No; as I just said:

I'll admit to a prejudice towards a relatively direct, common usage sort of realism. No apology. — Banno

Ok. Now I'm not sure if I should ask you to grab a cup for tea.

I'll admit to a prejudice towards a relatively direct, common usage sort of realism. No apology.

Do you inhabit some metaphysics-free space?

The place the comment addressed was Bob's thread "Metaphysics as an Illegitimate Source of Knowledge". Bob seems to have changed his mind.

Wittgensteinian hand-waving isn't a real response. — Leontiskos

Probably not, given certain prejudices about what a "real" response might be.

But it might be the best we can achieve.

Perhaps the rest is just shite we make up. Maybe that's important, too. But I'll reserve judgement.

If the claim that there are two cups is metaphysical, then so is the counterclaim that there is only one. — Leontiskos

I wasn't appealing to "another metaphysical claim", but to common usage.

I won't ask a Kantian to get a cup out for tea. Heaven knows what might happen.

aren't we getting a little over-simplistic here? — J

I like simple. I don't understand "bedrock Existence-with-a-Capital-E".

I did like your

The point is that, veridical or not, something is going on. — J

...except that I think what's going on is mostly veridical. There are true statements about the world. Lots of 'em.

(Edit: and I'll add that most of them are not just about my perceptions.)

An obtuse reference to another of Bob's threads concerning the legitimacy of metaphysics.

I would have thought that, where a metaphysics leads you to count two cups where there is otherwise but one, that alone would be grounds for doubt.

I don’t think you have said much in terms of your contentions yet. — Bob Ross

Yeah, I can see your lack of comprehension.

Interesting: could you please elaborate? — Bob Ross

That's what the rest of my post does... the counting bit is the one/two worlds problem. So you are happy that you have two cups, when realism and common usage says there is but one.

See how metaphysics leads one astray?

I'll come in on side with 's view here. A congenital problem with idealism is that, in denying that things exits outside the mind, it throws out the existence of other minds. Of course over the last few hundred years various arguments and excuses have accreted around Kant's thinking, but it seems difficult to see how we cannot be sure of the chair on which we sit, and yet we can be sure of the folk to whom we talk.

So, what arguments do you find convincing against transcendental idealism? — Bob Ross

Most of them?

I think it's been made clear, by myself and by others, that there are problems with the very idea of a thing in itself.

There's also the problem of one or two worlds - an area of disagreement amongst Kantians in themselves...

When you count the things that exist - say the chair on which you sit, or the cup on your table - how many do you count? Is it one, roughly the cup-in-itself as you perceive it? Or are there two, the cup-in-itself, unamenable to conversation, and the cup-as-perceived, about which we somehow can converse?

Or will you agree with me that being obliged to ask this question shows that something has gone badly astray?

So the only perspective is that of the viewer, looking at the corpse.

See from around PI §283 onward, especially

Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead is not the same. All our reactions are different. If someone says, “That cannot simply come from the fact that living beings move in such-and-such ways and dead ones don’t”, then I want to suggest to him that this is a case of the transition ‘from quantity to quality’.

I concur with his sentiment here, except I do not know what to make of ‘from quantity to quality’...

You've read this stuff; what's going on?

I was wondering about the visceral reaction. — Fooloso4

Death is not something one experiences in the first person. Dying, perhaps, but not being dead. Contrast that with pain.

Not at all sure where this is going.

Not really. — Bob Ross

A shame. It is apparent that arguing the point pushes you to defend Kantianism, reinforcing it in your mind.

This just disqualifies the idea that nothing exists, and nothing produces experience. — Bob Ross

Yep. You say that as if it were a bad thing. I suggest that the idea that we need a proof that things exist is affected, an intellectual pretence. Descartes' bad idea. There are other ways of dealing with sceptics.

That’s the nice thing about Kant: he stuck to a very oddly specific subject matter which can easily subsume all others underneath it. — Bob Ross

Doesn't that sound a bit too good? A bit like the way in which disciples will praise the words of their Guru? Are his ideas perfect, and if not where do they go astray? If idealism is that good, it's odd that philosopher overwhelmingly reject it. Perhaps Kant was right, so far as he went, but was asking the wrong questions.

Like what? — Bob Ross

Your very participation here shows that you hold that there are others who understand something of what you are saying and will participate in a dialogue with you. You're already well past "I think therefore I am".

As I alluded earlier, flirting with Descartes, Kant, Spinoza and so on is a philosophical rite of passage. It's lack of critique that marks the novice. Can you tell us where Kant went wrong?

Oh, ; no, zero is not a singularity.

And this:

Perhaps, the singularity from which everything arises, is in a superposition with reality. That is, a double state, in one state the universe exists as a singularity, in the other it exists in the state we are familiar with, with causality and dimensions. — Benj96

remains gobbledegook.

this is not a modern or contemporary development. — Fooloso4

Yep. Something invisible moves the trees, carries the clouds across the sky, you can feel it on your face. It enters and leaves your body as you breath. When it leaves a body permanently, the spirit is gone.

I have said this several times. — Fooloso4

Perhaps I was not clear. I am happy with what you have said here.

Hunters do not react this way when they kill. — Fooloso4

I wasn't referring to any reaction of regret; just the simple fact that a dead body is different to a live one. I was attempting to draw a parallel with Wittgenstein's observations concerning pain. Too long a bow, it seems.

The ubiquitous account is that something has left the body, implying a dualism. My point was that it is of equal validity to say that the body no longer does what it once did, avoiding the dualism.

Anyway, this thread would seem to be joining so many recent topics by heading off into exegesis of the ancients. Not my area.

By Ciceronianus own admission, it is not a contention with transcendental idealism; as it is a necessary and perfectly anticipated consequence of it. — Bob Ross

Oh, not a contention, to be sure - but while Tully might speak for himself, it's plain that talk about a thing about which we can say nothing is at least awkward.

And our perceptions reach much further than they did in Kant's day, in ways he could hardly have imagined. I wonder would he have been so ready to talk about the thing-in-itself as beyond our understanding had he seen how far recent physics has taken us. Which is just to say he was a product of his time.

Finally, if all we are to take from "There is experience, therefore something exists" is the existence of the experience, I don't see that we have made much progress. Certainly we would have no reason to conclude that anything more than the experience exists. But that's not the main problem here; it's rather that you are already making us of language, along with all that entails; so your very line of thinking presupposes far more than it pretends.

This is of course a huge topic. Yes, physics does provide us with ways to do things we could not otherwise do, and it is important to note that physics is not deterministic in the Newtonian clockwork universe sense, and there is much conceptual clarification to do with self-determination and freedom, and scale will influence what it is we are dealing with and we are all strange loops...


But, and still, physics does not provide the resources to determine if you will put sugar in your coffee.


That is, there is a difference here not so much of magnitude as of kind. What physics does is not the sort of thing one does in deciding on one's sugar.

The Liar is a bit more involved than just that. There are a wide range of formalisations.

Gödel does not use the liar. The sentence of interest is not "This sentence is not true" but "This sentence cannot be proved".

But we've covered this, earlier.

No, , that's not close.

The language "divided in two" is loaded with dualism.
— Banno

It reflects the dualism that Socrates is responding to. Then as now the division of body and soul was common. As you say:

The common prejudice is that at death something leaves the body.
— Banno

He uses the division of body and soul, and in doing so brings that belief into question. — Fooloso4

I'll take your word for it, although I recall reading a similar account elsewhere, with Plato writing differing accounts for various audiences. What's curious is the way in which talk of division or of a spirit leaving the body comes so easily.

I want to draw attention to what is a visceral difference between how one sees a living and a dead body.

We brace ourselves against this with ritual, seeking some sort of continuity or normality. But our grief recognises the loss.

Notice how I talk about not taking concepts out of their native contexts? — baker

Oh, yes. How you square this with semantic holism remains unexplained.

It is possible to make physics do that, though. — baker

Is it? Or is that an act of faith on your part? You put your trust in it being possible without the case being demonstrated.

Elsewhere, I just wrote this:

Odd, isn't it, that when some folk discover that the chair they are sitting on is composed of atoms, and is overwhelmingly space, they sometimes decide that therefore it's no longer really a chair. — Banno

The same happens when a Chemist claims that

"there is no love, there are only chemicals in the brain" — baker

As if love vanished after such explanations.

I have not given out my definition of the universe, — Corvus

I could go with my definition of the universe which is my town and the surrounding areas I reside and walk about on sunny weekends — Corvus

Hmm. A lost joke, it seems.

If scepticism "haunts us all the time", then so does certainty. Consider our acceptance of the paper, the workshop, all the conversations therein, and then this thread; all showing the certainty within which this discussion occurs. Our certainty here is not the result of rational considerations of criteria.

It's what we do.

Odd, isn't it, that when some folk discover that the chair they are sitting on is composed of atoms, and is overwhelmingly space, they sometimes decide that therefore it's no longer really a chair.

Any book suggestions? Or counter arguments to transcendental idealism that you find hold weight? — Bob Ross

One core problem has already been mentioned by .

Keep in mind that when Kant posited his ideas, microscopes were a novelty and Dalton had yet to explicate the place of atoms in Chemistry. Much that was hidden was subsequently revealed. We've learned quite a lot about the stuff we couldn't see. This has obliged Kantians to move to treating of phenomena rather than of reality.

So you might reconsider your first argument. Folk have experiences that do not imply that something exists - hallucinations, dreams, illusions and so on. Your conclusion is not justified.

A seed of doubt, maybe.

But does anyone disagree and claim that the body keeps working the same way after death? — Leontiskos

i don't think I said or implied otherwise. I was questioning the phrasing

a single, unified person is divided in two — Fooloso4

I don't think you are on the same page.

You present a quote that doesn't support your claim, and without references. :meh:

Here's the Ngram.

I am starting to embrace transcendental idealism... — Bob Ross

Good. Keep reading. You may grow out of it.

Sure. But isn't one of the methods of Philosophy to ask and analyse meanings and definitions of terms in the sentence trying to find out if the concepts are meaningful and understandable? — Corvus

Well, yes - that's what these posts are about. I'm pointing out that we do not do so by specifying an essence; that the way we use language will often suffice. So it will quickly become obvious that your use of "universe" differed in scale from that of other folk.