It's like: the mind always breaks the world into halves: light, dark, near, far, etc. These halves are dependent on one another for meaning.
It's a theory of meaning, sort of: meaning arises from oppositions. But when we think of the meaning of Unity, and note that it's dependent on the idea of Plurality, a second, transcendent unity appears — frank

Plato's Parmenides character is not Parmenides. Uncovering the foibles of the primitive logic of opposites and pluralities and how this evolved from Parmenides to Plato is what reading Plato's Parmenides is mostly about. The proof of this is in the 'unreadable' and controversial lesson of the second half of Plato's dialogue. The IEP and SEP are the best intro for starters.
The absolutes of cosmology and cosmogony are elsewhere.

"Ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing". — Parmenides
Since ex nihilo nihil fit, Parmenides rejected becoming; after all becoming implies an initial stage of nonbeing which in Parmenides universe is either nothing ... — TheMadFool

So he did. Parmenides (and Plato) divided the 'World' of the philosopher into (I) what can be known with certainty and (II) what is mere opinion. (Part I) Certain knowledge can only be formal according to and following Parmenides' deductive logic. For formalism only, what is is, and what isn't be cannot possibly be or be thought of, because premises and deductive logic says so with certainty. If the number 1 is then it is, otherwise nothing can be said because anything else goes. Green is green, not-green is either unspeakable (Parmenides) or everything else in the rest of the formal world (Plato).

There are a number of theories about what Parmenides actually believed — frank

There are a number of views to be sure due to the lack of clarity of the original text. Some is just poor writing skills in expressing an abstract subject matter (I sympathize with that). But the philosophical details were also too complicated to be clearly laid out this early by possibly the originator of formal logic. What there is is enough for Parmenides to have become the father of formal philosophy.

Parmenides' philosophy starts with Truth, the basis and proof for certainty of genuine knowledge. Of course, Truth is not a goddess but a singular value of evaluation. It is One or its Form of One. This Form cannot be in motion, change, come-to-be, perish, or lack uniformity.

Darwin is a translation of Hegel into empirical language — Joshs

You think so?

What is the relation between the two? — Shawn

The overwhelming majority of professional philosophers today do not hold that there is a significant difference between metaphysics and epistemology, and teach the subjects to that belief. Therefore on an amateur and student forum one should not expect discussions of metaphysics as first philosophy, as prior to epistemology and logic, to happen. That would require too much independent deep thought.

Metaphysics as understood before Aristotle, sufficiently documented in pre-Aristotelian literature, is almost completely unappreciated except as archaeological curiosity. Shamefully, it is written off by current dogmatic academic analytic 20th Century practice.

Edit: ooops, The first sentence is a brainfart. It's metaphysics and ontology that are melded and used interchangeably. Then epistemology is what it is.

Does reality require an observer?
... an observer is not external to reality. We are intrinsic to it. We are one facet of reality that happens to register itself. So when the question is rehashed as “does reality require reality” the question becomes a bit pointless. — Benj96

From a third-person observer perspective, it is true that other observers are part of reality and blend right into reality. But that is not what you are asking. The issue is whether the first-person observer matters as separate from what is being observed as reality. That is crucially important whether including or not including the observer itself as part of reality.

One reason for this is that while there are many third-person observers, there can be only one absolute 'I'. Only I can have my exact perceptions, beliefs, knowledge and values. Reality is unique to my 'I'. From a subjective perspective, when I sleep the world pauses, and when I die the world ends.

More importantly, the physical world is also absolutely centered on the observer, whether that be a person or any instrument, and the world looks different to each and every observation.

I guess what I’m really asking is is there any objective discernible difference between the state of observing and the state of being observed. Are they entirely interchangeable. Is the rest of the universe simultaneously observing us just as we observe it? — Benj96

The observer, being unique, sets the rules of observation. Be that the time, the place, the 'objects', the perspective, the methodology, the ontology of the logic used, and some arbitrary theoretical filter such as philosophical outlook.

Does reality require an observer? — Benj96
With respect to Kant's phenomena, yes but in re noumena, I don't know. — TheMadFool

Well that's the thing. If we have to consult someone's philosophy to say what reality is then we are in trouble. Why wouldn't we all just know what it is if it is?

Perhaps reality either is, or is not, or even neither or both. If each of these is unsatisfactory to some people then we all must be wrong. There appears to be a plurality of possible answers that we can't funnel into to just one.

Perhaps reality is just a name, a placeholder, not for the world itself if there is such a thing, but for our intersection with our personal world or with one of the many social and scientific worlds. After all, famine wars epidemics death are surely real to other people if not us at the moment.

By "symbols" I am thinking of those things within an art work that draw us in and with which we make an emotional connection. ... Is there a general philosophical concept that successfully describes why symbolic things have emotional meaning to an audience as opposed to the creator? — TheVeryIdea

Philosophy is a rational enterprise that has, following Plato, been divorced from creative arts. The notion that art is technical imitation persists and much vulgar critique is still based on perfection of depiction. A lifelike cute puppy will always sell.

Symbolic things are not philosophical but social and cultural. Art that rides the memes, even better creates one will be judged as great. The artist who works on expressing personal psychological meaning starts out alone. Should the expression turn out to evoke emotional meaning from the viewer/audience then it is successful. Prediction ought to depend on knowing the inclinations of one's intended audience. Why are Michelangelo's Pieta and the Mona Lisa vastly popular while the artistically much greater Slaves at the Uffizi Gallery less so?

This unstoppable character of light, lies at the bottom of SR (and GR, for that matter, which is nothing more than accelerated SR). In a sense you could say that interaction by light is instantaneous, as there is no time passage for light. So in a sense, all thing happen at the same time. Luckily there is space to prevent this.

Note that I use entropic time as the ingredient of this vision. A value can be assigned to it, it's entropic time quantified.

So in this light, can time (so not our subjective experience of it) be assigned to God? It depends. If he is part of this universe, then obviously yes. If they are outside of it? Maybe. It could be that there is a higher dimensional realm, of which our universe is an intersection. While time out there continues, the time at the big bang could have been fluctuating, giving rise to the big bang at their time-like command. — GraveItty

My hazy intuitions warn me that you somehow both recognize and confound various times here and there. Plato seems to read as speaking of three types of motion: translation, rotation, and flux which I think of as any sort of change over time. But Plato also thought that time and change are interchangeable,

Modern entropy is the slime that the slug that is the universe leaves in its trail. Statistically it is a steady increase (like the tons of plastic bottles in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,) but locally there are greater outbursts depending on the strength of local flux (from rivers of pollutants). But time itself does nothing in modern physics any more than space does except to keep each other inflated. Therefore it seems to me that entropy is independent of physical time.

As important as the divided line is, it is not the whole of Plato's metaphysics. It is part of political dialogue, both in the public sense and with regard to the politics of the soul. — Fooloso4

Reading Plato is like a quantum mechanical view of the physical world. What we see is an interaction between the reader and the text. Who we are and what we look for is half the interpretation of a (somewhat wrongly) presumed authoritatively objective source. Would-be politicians might read the Republic and the Laws, theologians seek God and the eternal in the Timaeus.

But Forms and particulars are only hypothetical constructs that are literally nonsense unless shown to be logically related as parts of a greater edifice. Sure, the Line is just the scaffolding but without it everything collapses whether that be ontology, ethics, politics, psychology, and even God.

Even given that this is your topic I admire your courage to take up something this deep.

Metaphysical issues are strewn about throughout the Dialogues, seemingly after the fact as revisions of the initial publication perhaps to forestall facile reading and criticism (from within the Academy by people who thought they had better ideas). Everything must be read and remembered (haha) or else one must have an index of where relevant suggestions are hidden. To our great fortune, we have online search engines and easy access to professional explorations with bibliographies. With the aid of these, even we can take a stab at some of Plato's deepest thought.

The key to Plato's metaphysics is the Line. One must take seriously all four levels of division which are at a finer resolution than the two that are usually focused on by Aristotelian readings Plato. Four is minimal to allow sufficient intermediate steps required to get from the lowest level to the highest and back again, or as people would have it, the other way around.

It is hard to discover any description of the lowest level other than what Plato says dismissively, but this is the physical world, the one physics studied and studies, (see Kant's noumena). Participation connects this unknowable world to the real absolute Forms to momentarily produce ''objects' as appearances, (see Kant's phenomena). Since this is not logically possible then how can it be? That's the puzzle. Mathematicals can tell us about the Forms or some Forms, and about the physical world, but can they tell us what the connection is and how it might work?

Greater and smaller are relative terms when describing particular things, not the Forms themselves. Simmias is greater than Socrates and smaller than Phaedo, but Greatness itself is not greater or smaller. — Fooloso4

The Forms are not relative but absolute, Greatness and Smallness. Something greater has more Greatness and less Smallness, that's how Plato's relatives work. The conversion is flawed, as Plato knew, because Forms are point objects outside of space and time while relatives are along a common line. To work, an origin or standard for comparison would also be required. In the passage, Simmias is measured against two competing standards; at different times he is great and small. But if we lined all three up then Simmias would be both great and small at the same time.

Socrates also says that the Forms are an hypothesis — Fooloso4

And so they are. Forms cannot be deduced from any source nor can they be directly observed which leaves only scientific hypotheses by the way of divine inspiration which happen to be the 'likeliest' and therefore should not be doubted. This may seem farfetched until we recognize that modern theoretical science works the same way.

Socrates likens the Forms to originals or paradigms, and things of the world to images or copies. This raises several problems about the relation between Forms and particulars, the methexis problem. Socrates is well aware of the problem and admits that he cannot give an account of how particulars participate in Forms. — Fooloso4

A two-tier metaphysics can't work because it is static and too dissimilar to be directly related. The relationship top-down one-many lacks both motivation and mechanism therefore nothing can happen, nothing can be caused. Plato's particulars can be neither static (Aristotle) nor in flux (Heracliteans) but exist momentarily (Bradley).

See also my discussion of the city at war in my discussion of Timaeus. The static Forms cannot account for a world that is active, a world in which there is chance and indeterminacy. — Fooloso4

Agreed. Forms as simples cannot be causative in the world.

We can try this one:

... each of the abstract qualities exists and that other things which participate in these get their names from them, then Socrates asked: “Now if you assent to this, do you not, when you say that Simmias is greater than Socrates and smaller than Phaedo, say that there is in Simmias greatness and smallness?” — [Phaedo,102b]

This is a crucial problem in the Forms. If the opposites (complements or contraries?) 'greater than' and 'smaller than' are relative terms then everything and everyone participates in each of Greatness and Smallness to some degree. But to what degree? Only in context can this be determined, otherwise these terms and all other Forms are in danger of collapsing.

[Edit] What makes such problems especially challenging is that it is wise to assume that Plato's conception of participation to explain particulars and predication is fundamentally sound. This way, the quest becomes more formal in search of gaps and logical flaws in his model.

When I cut a pie in half then I have a determinate dyad of slices of the whole pie. No problem.
When I divide a cloud then I have two clouds.
When I split an idea then I have nothing.

Unfortunately, Plato's logic could be renamed early logical or pre-logical argument. Neither the great Sophists nor Plato had sufficient grasp of the logical argumentation they were practicing and teaching. When we read Plato's Dialogues this is good thing to keep in mind before convicting the Sophists (who were the real logicians and rhetoricians of their time) or old Plato of being illogical.

Gerson also insisted that Plato was an Aristotelian ! (It's a book plus a lecture on youtube)
What does that say about Gerson's credibility as an expert on ancient philosophy?

Since Plato incorporated and synthesized almost all philosophy of his time into an extended multifaceted corpus, he can be claimed by followers any one of those philosophies to be of their own limited persuasions.

Metaphysically speaking, Aristotle's position was looked at and rejected by Plato except in the narrowest sense.

The Cratylus rejects the view that words or the world are the source of the Forms, and the notion that material objects have reality was abhorrent to Plato.

Instead, the basis of Plato's participatory realism is in fleeting appearances that come and go, are and are not, in a moving dynamic world of objects+chora.

Since they are potentialities which need to be actualized, he claims the soul itself as the first principle of actuality, which is responsible for actualizing the various potencies.
Aristotle says:
From this account it is clear that he [Plato] only employed two causes: that of the essence, and the material cause; for the Forms are the cause of the essence in everything else, and the One is the cause of it in the Forms (Aristot. Meta. 987b19-988a14) — Apollodorus

Yes, I saw this, and it is inconsistent with what he said about Plato the very page before, what I quoted. It makes me wonder how accurate this account of Plato's metaphysics, which Aristotle presents, really is. Aristotle presented it to refute it, so it's likely a bit of a straw man.
If we take Aristotle’s statement, “the Forms are the causes of everything else” in an absolute sense, then they will be the cause of the Good, not only of the One. — Apollodorus — Metaphysician Undercover

I think Aristotle was genuinely struggling to understand as much of Plato as he had read and (mis)understood as well as insisting that one or another of his own reductions was sufficient to explain all. Since Plato was a self-publisher, much as today's bloggers are, he was free to adjust and amend his previous books on the run, as he saw fit. If this was the case, then Aristotle who had divorced himself from Plato and the later books, would have been left in confusion when faced with the Theaetetus' psychology and the Timaeus' atomism and cosmology. With the Parmenides, Plato had already refuted and abandoned his middle-period metaphysics in favor of the much more complex Sophists and Philebus.

Incidentally, this is very like what Platonists have suffered with throughout the ages to varying degrees depending on how deep they are in Aristotelean reductionism, whether that be on the 'universal' or 'material' side. The vast majority (all?) of translations are metaphysically wrong-headed, and interpretation based on Aristotelean mis-translation then become next to worthless. As old as the Cornford works are, they are still invaluable because of their depth, and because he made the fewest gross errors.

Hw do you figure music is not manageable? It's not an object? Or it is an object, but not an ontologically manageable one. If the latter, what does that even mean? — tim wood

Some objects are tangible, like a house or a mouse, some are less so, like a cloud. Some other objects are in the mind, like ideas, simple numbers or dreams. Then there are those that are products of social conventions, like scientific objects.

For music, there are several obvious candidates: the material original score, the music to which that score refers, or a correct performance. I take it that you are under the impression that one of these is the true composition. Unfortunately, none of these comes close enough to the world-as-it-is to sufficiently describe what most philosophers can comfortably accept.

For example, the score is generally not intended by the composer to be performed as it is written, The written language of music is too sparse to indicate exact performance. Nor is music intended to be performed exactly as the composer first envisioned, because variation and interpretation are implicit in the musical score and practice to suit the performer, the occasion, and the audience. Even the composer's own performance of their music is just one particular case and not the definitive exemplar.

True, some degree of vagueness in conception also occurs in natural and scientific objects, but in music variation is the heart of the subject and not just an insignificant nuisance to the philosopher as it is elsewhere.

2.1 The Fundamentalist Debate
Musical works in the Western classical tradition admit of multiple instances (performances). Much of the debate over the nature of such works thus reads like a recapitulation of the debate over the “problem of universals”; the range of proposed candidates covers the spectrum of fundamental ontological theories. We might divide musical ontologists into the realists, who posit the existence of musical works, and the anti-realists, who deny their existence. Realism has been more popular than anti-realism, but there have been many conflicting realist views. — SEP says

The SEP article lays out the difficulties of the subject, and this does not even acknowledge the role of the listener or the circumstances of the performance. Is this at a circus, parade, a concert in the park, or a funeral? To go beyond some vague definition for art and music, we really should attempt to limit philosophical discussion to ontologically manageable objects. While this is not the advertised topic of this thread, it is the underlying issue, I believe.

Hilary calls the performance a 'wild ride'. From a very still start. — Amity

The wild ride also goes for the audience, especially if the performer is famous and the concert is highly anticipated. I often think that composing and performing are mostly technical with touches of creativity here and there but sometimes I am shocked into intense lasting pleasure (superior to even the best sex) by transcendent artistry. It is this that I seek as a listener.

Your highlighting the importance of presence in music sparked thoughts in a number of directions. The prime focus should be on the essential personal subjective experience of one listener at an ideally live performance with a large audience also in attendance. This one-time experience of the weather, traffic, parking, cost, crowd, formality, location of seats, acoustics, the dispositions of human performers, and coughing strangers during quiet passages.

This is different from listening repeatedly to recorded performances with a fine headset. Recordings are comparative by their nature with so much more of the same or similar recordings readily available on youtube. Spontaneity is replaced with sober analysis off the computer. The Vidovic recital I meant is the recent one, starting at 41:39. My wife thinks it's the best she's ever heard. So do I, but all I could think of at the time were those muted notes. Sorry me.

But presence has other notable aspects. The performers make the music and not the composer. The composer is the beneficiary or victim of the instrumentalists. Performers work for years to hone fine details of their art to create the possibilities that only can come to fruition on stage in front of an audience or microphones. When that happens they also experience the presence of their efforts. I found a couple of oldies to compare: Heifetz, Ysaye, Hassid

Music is a presencing [...] the experience [...] the time of hearing it [...] , along with the conventions of the time — tim wood

I think that at the time of presencing the composition in their minds most composers were keenly aware of the audience and as professionals needed to balance their own much further advanced musical intellect and the pedestrian listening public.

When emperor Joseph II allegedly yawned and later told Mozart that there were too many notes, to which Mozart asked 'which ones should I remove your majesty?', the emperor was not wrong and neither was Mozart. Today audiences listen to recordings with veneration and expect the performance to be true to the note, at the expense of the spontaneity and innovations of the presentation. I'm the same way. Why did Ana Vidovic flick off that three-note figure repeatedly in an otherwise other-wordly Scarlatti sonata?

if intelligence is what Plato called nous, then is its modern assessment defined by psychometrics testing, as IQ? — Shawn

I would venture that most disagreements in philosophy originate from vagueness of the topic or from ambiguity of usage in the language employed by the discussants. Here both are present.

The mind can be viewed as a general wide-ranging concept or it can be drastically narrowed down to a hardly useful statistic depending on the whim of the speaker. This range of meaning was paralleled by classical philosophical positions where the Sophists favored a flexible, sensing, feeling, intuitive mind, whereas the Eleatics pushed for what they thought was a manageable knowing reduction.

The meaning of nous likewise was not as fixed as the lexicons would have it. Aristotle should have had the strictest conception, Protagoras and Gorgias the broadest, with Plato somewhere in between but leaning towards knowledge by intuition.

"A quantum object has no way of being something in itself, independently of the experimental context in which it is observed"

Here I disagree. — Thunderballs

Then you're lost

The first step is to visualize a vector field: — jgill

:up: and over time ?

So what's difference between speed and velocity? If I run around in a circle at 10m/sec what's my speed, average velocity, and my instantaneous velocity at t₀?

What kind of logic is this? — Ioannis Kritikos

This is three-valued logic with the middle ground being everything and anything between the recognized and named extremes. This example is a fascinating contrast to Aristotle's principle of non-contradiction which rules out the possibility of any middle way.

Believe it or not, an old friend of mine had very similar thoughts! He spent his life trying to relate those ideas without much success. But he died happily knowing that the next time he comes back freshly reincarnated he will return with more clues to further his quest. He is not back yet. I hope he isn't now a giraffe or something.

Physical world is material side. Appearance is the "magical", "essence essential" construction of material part — Prishon

By what means can any of these be related? How does Prishon's physical world relate to Prishon's material world, can they really be the same, as in 'is', or is the magical essence the only intermediary for reconstruction?

the appearance of that physical world is mind-dependent — Prishon

So the physical world is mathematical and the appearance is experimental physics?

So one way or another, it seems quite implausible that "there was nothing before the Big Bang", both in terms of the actual physics, as well as any sort of conceptual coherency to this idea. — Seppo

Are you saying that there was a 'before' before time? Was there any time at all, or perhaps there was more than one time. Do you mean time as an invented physical term or as our life-experiential time. If you say they are the same then what makes you so sure?

Intuitionists" believe that mathematics is just a creation of the human mind. In that sense you can argue that mathematics is invented by humans. Any mathematical object exists only in our mind and doesn't as such have an existence.

"Platonists", on the other hand, argue that any mathematical object exists and we can only "see" them through our mind. Hence in some sense Platonists would vote that mathematics was discovered. — Prishon

One should not have to choose between these extremes. Mathematics was discovered through technological trial and error to be reasonably but not perfectly predictive of sounds coming out of musical instruments and from observations of the day and night sky. It was obvious from the first that mathematics is the guide to a hidden world that lies beneath the appearances that we take for granted as the reality of speech and action.

What 'exists' does not belong. Existence is a construct needed to describe fixed objects in a supposedly timeless reality.

the problem with saying that it’s ‘merely’ an invention of the human mind, is that it doesn’t allow for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. Maths is predictive, through it you can discern facts about nature which you would have no way of finding otherwise. — Wayfarer

But mathematics is predictive only in the sense that physicists have assumed (as the Pythagoreans Heraclitus Plato Galileo had) that the unknowable natural world is mathematically orderly. This pragmatic assumption has sent mathematical physicists scouring through all maths in search of hypotheses to fit physical observations.

As of today, I doubt that there is any maths left that has not been incorporated in some physics. New maths is spurred on both from discovery-invention within pure mathematics and from mathematical physics in search of logical justification for some fanciful ideas.

Are you saying we have a model of reality — Yohan

No. I'm suggesting that philosophical reality is made up by the philosopher, constructed out of the elements of the model, to match a particular philosophical model. For example, if all objects make up everything there is, then we darn well better make sure we can say what objects are. Is the Sun, which is an extended cloud of mysterious plasma an object or must we be able to grasp all objects?

This in contrast to personal reality that we usually mean when we say that this or that event or memory is real, As memory of a personal experience fades into the past it becomes less real. More or less real which we swear by is not allowable in philosophy, some thing is either real or it is not.

So there is nothing but models of models of models ad infinitum>? — Yohan

In everyday conversation reality is a word for what we might imagine to be out there.

From a philosophical perspective only formal technical models can be constructed because we can't be certain of anything more. Then the models can be tentatively presumed to correspond to what is now labelled reality. The debates are about possible improvements and objections to improvements of that model. What is labelled truth is the correspondence of a statement to that model but of course not to some unknowable outside world.

But common conceptions always remain very different from the terminology used by philosophers. Lack of understanding of this distinction leads to most if not all public criticism of philosophy. No, we are not shoveling clouds.

Reality cannot be inconsistent. — Yohan

Reality is consistent with our model because the model is our reality. That's truth.

But not even this! For as nature as it is understood here to be a non-sentient randomness of conformity can convey what time is best to plant, hunt, or harvest. So where does that leave us? — Outlander

... non-sentient randomness of conformity implies a scientific (but not philosophical) objectivity in that within the scope of all observations that conformity is universal. Nature knows when it's time to plant. As for us, we copy and try to improve on nature's way by seeking to extract and make use of information useful for us.

What is information for the cosmologist is not information for the farmer.

:100: :up:

Talk about the state of anything when it is not being observed is empty words. — Wayfarer

Sorry about that! I'm only trying to make a point to Kenosha Kid there.
I agree with you about QM. Exists is only meaningful to a philosopher and is an empty word for QM theory. For example, electrons can't philosophically exist because of their lack of 'substance', being only a bundle of instantaneously measurable ephemeral properties.

"The cat is dead". The truth value of that depends on who you ask. — Kenosha Kid

There is an interesting thing about that cat. Wigner's cat and his friend's cat are obviously not the same cat, as one is alive and the other is dead. Ontologically speaking, this is the only correct answer. People who claim that the there is but one cat are suffering from confusion. To expand, there are as many cats as there are observers.

What's perfect?
Logically the computer cannot do otherwise. Therefore your conception of perfect must be wrong.