Ontological arguments for idealism
What are some good ontological/logical arguments for ontological idealism?
I have been thinking about one for a while, which I found out has a place in the literature. It goes something like this:
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If there is something else than the mental, it either interacts with the mental, or it does not. If it does not interact, then one can just ignore it and define "reality" as the intra-connected and closed sub-reality of "super-reality" that we experience; then, reality is idealist, even if super-reality is not.
If the non-mental does interact with the mental however, that raises questions as to how that is even possible.
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I have not found any proof/argument of how it is impossible for the non-mental to interact with the mental; only assertions thereof. Do not feel limited in your responses by the above argument. I'm looking for any and all arguments for ontological idealism. Also, feel free to criticize any of the arguments in this thread.
I have been thinking about one for a while, which I found out has a place in the literature. It goes something like this:
--
If there is something else than the mental, it either interacts with the mental, or it does not. If it does not interact, then one can just ignore it and define "reality" as the intra-connected and closed sub-reality of "super-reality" that we experience; then, reality is idealist, even if super-reality is not.
If the non-mental does interact with the mental however, that raises questions as to how that is even possible.
--
I have not found any proof/argument of how it is impossible for the non-mental to interact with the mental; only assertions thereof. Do not feel limited in your responses by the above argument. I'm looking for any and all arguments for ontological idealism. Also, feel free to criticize any of the arguments in this thread.
Comments (184)
You might start with the simplified question of how any sort of interaction is possible.
You are explaining idealism as dualistic. In your explanation the mental and the non-mental are two and thus interaction has to be explained.
As I understand idealism, all is mental. The non-mental is an expression of the mental.
Like the water surface and the ripple, the mental is the water (all there is) and the ripples are the non-mental (water excited).
Hello 0 implies everything,
It sounds like you may be referring to the problem of interaction for substance dualists; and the argument is founded on the acceptance of substratum theory (and so is the stereotypical subtance dualist position): simply put, substratum theory is the conjecture that properties require a substance to bare them. In other words, properties are bore by a bare particular which is distinct from the properties themselves. For example, from a substratum theorist perspective, the properties of a chair (e.g., material, color, etc.) are bore by a bare particular which is the compresence for the chairs properties. This is how they would explain how objects have properties which are tied or glued to themselves as opposed to being floating properties.
This is where the idea of a substance comes from in philosophy of mind: it is the ultimate substrate which bears all the properties of that type.
Under this substratum theory, originates the first fundamental distinction in philosophy of mind: qualitative (i.e., pertaining to types of substances) vs. quantitative (i.e., pertaining to tokens, or how many, compose fundamentally reality within each type of substance) considerations. With respect to the former, here are the basic distinctions:
Qualitative:
Monism: there is one kind of substance.
Pluralism: there are three or more kinds of substances.
Dualism: there are two kinds of substances.
Within the latter:
Quantitative:
Monism: there is only one thing within and of the kind of substance (in question).
Pluralism: there are three or more things within and of the kind of substance (in question).
Dualism: there are two things within and of the kind of substance (in question).
Sometimes the thing is referred to as a token.
Now, within philosophy of mind, under this substratum theory, there are five main (stereotypical) categories of views:
1. Physicalism (also sometimes used synonymously with materialism): a qualitative monist, quantitative pluralist view whereof the kind of substance is physical (or matter, depending on how the terms are hashed out) and there is fundamentally many of that kind which make up the real world.
2. Property Dualism (also sometimes called irreducable materialism/physicalism): a qualitative monist, quantitative pluralist view whereof there is one kind of substance which is physical but the mental is irreducable (somehow) to the physical (i.e., strong emergence) and there is fundamentally many of this kind which make up reality.
3. Substance Dualism: a qualitative dualist, quantitative pluralist view whereof there are two kinds of substances which are physical and mental and there is fundamentally many of both kinds which make up reality.
4. Idealism: a qualitative monist, quantitative monist view whereof there is one kind of substance which is mental and there is one thing which fundamentally constitutes reality (which is usually God).
5. Non-dualism: a qualitative pluralist, quantitative monist view whereof there are three or more kinds of substances which are usually mind, matter, and an unknown God-like unifying substance; and it is usually one thing which fundamentally constitutes reality (usually God in a pantheistic sense).
Now, I want to note that these are just stereotypical, basic definitions and many people will not fit nicely into them. For example, I am a subjective idealist (more or less), and definitely am not a quantitative monist. So do what you will with those definitions: I just thought it may be useful.
In terms of the interaction problem, by definition two substances have no communal attributes (as they are two fundamentally different kinds of existence): so one kind cannot, by definition, have any interaction with the other kind unless one is positing that two things can interact without sharing at least one communal property.
In terms of arguments for idealism, I will briefly elaborate on the argument from introspection and parsimony:
When one introspects upon their experience (which is consciousness), they will begin to realize that every object within their experience is wholly reducible to a collection of sensations. Now, unless there is a reason to posit conceptually external (consciousness-independent) objects to explain the data of ones experience, then by occams razor one ought to hold Idealism over the other positions because it is more parsimonious (i.e., it explains the same data with less entities). The million dollar question you must ask yourself is thusly this: do you need to posit (conceptually) a consciousness-independent object to explain any data within your experience? If not, then Idealism is for you. If you do, then it is not for you.
Now, what your argument seems to be what is sometimes called a malicious argument (although I dont find it such at all) that even if there was hypothetically a non-mental substance somehow, from the perspective of the subject it would still be all consciousness and they wouldnt ever need to conceptually posit consciousness-independent objects (even if there actually were some). To some extent, I sympathize with the view because I, likewise, do not think I can rule out there being something non-mental nor that the non-mental isnt, from a transcendent perspective, physical (or neither or what have you) because I do not subscribe to substratum theory.
Bob
I am familiar with the argument from parsimony, and although I find myself somewhat agreeing with it from a pragmatic point of view, I am in the enterprise of creating a theory of absolute certainty. Thus, making ontological assumptions based on pragmatic considerations is not really what I am about.
Furthermore, the argument from parsimony is not an argument for how it is impossible for the mental and non-mental to interact; instead, it is an argument for how it is unlikely and/or how it is most economical to assume they do not, one the basis of the how it is uneconomical to posit/unlikely that the non-mental exists.
I used interaction in the straight-forward sense that everyone uses it; not sure there is any other way. Interaction is present if the behavior of a thing is altered by the co-existence of another thing.
Ontological idealism is the claim that all of reality consists solely of the mental, as opposed to epistemological idealism, which is the claim that all we can know of reality is (that of) the mental.
I'm not what anyone would call an idealist in the philosophical sense, but I do see value in using that kind of approach. In order to do math or logic, you would have to be able to see the world through idealist lenses. Also, although I am mostly drawn to pragmatic approaches with a bit of materialism mixed in, I often find myself drawn to more idealist elements - honor, human rights, fairness, kindness.
1. The non-mental does not exist.
2. The non-mental does exist, but it cannot interact with the mental at all.
Both of these possibilities are practically identical, but to arrive at 2., one must invoke the problem of interaction. Basically, it side-steps the issue of proving the non-mental non-existent by arguing that it does not matter whether it exists.
I would disagree. In order to do classical mathematics or certain types of logic, one has to view it through the lens of Platonic forms (or some other non-mental, non-physical substance). There is no way to experience absolute infinity, for example. We can define it, but to invoke it as an object/property without constructing it, one would have to postulate or imagine some kind of realm in which it exists merely because it was definable.
One can contrast this to constructive mathematics, in which one must use an idealist or dualist lens (probably the latter, due to them designating the aid of computers performing calculations (necessarily) outside our experience as valid).
I think you and I are using the term "idealism" with different meanings. When I say "idealism" I mean philosophies similar to Plato's. From Wikipedia - "In its most basic fundamentals, platonism affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to exist in a third realm distinct from both the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism."
Am I using the word wrong? Anyway, whatever language differences we are having, I think you and I agree that seeing the world through Platonist glasses, as described in Wikipedia, would be useful for mathematicians.
That is not the typical definition, no. Though, I feel like I have a vague memory of it being used in that way; in any case, I do believe there is a tradition of using terms Forms and Ideas interchangeably.
However, the typical definition of ontological idealism is that it is the view that all of reality consists solely of the mental. On this point, Platonism is explicitly not; take what I say with a grain of salt, but I think Platonism is a substance pluralism, in that it claims there is a mental substance, a physical substance and an abstract substance (the latter consisting of Plato's forms).
Note also that epistemological idealism is the view that we only know (of) the mental.
That is fair: I should have included that distinction in my synopsis.
In that case, I think we are both in the same boat then: the only valid ontological position in philosophy of mind is in principle agnosticism.
I do think, however, that epistemological idealism is obtainable by the argument from parsimony.
Just to clarify, I wasnt trying to claim that the argument from parsimony is related to the problem of interaction: you are right that they are two separate things.
Bob
Well, I am in that boat, but only reluctantly so. I have been able to derive things from the empty set of assumptions, and as such, I might be able to derive ontological idealism. I think it might be possible via realizing restrictions on causality.
Quoting Bob Ross
I think epistemological idealism is obtainable through quite simple logic. All knowledge is directly derived from the mental (by definition of the mental), and in order to know that we can know of the non-mental is to know that there is a completely reliable mapping between the mental and non-mental. However, any such knowledge would be mediated by the mental. How can we know of a mapping if we do not have access to both the domain and its image?
How about judgement and reason? Is a rational judgement, like a syllogism, reducible to sensations?
Quoting Ø implies everything
I think there's an unstated problem in this description, which is how to grasp 'the mental' as an object of cognition. I think this is what panpsychism does: it attempts to show that the capacity for experience is something which even the most primitive fundamental particles, such as electrons, possess, and is in that sense, an objectively existent attribute. Then this latent capacity for experience is said to account for the much more sophisticated capacities found in animals and humans.
However, panpsychism is criticized for the combination problem, i.e. what is it that enables all these micro-experiential entities to be combined into the unified whole that presents itself in experience. Many philosophers regard that as a defeater for the Strawson/Goff style of panpsychism.
i.e.
Naturalism (in the domain of metaphysics) vs. Supernaturalism
Evidentialism (in the domain of epistemology) vs. mysticism, authoritarianism, dogmatism, a priori facts, faith.
Consequentialism(in the domain of ethics) vs. authoritarianism / absolutism
Aesthetic Relativism(In the domain of aesthetics) vs. cosmic aesthetics / aesthetics as morality.
Major Specific Advances also ignore idealism all together.
Set Theory
Symbolic Logic
Reduction of Mathematics to Axioms & Logic (Russell)
Transfinite Mathematics (Cantor)
Game Theory
Gödels Incompleteness Theorems / Dan Willard's Solutions
Modal Logic
Bayesian Epistemology
So there is really no place for idealism in Philosophy except from Chronicling.
Idealism doesn't assist our Philosophical goals (the production of wise claims about our world and the expansion of our understanding).
I suppose one formulation of idealism would be: there are only ideas and nothing else.
So, all there is are ideas, and ideas come from minds. If this is the argument, then we cannot say that there is non-mental stuff. The interaction problem does not arise.
One problem that arises out of such a formulation is pointed out by Galen Strawson, I think correctly. If there are only ideas, then the person who has the ideas, is also an idea.
But this is a problem, because an idea is (or should be) an idea for someone, a subject. But if the subject is an idea, then who is it that has the idea? Another idea? We could say a mind has ideas. But then the mind too would be an idea. That's not too coherent.
But, that's a very vulgar and general formulation of idealism, there are many others, which are quite sensible.
Well, I have many questions regarding how to grasp anything as an object of cognition, but I do not think that the category of the mental poses a lot more difficulty than any other concepts. There is some added difficulty due to its primitiveness however; it is only understood through pointing to experience, and the successful reception of that requires a non-verbal leap in the mind of the receiver. That said, all concepts derive from primitives and thus inherit this difficulty; however, the difficulty is less visible at these higher levels of conceptual aggregation, and there are also likely more sources of meaning rushing in to ground the concepts; though, that amplifies another issue, the issue of signifiers having distinct groundings between speaker and recipient.
In some ontologies based on objective idealism, all thinkable, perceivable and feelable objects exist regardless of whether they are the objects of any finite subject's consciousness. Perhaps these object's intrinsic natures also exist, despite those natures being incomprehensible to said finite subjects; for example, absolute infinity is a thought/concept whose extrinsic nature is thinkable to finite subjects. For proof, see this definition; absolute infinity is a quantity of which no number could be larger. Due to its definability, it has an extrinsic nature. In an ontology based on objective idealism, there could be a "place" for its intrinsic nature to exist as well, despite perhaps our fundamental incapacity to mentally access that nature.
This brings me to subjects . In an objectively idealist reality, the intrinsic nature of subjects could, like absolute infinity, also have a place in this objectively idealist reality; it is simply that this place is not (necessarily) the theater of our experiences. Perhaps it is capable of entering the theater temporarily, though, through deep introspection/meditation. Can you bring awareness to your awareness itself? Can a subject be its own object? Even if it can, we know from experience that it is not so at all times. Thus, we need something more to explain our own existence.
Another solution is to not define the mental as the contents of mentation, but rather, the space/medium of mentation. Thus, with this definition, idealism is not postulating the sole existence of experience, but rather, only the existence of experiencer(s). However, for this to then be idealism, experience would need to be derivative from experiencer; if not, then one would not be dealing with a monism, and thus, it would not be idealism. Bernando Kastrup conceptualizes this derivativity as experience being to experiencer what waves are to water.
The last solution is to simply reject the premise that experience necessitates an experiencer. What have we to support this notion, really? If we can envision a lifeless physicalist reality, why not a lifeless idealist reality? What if it is all an illusion; what if the self is just a construct of thoughts that belong to no-one, but that insist on belonging to someone? Can I not write on a paper, "Hey, I (this paper) am alive!". Perhaps an idealist reality can have objects that falsely proclaim the existence of a self. One can summarize this view with the following:
Cogito, ergo sum? No: Cogitatio est, ergo cogitatio est.
An example of the mind mater duality is hitting your big toe the signal travelled to the brain to inform of pain and avoid pain in future.
Useful to brain and body.
Its an evolutionary trait other wise wed be breaking hurting our body without this
:up:
It seems to me that 'ontological idealism' entails absolute (i.e. "divine") solipsism, which though conceptually unparsimonious is, in practice, indistinguishable from ontological naturalism (e.g. epicurean atomism or spinozist realism). I think the arguments for the latter are cogent and existential in ways the former are not.
I wonder, why do you find idealism conceptually unparsimonious, and why do you find naturalism more cogent?
Noticed that my Latin grammar was wrong, so I've edited the quoted text. I hope the message you received has not been affected.
This sounds like a complication. An object is an idea regardless of the subjects experience? Why postulate an object which can (perhaps) never be encountered by a subject and also claim its ontological status beforehand?
There could be some phenomenon that cannot be encountered by our kind of experience.
Quoting Ø implies everything
I think that's fair.
Quoting Ø implies everything
Correct. Schopenhauer addresses this point rather well, about us being both subject and object. And yes, our self-consciousness fluctuates.
Quoting Ø implies everything
Why can't idealism be monist? One could speak of the different aspects of the mental.
Kastrup uses this analogy, and it has some force. Sure, there is only water, but the activity of waves is an attribute or property of the water: water can be wavey, given certain circumstances.
In other circumstances, water can't be wavy, for instance if it is forzen. So while we are still speaking of water, we should consider the epistemic conditions that allow us to label something as wavy, or frozen. Which takes us somewhat beyond "just" water.
Quoting Ø implies everything
There is a sense in which the self is an illusion, or rather, a fiction, in Hume's phrase. But beyond our own conditions of having selves, to extend that to objects and attribute to them this aspect of "self", is not warranted, regardless of ones ontology.
I hold that awareness, will, and reason are non-physical and aren't really objects--as all three are dependent on the will or is the will itself. What I was trying to convey was that all objects (i.e., physical stuff) is reducible to sensations themselves and there is no need to posit conceptually some kind of sensation-free object.
Bob
What do you mean by empty set of assumptions?
What do you mean by realizing restrictions on causality? Idealism eliminates the possibility of causality: there is no physical interaction analogous to a physicalist worldview.
The problem I would have with this is that it is still positing a concept of consciousness-independent object, and simply noting we cant be 100% sure we are understanding the physical correctly (by the logic you already explicated); but that is still fundamentally conceding that one can know of the physical as the entire conceptual model is predicated on the idea that the mental is a sensing of the physicalwhich places the physical still conceptually as primary. Which, in turn, to me, makes the view very anti-idealist, because idealism is, at its root, that the mind (or mental) is primary. Now I understand that is valid, in the contemporary literature, to use epistemological idealism to refer to the kind of argument you noted, but, to me, it is just a severely skeptical physicalist or substance dualist view because it is still conceives the world as fundamentally and primarily physical (hence the outlook that the mental is an image of the physical). In my kind of style of epistemological idealism, I do not conceptualize the world that way: I do not concede that the senses are of something independent of them. I just dont see how one is an idealist in any sense if they are still viewing the world as fundamentally (and really ontologically I would argue) physical (or some other mind-independent thing). For example, Kant is considered an epistemological and trancsendental idealist (and to an extent I get why), but I think his view simply was incoherent with idealism in truth because he was still positing these realist notions of objects which we interpret as minds.
Bob
If, by "Idealism" you mean the rejection of Realism, all Either/Or logical arguments will go round in circles. You can't have overhead mental Ideality without its substrate of material Reality. And a Reality without sentient beings will have no Ideas. Reality knows itself via Ideality : the ability to abstract Concepts from Percepts ; to generalize Universals from Particulars ; to synthesize personal Meanings from impersonal Things. Reality & Ideality go together like matter & aether.
That's why I have resorted to an Intuitive argument that I call BothAnd. For example, Cogito Ergo Sum implies that I am both Mind and Body; both Knower and Known. We can have isolated abstractions only in imagination. :smile:
PS__Your appellation of "zero implies everything" sounds like a BothAnd concept. "Nothing" is meaningless without Something to relate it to. Computer logic is based on the fundamental relationship between All (1) and Nothing (0). Likewise, the concept of "Zero" is merely the opposite end of the statistical spectrum of all possibilities (100%). All things are relative : nothing exists in isolation.
"Nothing exists in isolation. In fact, all beings and phenomena exist only because of their relationship with other beings or phenomena. ? Jeff Ourvan, Quora
BothAnd :
One sense of non-dual is the opposite of Cartesian dualism, in which body & soul are completely different kinds of stuff. But if everything is made of Mind, or Consciousness, or Information as assumed in Panpsychism then Mind is simply the natural-but-immaterial function of the material Brain. Quantum theory is a materialistic version of non-duality. It views the world as made of continuous mathematical Fields of potential. Within their defining field, pairs of quantum particles may become entangled, and act as one, or vice-versa, fluid waves may also be discrete particles . Unfortunately, such BothAnd (wave/particle) constructs are difficult for our macro-sensing brains to imagine.
https://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page62.html
I think its as simple as that but forgive me if I have not considered further berkelian defences of subjective idealism..
Quite right, but the OP asks for arguments for ontological, not epistemological, idealism. Are you objecting to "ideality" as prior to independent of "non-ideality" and thereby also rejecting the premise of the OP?
Arguments for or against Idealism are complicated by the several definitions of the term, and variations within those definitions*1 *2. Since I have no formal training in philosophy, I'll have to stick to naive Idealism (the map is not the territory) and naive Realism (there is something out there that our senses are reporting). The objective aspect of both is our shared myths of reality : a> religious stories about an extrasensory spirit realm, and b> scientific reports about the invisible structure of the material world. From Kant to Quant we have been admonished that "Reality is not what you think it is"*3
So I have to be cautious about taking a firm stand on the mushy foundations of reality, especially as revealed by subatomic science. When I take a step on the ground, I expect that it will support my weight. But Quantum physics tells me -- and I only have this knowledge second hand -- that the atoms below are 99% empty space. So the "support" comes from counteracting weak forces between my feel-real shoes and the supposedly real ground. My intuitive model of the ground is solid, even though intellectually I "know" that it is porous. But my mental map of reality "works" most of the time. It's only quantum theorists who must work with an un-real mathematical model of reality, dominated by invisible forces instead of solid matter, and undermined by the interventions of observers .
The Objectivist Creed of modern science aspired to replace divine revelation for perfect knowledge of Reality with a collective consensus on what's what*4. And I am grateful for the harvest of practical insights, due to that divorce from religion. But the Objectivist Myth*5 was watered-down by the new statistical models (mathematical instead of material) of subatomic physics. What used to be fundamental to reality is now known to be a mere possibility prior to our measurement of its realness. Faced with such perversions of Classical Reality, what's a naive boy to do?
So, my personal position on Reality is like a wave/particle : BothAnd*6. The world is not Either Real or Ideal, but a blend of both mental & material aspects. Its wave-nature is continuous & statistical, while its particle-nature is discrete & physical. Reality is whatever works for me at the moment. Ideality is a possible state that exists only as a concept. Like the dream of seeing a man walking on the moon, ideas can become real. :smile:
*1. Objective idealism is a form of metaphysical idealism that accepts Naïve realism but rejects epiphenomenalist materialism, as opposed to subjective idealism denies that material objects exist independently of human perception and thus stands opposed to both realism and naturalism. ___Wikipedia
*2. What are the two types of idealism? :
Thus, the two basic forms of idealism are metaphysical idealism, which asserts the ideality of reality, and epistemological idealism, which holds that in the knowledge process the mind can grasp only the psychic or that its objects are conditioned by their perceptibility.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/idealism
Note -- My interpretation of Hoffman's theory is neither subjective nor objective idealism, but merely that there are practical evolved limits on perception; so he advises : know thy limits.
*3. Reality is not what it seems :
Physicist Carlo Rovelli's book on quantum gravity
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/02/01/512798209/reality-is-not-what-we-can-see
*4. Copenhagen Interpretation :
An interpretation of quantum mechanics is an attempt to explain how the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics might correspond to experienced reality. Although quantum mechanics has held up to rigorous and extremely precise tests in an extraordinarily broad range of experiments, there exist a number of contending schools of thought over their interpretation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics
*5, Objectivist Myth :
Scientific Objectivism replaces the prayerful Priest with an empirical Expert
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-objectivist-myth-of-knowing_fig1_254734289
*6. Both/And Principle :
[i]*** My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a whole system.
*** This principle is also similar to the concept of Superposition in sub-atomic physics. In this ambiguous state a particle has no fixed identity until observed by an outside system. For example, in a Quantum Computer, a Qubit has a value of all possible fractions between 1 & 0. Therefore, you could say that it is both 1 and 0.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
IS THE MOON REAL WHEN I'M NOT WALKING ON IT?
The SEP article says the former is a claim about reality, while the latter is a claim about the practice of science and philosophy. I interpret the latter as asserting "we can only know of the natural", without asserting the non-existence of the supernatural. This then makes the relation between ontological naturalism and methodological naturalism that of the relation between ontological and epistemological idealism.
So, what do you mean by naturalism, ontological naturalism, etc.?
Objective idealism is not postulating an object that can (perhaps) never be encountered by a subject. It is saying that there is an all-experiencing subject (often equated with God), who thus gives rise to all of reality. This is a way to explain the regularity of experience, and its apparent independence of our will. I cannot will a glass to levitate, nor can I will to see or unsee the sky with open eyes directed at it. My experience evolves in a regular way beyond my control. In order to explain this, we can say that existence is not predicated on any one, finite experiencer, but rather, on every experiencer (though, to different degrees). The experiencer that experiences everything is God. Taken together with the idea that the experiencer is the medium of experience, we thus arrive at Kastrup's idea of everything being a part of the mind of God; we could be explained as the dream avatars in God's dream. I say God out of convenience here; Kastrup uses a far less loaded term; mind at large.
Also, as a side note: this all might seem very theistically loaded. I just want to say that personally, I am agnostic, and all the views espoused here are not views I hold (although I do lean towards them more than their alternatives). Furthermore, Bernando Kastrup does not advocate for the equivocation of his mind at large with God, given that he believes the mind at large does not possess meta-cognition.
Quoting Manuel
You misunderstood my paragraph, which is understandable, due to my clunky chain negatives of which I take on faith to be even number xD. But yeah, I was saying the opposite; idealism is by definition a substance monism (at least, those are the definitions I've encountered).
Quoting Manuel
I did not talk about the possibility of attributing self to objects. Instead, I was talking about the possibility of no self. It is an extremely counter-intuitive possibility, but what if reality just is? Physicalists are capable of positing objects with subjects, which means the notion of a subject-less theater of objects is already posited. Now, the theater of objects surrounding "you" is what you have defined as the subjective theater; but what is it about the objects around you that necessitate the existence of a subject? Why cannot it simply be reality?
Such a view has to contend with the experience of a subject however; it does that by saying that such experience is always indirect. That is, we have thoughts of being a self, but what evidence is that? Cannot a piece of paper proclaim itself as belong to a self? Thus, cannot a subject-less though proclaim itself to be belonging to a subject?
I see. Would you say your style of epistemological idealism is really just ontological idealism, but based on epistemological grounds instead of ontological grounds? That is, on a first-order level, you assert only the mental exist, but on a second-order level, you assert this assertion is not certain, but rather the best assertion; as opposed to a purely ontological idealism, which would assert the sole existence of the mental on all orders.
Personally, I advocate for using the standard definitions. If the above paragraph is a correct description of your views, I would then refer to your view as epistemologically motivated ontological idealism. One must separate the contents of an axiom from its motivation, lest they be confused.
Could it also be seen as saying that the ideas, forms and principles that comprise the fundamental elements of reason are invariant, and so are grasped by all minds in the same way?
For consistency and coherence sakes, methodological naturalism (i.e. using aspects of nature in order to describe and explain aspects of nature) presupposes ontological naturalism (i.e. structural/causal relations immanent to nature).
Quoting Ø implies everything
I think naturalism is more cogent because, as a speculative paradigm, it is more consistent with common sense (i.e. practical, or embodied, participation in nature) than idealism. I find naturalism parsimonious because it does not additionally assume that 'ideas transcend (i.e. constitute) nature' as idealism (re: ideality) does. As ontologies, however, both naturalism & idealism are monistic (though, as I discern it, 'idealism conflates epistemology with ontology', implying fallaciously that 'all there is is what we (can) know').
The way I categorize objective idealism and subjective idealism is the following way:
You, under no hallucination, look at a tree, and then you look away. Does the tree still exist?
"No," says the subjective idealist.
"Potentially", says the objective idealist, "Because someone might still be looking at the tree."
An objective idealist who asserts there are certain laws to reality, which is typically the aim of objective idealism (and coupling of idealism with empiricism and logic), would likely answer: "Most likely, because there is no reason to believe I was hallucinating. Trees do not just poof out of existence (because of this and that law of nature), and thus, since my recent experience of it necessitates its existence, someone must still be looking at it." But who is looking at it? If you assert the existence of comprehensive, idealist reality that spans every place/object that has ever been experienced, whatever form those places/objects may take now, then you must assert some distributed awareness across all of reality.
You could say the difference between the weaker and stronger form of objective idealism that I just delineated is that the former says there is something objective out there, due to the existence of other conscious observers. The latter does that, and then also specifies what is objective. In so doing, the latter form typically requires an entity often equated to God, whereas the former could say all that is objective exists purely inter-subjectively between finite, normal subjects. Thus, to arrive at this:
Quoting Wayfarer
One must, in addition to claiming the existence of the objective, one must specify that the above is also objective. So, to answer your question; objective idealism does not necessitate the above be objective, but it typically would.
Also, when considering common sense as a factor in theory creation, it ought to be tempered. The degree of common-sensicality of the assertion itself should be taken together with the degrees of common-sensicality of its consequences. Furthermore, common sense is arbitrarily shaped by culture, even if it is perhaps constrained on a deeper, neurological level. Thus, one ought to consider whether an assertion's alternatives could be considered equally common-sensical in a different culture (which would be, of course, considerations steeped with uncertainty). I believe objective idealism, in a different culture, would be just as common-sensical as dualism is in our current culture, and more common-sensical than ontological naturalism is in our current culture.
Perhaps a historicist's perspective is due here? I wonder if the theists of the past thought that reality was all in the mind of God, thus asserting an objective idealism?
No assumptions; from an absolutely skeptical standpoint. It may seem impossible to derive any propositions from no assumptions, but I believe I have. Nothing significant (yet) though.
Quoting Bob Ross
In an objective idealism, there can be. If you, in addition to your idealist assumption, assume a regularity in reality (laws of nature), and a distributive awareness (God, mind at large, the simulator(s), etc.), then you can arrive back at science. Now, in such a framework, you'll have causality; and if it is restrictive enough, it will deny the possibility of non-mental objects interacting with your framework's solely mental reality.
Hello 0 implies everything,
That is a fair assessment. I dont really consider myself making a standard ontological argument for idealism because I am agnostic as to if there is a truly a physical substance; but I do know that it is, by my lights, indistinguishable from an empty conceptit thereby is still technically possible; and, yes, it is motivated heavily by epistemological idealism: I basically argue that there is no legitimate reason to hold there is an indirect consciousness-independent object when ones representations could be 0% accurate (and they never come in contact with anything non-mental ever nor is it possible as a conscious being). Even if I could somehow go outside of my conscious experience and know that there is truly a physical substance of some sort, then I would still say that for conscious beings emergent therefrom they would have zero justification to think there actually is a physical substance.
I have never heard of that term, but, yes, that seems to fit nicely!
Oh, I see. Have you looked into a priori knowledge?
Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but to me causality has been reserved for interaction in a physical sense in the literature; but in the sense you just described there would be no interaction other than mental events (e.g., the laws of nature are Ideas, platonic forms, etc. in the mind of God), which you are calling causality, which I dont have any issue with (in the sense of defining 'causality' as simply a realist position pertaining to the 'cause' of sensations being objective).
Also, have you read George Berkeleys idealism? If not, I think you may find it an interesting read.
Bob
I try to prove idealism "via negativa" by demonstrating the incoherence of materialism.
Idealism acknowledges that all points of view depend on viewing.
Even materialism is a point of view. Therefore materialism is sub-category of idealism (if that makes sense. Maybe not worded the best way)
It's kind of like the difference between the first person and third person point of view.
When you close your eyes and just focus on your sense of existing that's kind of like the pure subjective first person.
On the other hand, if you open your eyes and look around the world, you're viewing everything from a third person perspective, but this third person POV takes place from the first person perspective. You can't escape the first person and achieve some ultimate transcendent third person objectivity.
If you could view all of existence from the Eye of God, and this God views without any bias, it would still be an experience from the highest view rather than something independent of first personhood.
In a sense idealism isn't a particular point of view but rather the recognition that any and all views involve viewing.
Do you mean I equivocate POV (concept) with viewing (perception)?
How those relate and which one is primary is another difficult question.
On the other hand, the hard problem remains of what objective matter can be independent of conception or perception.
We have examples of matter being conceptualized into apparent existence. We do this in dreams.
How the mind converts mentality into the experience of perceiving objects in 3d space is a metaphysical rather than a physics question. Metaphysics by definition is prior to physics.
Trying to understand the physics of consciousness is a category error, like trying to perceive a number or principle with the senses.
I see it as proceeding like this
Consciousness first, then conception, then the co-arising of perception and objects perceived.
I don't see how objects lead to concepts and concepts to consciousness. Then again I don't see how consciousness creates concepts either. Either view has something popping into existence.
Edit:
A materialist can say that an idealist is equovicating ' things' with perception or conception. An idealist can say that the materialist is confusing the concept of a thing for a thing in itself independent of conception/consciousness.
How do we determine which is making the error?
It's tricky because each argues from a different metaphysics, making any argument circular or appearing like a conflation.
Bernardo Kastrupt's "The Idea of the World," throws together most of the best arguments against mainstream physicalism in an easy to follow, analytical style. I believe all the chapters are available in free peer reviewed journals; that was a goal of his in making the book, although they are edited to flow better in the book. He also has a lot of video lectures, but I can't speak to those.
I thought the early part of the book was pretty solid. The arguments are not all new, but he lays them out with a good deal of clarity. He mostly focuses on problems with physicalism. I thought his arguments against panpsychism, and information ontology/"it from bit" or similar "mathematical/computational universe" ontologies are rather weak, tilting at strawmen to some degree, but they really aren't the focus anyhow.
The big points he has are:
>All scientific knowledge comes from sensory experience, which is a part mental life.
>All evidence that sensory experience misleads us comes from other sensory experience, so the idea that mental experience is inherently untrustworthy is itself self-undermining. If you say "there aren't really chairs and tables like you see, but rather quantum fields and standing waves," such a statement is still based on a combination of empirical observations and logical reasoning that have both occured in mental life and are only known to human beings through mental life.
>Scientific models are maps of our world made for predicting mental experience. The map is not the territory. All scientific models only exist within first person experience. Saying the external world is made of scientific models or terms from them is like saying a pond is made of ripples, i.e. the model is subsumed in the larger body of the "pond of first person experience," so the pond/experience is ontologically more primitive than the model.
>Importantly, none of this invalidates the findings of science. Science is an epistemological system for predicting and explaining the world. However, science has no ontological commitments. Science can be true as a description of mental phenomena in a mental universe as easily as it can be true of some sort of physical universe. Much of the second half of the book is advancing a plausible ontology of how an entirely mental universe can explain empirical science, but essentially the claim is that chairs, quarks, quasars are all "out there" from our perspective, but comprised mental substance.
The biggest problem with the above is that Kastrupt leaves out that, even given physicalism is the case, we should expect the epistemological problems he points out to exist anyhow, and the illusion of his version idealism to exist. Whether or not it is coherent to have an "in-principle unobservable" substratum of being, and all the problems that come with positing one is another matter, but this seems like a plausible rebuttal to his critiques.
IMO the critiques of physicalism are much more successful than the replacement ontology he offers up in the second half. The replacement ontology relies on this appeal to rare multiple personality disorders that seems like a stretch. Also, his claims that AI can't exist and that only life has consciousness is very ad hoc and doesn't address the dicey issue of cyborgs and hybots, i.e., how much biological material does a robot-organism need to be considered alive and thus conscious? Given this, what about consciousness causes something to be alive or vice versa? The whole dissociative bubble we're all supposed to be in, which explains why I don't have your sensations, seems like a "too cute" brute fact to me.
The theory also seems confused in offering up the universe as a potential source of distributed cognition (although he does say this is highly speculative), but then appears to be rejecting the possibility of non-living things being part of smaller distributed consciousnesses (e.g. states and corporations) in a way that seems arbitrary.
The parts on quantum mechanics are rigorous enough, but fall into the problem of offering up information in support of the thesis, but not all the counter arguments. I understand sometimes putting your best arguments forward and leaving it at that for brevity, but it's not a style I like. Certainly, there are explanations of QM that still leave a single "objective" reality, they just increasingly have to come with extra baggage that can seem implausible to the extent that you need to claim all scientists' measurements are predetermined by the initial conditions of the universe so as to come out "just so," and avoid problems with Bell's Inequalities (i.e. free choice and locality seem like they might both need to be dropped to keep objectivity, but even this is not universally accepted).
The final critique I have is that it leaves out some of the best arguments against physicalism. It avoids the more nuanced, philosophical debate on if there is actually a coherent way to define physicalism. You can catch these on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on physicalism though. Wish I had a better source, because that article is dense.
That said, arguments against physicalism aren't necessarily arguments for idealism. However, it seems like the most compelling default if you are forced to reject the former. I liked the book, it's worth checking out.
This is not how Aristotle conceived and taught his First Philosophy with respect to his Physics. The word 'metaphysics' literally means 'the book after the book on physics'. It is meant to consist of categorical generalizations about nature derived from studying the many domains and particularities of nature. In other words, one must know nature (i.e. physics) in order to understand the principles / limits of physics (i.e. metaphysics). I'm no Aristotlean (I'm much more of an Epicurean-Spinozist) but I'm sure Plato's best most renown pupil didn't put the metaphysical cart before the physical horse. That's clearly a modern idealist's (or p0m0's) mistake. :smirk:
I don't think you can put one necessarily before the other. The relationship is often circular. For example, metaphysics deals with how we think about empirical data, and so in that respect it is, in some ways, prior to the empirical sciences, although the empirical sciences obviously can inform our metaphysics on this point as well.
Metaphysics seems prior on one point. For the sciences to be informative, we need to believe that the world is rational and that we can understand this rationality. If one thing does not follow from another, no cause entails any effect, even stochastically, then science cannot work. Obviously, the success of the sciences is a big piece of evidence that this presupposition is correct, but it still seems it must come prior to the sciences.
After all, there is no point in appealing to statistical analyses and mathematical "laws," in nature if we live in a world where 1 + 1 can come out to six or the charge of an electron varies day to day randomly. Hume's problem of induction is another issue that must be either resolved or set aside before scientific inquiry can begin, i.e. you have to at least pragmatically assume that induction is valid (deduction as well, since mathematics is essential).
Metaphysics also seems prior in ontology in that the claim that empirical findings are caused by a different level of being than the one in which they occur (i.e. that findings are caused by a physical world even though they can only be accessed mentally) isn't something that can be proven or disproven by empiricism on its own, since by definition all empirical data comes through subjective experience. You can say that experience shows that such an inaccessible level of being is likely, but any such claim is going to have to also rely on non-empirical evidence.
Leaving aside arguments that a metaphysically bare science is impossible, what would such a bare science look like? A set of observations subjected to analysis, probably using the maximum entropy principal. Such a science would simply say: if information I is collected from observations of system S then here are the observations we should expect to observe in the future vis-á-vis S. It only needs to extrapolate future observations from past ones; positing entities or realities is unnecessary. There is no physical world here, and no mental one, since claiming observations are mental when the entire universe of inquiry only includes observations makes the term contentless in this context.
I don't know if this could ever work in practice, but this is essentially how AI hypothesis crunching models work.
Wasn't Spinoza an idealist in all but name? At the very least, isn't his metaphysics compatible with "being is perception"? I don't see how matter as divine immanence can be closer to ontological naturalism (which has no concept of immanence) than to idealism for which immanence is a tautological truth.
As for Epicurus, as an empirically minded philosopher, didn't he stress the epistemic primacy, if not ontological primacy of sense-data? I'm also not seeing any real points of disagreement between the ontological arguments of Berkleley and Epircurus, save for whatever brand of atomic materialism Epircurus might have subscribed to, (which at most would amount to a physics disagreement with Berkeley , as opposed to a metaphysics disagreement). If both are understood to be empiricists who rejected Platonism, then how is metaphysical disagreement between them possible?
I
Spinoza isn't "an idealist" according to my reading.
Yes.
I can't help you with that. :sweat:
Like Hegel, a lot of Aristotle appears to be lecture notes dutifully compiled by students and mixed in with additions by the students to fill them out.
Hello Count Timothy von Icarus,
Thank you for the elaboration on Bernardo Kastrupts The Idea of the World! I cannot say I have read it, but I will (eventually).
To be honest, I didnt find anything in your post that I disagreed with, so let me try to build off of it (and you tell me what you think).
As an introduction, I think that when one takes on the mantle of discovering the ontology of the world (regardless of whether they come at it from a more idealistic or materialistic perspective) they should come to the same conclusion (which, I think coincides with how you also think that under physicalism we would still expect to be stuck in the same idealistic illusion as outlined in your post): first-order (ontological) idealism and second-order (ontological) agnosticism.
In order to even discover the ontology of the world, I think that we must understanding our approach, as it is going to heavily decide our conclusions; and I suggest that we fundamentally split the ontology of the world into two sub-ontologies: first-order (i.e., the structure of reality within first-person experience) and second-order (i.e., the structure of reality at rock bottom).
Since we are first-person experiencers (i.e., conscious beings), we must start our investigation within the first-order, and use that ontology to attempt to decipher the second, deeper ontology (I would argue). Within the first-order ontology (of reality), I think you have done a great job of outlining (generally) why idealism is true: we, as first-person experiencers, are always working with mentalityi.e., always within consciousness. Science only gives us better models of how to navigate the mental territory, but never tells us anything ontologically. However, this does not entail that what fundamentally exists is just mentality: that is a second-order concern.
As second-order ontology (of reality), which consists of whatever the fundamental stuff of reality may be and what exists thereof, I find that the only legitimate response is agnosticism. We are essentially trapped in the first-order ontological idealism, and we have no means of deciphering anything being that (once we properly understand the first-order ontology [of reality] itself).
I look forward to your response,
Bob
I agree with this. Kastrup has taken an old song and is having a lot of success playing it to a new tune. His replacement ontology seems to want it both ways: everything is mental, but there's an "outside" world where evolution somehow still works. How are there any random events in an idealistic reality?
I'm not an expert on Kastrup's neo-idealism, but it makes sense to me --- because I don't interpret his position as contradictory Idealism versus Realism. Instead, I frame it as complementary Idealism within Realism or Realism within Idealism, depending on the context. Perhaps he does"want it both ways". But that's what philosophers do : look for orderly patterns in a disorderly world.
As non-empirical philosophers, it's hard to deny that there are both "inside" ideas (concepts) and "outside" objects (percepts). So there are indeed "random events" in physical reality, and "non-random" order in metaphysical mentality (i.e. Reason imposes static order on -- extracts orderly patterns from -- a mutating & evolving dynamic world). Reason takes statistical snapshots of constantly changing reality. Those "frozen" mental images are what we could call "Ideality". :smile:
But consider that philosophers deny such a thing all the time. I'd even say that dualism is a default view, what people vaguely assume before they study philosophy seriously. I'm not denying that philosophers can engage in a sophisticated defense of dualism, but it's a tough position to play.
I'm beginning to see how they are the same thing.
We can drop 'mindindepent' as confusing. We can grasp language in terms of embodied enacted social norms which are out there in the world as patterns in our doings. Our brains evolved to play such games, so there are 'marks' also on our brain as we learn to enact community meanings (universals as 'material' or worldly patterns.) Talk of 'selves,' talk of 'minds,' is all part of a worldly enactment of semantic and other norms.
Not only 'our doings'.
Quoting Steve Talbott, Evolution and the Purposes of Life
This is why I convinced of the reality of universals. But no, comes the invariable response, they're the products of the mind, conventions of language - what is 'out there' is real existing independently of any act of thought on our part.'
Why not, if one includes talking and writing ?
OK. Well I'm not so averse to that. Our lifeworld is conceptually articulated. We and our semantic and perceptive norms are 'one' with it. We see the waterfall (also) in terms of Newtonian physics. The waterfall 'is' those physics (and other stuff) in this sense.
Is it there like that without us ? Does that question even mean much ?
Perhaps we agree here : I don't think we can 'really' peel apart us from not-us. This is (I think) Hegelian idealism. This is idealism as holism, a denial of isolated entities (those which can make sense when yanked out of the total context.) All abstraction (extraction, yankingout) does a certain 'violence' or methodical forgetting or ignoring or deworlding --- which may be convenient and practically justified.
I think something like that was probably also found in Hegel, and the other German idealists. Nowadays it is mainly only preserved in Aristotelian Thomism.
What is form ? What is concept ?
That intellectual activity -- thought in the strictest sense of the term -- is irreducible to sensation and imagination is a thesis that unites Platonists, Aristotelians, and rationalists of either the ancient Parmenidean sort or the modern Cartesian sort. [/quote]
Yes. I focus on this issue, this apparently addictive prejudice that isolated subjectivity makes sense.
Hegel => Feuerbach => Heidegger / Wittgenstein
:up:
Yes, of course. I'm a bit of a rationalist myself in Brandom's updated sense. I claim that we are deeply and fundamentally normative and discursive creatures and that philosophy is a particular kind of moralizing --a normative imposition, a push on our way of doing things from the inside.
'One, as a rational person, ought to think of concepts this way.'
:up:
Yes ! These are enacted semantic norms, patterns in our doings (marking and barking and parking) --patterns that bots can 'internalize' (encode as floating point parameters), generating novel and helpful sentences. Our brain must encode these norms somehow. We also create and adjust these norms. Time just is (human intellectual existence just is) the critical self-confrontation of semantic norms. Thus spake @plaque flag.
***
The proposition that the finite is ideal [ideell] constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out.[/i]
***
Now it's going to get muddy (I think I can tentatively paraphrase this, if that becomes relevant.)
...
everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.
...
The living substance, further, is that being which is truly subject, or, what is the same thing, is truly realised and actual (wirklich) solely in the process of positing itself, or in mediating with its own self its transitions from one state or position to the opposite.
...
The truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential nature reaching its completeness through the process of its own development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only at the end is it what it is in very truth; and just in that consists its nature, which is to be actual, subject, or self-becoming, self-development.
....
Reason is purposive activity.
I think Wittgenstein was nominalist, through and through. In other words, universals could have, for him, no reality aside from their usage in language (which is exactly what nominalism means). The revisitionist perspective on realism that I'm trying to articulate is that universals can be interpreted more broadly as scientific principles, arithmetic proofs, and logical laws, and that these are not dependent on our conventions of speech. They are independent of your or my mind, but can only be discerned by the mind; they're intelligible objects, in the sense intended by objective idealism. (Note that in saying that, they're not actually "objects" at all, except for in a metaphorical sense; they're more like the constituents of reason, structures or ideas but they are invariant for different observers. The problem is, designating them as objects invariably leads to the question of where they are, as objects must be located somewhere. That culminates in the discussion of the 'ethereal platonic realm', which is a dead end, an analogy for Descartes 'thinking thing', another dead end. All of that arises from the tendency to objectify, to treat reality as if it comprises solely the interaction of objects.)
But Wittgenstein, of course, will reject all this on account of its proximity to classical metaphysics, 'language on holiday'. That is because, I say, there is a normative dimension that had collapsed in Western philosophy which provided for different levels of modes of being, other than the sensory, which was lost with the rejection of realism.
That's just not true. If you mean philosophy isn't theology, I'd say just go for it. As I see it, what I consider mischaracterizing philosophy weakens your rhetorical position.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think that's correct. Norms aren't names.
**********
In general, I think something (very) like what you are aiming at is already right there in the tradition. But it is presented without the trappings of traditional religion. So you don't see it / like it / greet it as a friend. (I am just reporting how it seems to me.)
Hegel seemed to see the lifeworld as an organism that was increasing in complexity and becoming able to understand its own nature. Forward, upward. Now we are building digital gods. Reality swells. Baby godworld is going to be a big boy. The timebinding Conversation we mostly are thickens on the climb to godhead. Any nostalgic philosophy is therefore suspect. As boundtime or fattened Zeitgeist, the past is always with us, and we are this past in the mode of transcending it. With that in mind, how do you address acknowledge appreciate our ascension ? Even if in some dimensions you count it a regressive, certainly we some kind of monster spreading its wings, some kind of tower being erected.
The world, through us, comes to make its own nature or character more and more explicit. It comes to know itself. We are god's spies, god's eyes, god's authors.
Consider that Hegel was a Romantic rationalist. He wanted to heal his generation's sense of alienation. It was common at that time (as it is in ours) to bemoan our loss of the garden. We missed an immediacy that we probably never had to begin with. We are stardust, we are golden.
Hegel's problem (like Joyce's) was to wake people up to the divine in their own dirty little lives, embedded in a history of violence and superstition, but hopeful for utopia. Things were looking up back then. Maybe it'll help to share this key piece of his aesthetics again:
******************************************************************************************************************************
The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom.
This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.
Yet absolute subjectivity as such would elude art and be accessible to thinking alone if, in order to be actual subjectivity in correspondence with its essence, it did not also proceed into external existence...
...the Absolute does not turn out to be the one jealous God who merely cancels nature and finite human existence without shaping himself there in appearance as actual divine subjectivity; on the contrary, the true Absolute reveals itself and thereby gains an aspect in virtue of which it can be apprehended and represented by art.
...the determinate being of God is not the natural and sensuous as such but the sensuous elevated to non-sensuousness, to spiritual subjectivity which instead of losing in its external appearance the certainty of itself as the Absolute, only acquires precisely through its embodiment a present actual certainty of itself.
God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself.
Are you aware that the future is radically different from the past? We might say that the past consists of what has actually occurred, and the future consists of what will possibly occur. And since there is no substance to the non-dimensional boundary which separates past from future, all substance is either of the past or of the future. Because the substance of the past is radically different from the substance of the future, substance dualism is justified, and it is the best option for understanding the nature of reality.
And like twenty different things to boot! I've seen:
Realist = time and change exists
Realist = substrate independent, diffuse entities like economies and states exist
Realist = countries always self-interestedly act to maximize their own security and power (big in international relations)
Realist = universals exist
Realist = propositions exist
Realist = abstract objects and mathematical entities exist
Realist = mind independent objects exist
Etc.
Total tangential point here: I don't even think it's a good label most of the time. Like, in IR, it seems somewhat fanciful, like the grand strategy video game view of how states act. If John Mearsheimer's Offensive Realism was true, it seems ridiculous that the USA wouldn't have annexed Canada and more of Mexico at any point after the Civil War, when its military would have easily defeated any force that could cross the Atlantic.
Values explanations make way more sense. Americans used to think of Canada as similar to themselves, just other British colonies. Thus, as soon as Massachusetts ended up at war with Britain, even before the other states joined, an army of Massachusetts and New York men immediately marched north and sacked Montreal. This ultimately failed due to Quebec City's walls and the fact that a winter offensive and siege in Canada with 1770s technology is, to put it bluntly, dumb. Then in 1812 the US invaded Canada again. But by 1860 there is a distinct difference in identity and moral sentiment is much different.
Just an example. I don't think you can divorce moral opinion from state action. The US did annex Texas, but it had to vote to ask for annexation first to motivate the actual action. /rant
I just hate that the "realist" position is so goofy.
Thanks, but. Since I'm not educated in the technicalities of academic philosophy, for me, "Realism" means naive realism. In the Enformationism thesis, I distinguish between Realism & Idealism in my own idiosyncratic ways, relative to the various roles of Information in the world. More specifically, the distinction is relative to, what Murray Gell-Mann labeled IGUSES (information gathering and utilizing systems). Humans being the exemplars of those knowledge gatherers. The contents of human minds are Ideal (in the sense of subjective concepts), and everything else is more or less Real. From that perspective Universals are merely memes in human minds. Whether they exist elsewhere is debatable. But we like to think that mathematical Principles and physical Laws are somehow Real, since evidence for them is found consistently in Nature. :smile:
Quoting plaque flag
That's nearer to what I'm on about. Note the convergences with (neo)advaita and the like. There's an academic, Robert M. Wallace, who has written on Hegel's philosophy of religion, see this.
To me, that is the major subject of philosophy. It is the domain of the a priori, but it's not as if there's evidence for them, so much as that we rely on them to decide what constitutes evidence.
Cats are different than roaches too. As I see it, anything we can make any sense of is for just that reason 'part' of the same inferential nexus. So I'm down with idealism understood as holism (as Hegel seems to have understood it.) But this kind of idealism does not think that mind is fundamental or prior to matter. The lifeworld and the self and others and language are all given in a primordial unity. Heidegger and the later Husserl talk about this. We can abstract (yank out) entities from their context. We can talk as if thought was weightless and disembodied. We can ignore its energetic cost, its dependence on a representative for its equivalence class. Such methodical ignorance may even be practically appropriate if metaphysically absurd.
A whole lot of reality we cannot make sense of, as physicists have found out.
The principles of modal logic fail to make a true separation between what is necessary and what is possible, leaving the necessary as a subcategory of the possible. This renders formal logic as inapplicable to a wide aspect of reality, what happens at the present time, when possibilities are actualized (become necessities). By designating the necessary as already a subcategory of the possible, there is no place in that structure of logic for that act which occurs in reality, which actualizes a possibility, rendering it as a necessity. This aspect of reality is not included within the "inferential nexus", meaning that the inferential nexus is not applicable to it.
Because we do have the capacity to, and we can actually make sense of this act, which mediates between the possible and the necessary, (the freely willed choice for example), yet we know not how to allow for it in the "inferential nexus", your statement is false. There are things we can makes sense of, acts of free will for example, which are not included in the "inferential nexus".
Quoting plaque flag
The true context is temporal, therefore we must understand entities within that context, not yank them out of it. And, as I explained we cannot make an acceptable unity out of time because the actualities of the past are incommensurable with the possibilities of the future. The two cannot be measured by the same principles. Therefore the "unity" you refer to, is nothing but a false premise, a deficient metaphysics which results in a whole lot of reality ending up in the category of "what we cannot make sense of'. However, if we ditch that idea of unity, and accept a better metaphysics, we bring that part of reality into the fold of "what we can make sense of", by providing us the means to understand why such a unity is false.
You are appealing to inferential norms.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm not talking about formal logic. I'm talking about largely tacit norms that govern what follows from what as a way to understand meaning.
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Inferentialism_Normative_Pragmatism_and.pdf
Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning and conceptual content. The modern Western philosophical tradition has taken representation to be the key concept of semantics. To understand the sort of contentfulness characteristic of sapience, that tradition counsels us to focus on the relation between pictures and what they picture, between signs and what they are signs for. The master-idea of semantic inferentialism is to look instead to inference, rather than representation, as the basic concept of semantics. What makes something meaningful or contentful in the sense that matters for sapience (rather than the mere sentience we share with many nonlinguistic animals) is the role that it plays in reasoning. The primary vehicle of meaning in this sense is declarative sentences. Those are symbols that can be used to assert, state, or claim that things are thus-and-so. The kind of content they express, propositional content, in the philosophers jargon, is what can both serve as and stand in need of reasonsthat is what can play the role both of premise and of conclusion in inferences.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That to me is an unclear and uncertain concept. Selves are normative entities. I'll give you that. We are held responsible. But that's all the 'freedom' I'm confident about at the moment.
You referred to an "inferential nexus". The "largely tacit norms that govern" the use of this term "inferential", generally dictate that "Inference" refers to what is deduced from the application of reason. "Deduced" implies according to strict formal rules.
Quoting plaque flag
This is a deceptive use of "inference", which is outside the "largely tacit norms". It is a use manufactured for sake of sophistry. To say that the meaning which one derives from a word or a sentence is an "inference", rather than simply an "association" or "relation", implies that there is some form of logic behind this derivation of meaning, when in reality there need not be any logic involved at all. Obviously, that is a very misleading use of "inference" which leaves no separation between the consequences of emotional feelings and the results of reasoning, suggesting that emotions produce inferences.
Quoting plaque flag
I see you want your cake back, after you've already eaten it, plaque flag. You give "inference" the most vague of meaning, by allowing that the basic semantic association of a words is "inference", then you complain about free will being "an unclear and uncertain concept". If you do not want to delve into the world of unclear and uncertain concepts, then restrict your use of "inference" please, so that the vague associations and relations of emotions are not classified as equal to what is inferred from formal logic, as "inferential".
Interesting. I've never heard the argument that past and future are different substances. Substance is generally supposed to be able to undergo change though, so doesn't that presuppose that it exists through time? And if past and future are substances, can they change? If they change it seems like they might require a second time dimension to exist in which such a change can occur. But, since what is past is always changing, it would appear that the past does change, although maybe it can do so without changing the underlying substance.
This would seem to assume that the past and the future are actually different though, which eternalists deny, and that the past and future actually exist, which presentists deny, so I suppose people might disagree based on the premise, although I don't. It seems to me that past events exist at the time when they occured and future events are, as you say, different from past ones.
Video games occasionally have procedurally generated worlds that are generated dynamically on-the-fly in response to the player's actions. These games demonstrate that the unknown past and the future can be considered as being metaphysically identical for all empirical intents and purposes. This parsimonious viewpoint has the advantage of treating causality in a temporally symmetric fashion, with both forward and backward causation.
I know; I did not claim that you did either. Instead, I just disagreed with your belief that naturalism is the most common-sensical notion by claiming that dualism is instead the most common-sensical notion among laypeople nowadays. By brining up dualism as the most common-sensical nowadays however, I then had to contend with it as well in my comment. That is why I asserted the common-sensicality of idealism in comparison to both naturalism and dualism; the latter being the contender I myself added to the mix.
Quoting 180 Proof
Well, it is implied:
Quoting 180 Proof
Parsimony and consistency with common sense are non-factors as far as a realist notion of truth is concerned. As far as building a practical theory is concerned however, parsimony and common sense are definitely factors. I assumed the latter context because the alternative would be assuming that you believe common sense and parsimony are prerequisites for real/absolute truth, which is demonstrably false.
I have not heard the term epistemologically motivated ontological idealism outside of my own usage either, just to let you know that it isn't (necessarily) an established term. I think it is a practical term though.
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, I study a lot of formal logic.
Quoting Bob Ross
That could be, but I am not so bothered by it. I see no issue redefining terms so long as the new definition is explicated and clear. Furthermore, I do not think physicality is a criterium for causality in any mainstream (philosophical or otherwise) definitions in the literature. Instead, the mostly physicalist application of the term is likely just because causality is typically of more interest to physicalists and because idealists are not that common/well-known. Thus, I'd say causality merely has physicalist connotations, but is definitionally not reserved for that domain of reality.
How is randomness incompatible with an idealistic reality?
In an idealistic reality, isn't everything a dream? A creation of one super-mind, or a collection of minds? Are there random events in dreams? How would that work?
I have some thoughts on random versus determined events that are a bit too tied up in my theory to be laid out here.
But I can respond to your comment with another question: how is physicalism any more welcoming of randomness than idealism?
I don't see how it would be. WOuldn't a random causal chain have to end with an uncaused cause?
...I would think so. Are you thinking of the book Something from Nothing? Good book, but I think the underlying rules constitute something, What do you think?
Our understanding of change is based in empirical observations which are always of past time, observations are memories. We have no observations of the future yet we have observations of the past, so we produce an understanding of change based on these memories, which are our observations of the past. it might appear, and you might think, that these observations are made at the present, but they are not, they are always in the past, always existing as memories. So our understanding of change, and consequently the associated understanding of time is restricted to past time, and this is the type of "change" which substance is said to undergo.
On the other hand, our understanding of future events, future changes, and future time, is merely a logical projection. We take our memories, our observations of the past, and apply a premise of continuity, and project into the future. But this is really insufficient, because that supposed continuity is a determinist principle which denies the possibility of free will, and real change.
Notice I've introduced a new concept "real change". This type of change is inconsistent with the determinist premise of continuity, and it allows for the reality of free will. When we allow that there are real possibilities for change, at any given moment in the passing of time, we must deny that the continuity of substance, as time passes, is necessary. Then "substance" as it is in the past, according to empirical observations, is inconsistent with whatever it is in the future.
Here's an example. Suppose that a free will act could annihilate a substance at any moment of passing time. This act of annihilation could be chosen at any passing moment. If this were the case, then the substance could have no real temporal extension into the future, because it could be annihilated at any moment. if it could be annihilated at any chosen moment, then it is impossible that it has any actual existence in the future of any moment at all, even if it isn't annihilated at any moment, because the possibility of it being annihilated is always there.
This is the way we ought to look at the possibility of real change. Anything which might be changed by a free will act, cannot have any temporal extension into the future. If the free will act can end its existence as it is, at any moment of passing time, then its existence as it is, cannot have any extension into the future. So if it's possible that you could smash a glass at any moment of passing time, it is impossible that the glass has any real existence in the future of any moment of passing time.
Yes. Aristotle studied both Physics and Metaphysics as different aspects of comprehensive "Nature". Today, empirical scientists claim the royal realm of Reality, and leave the plebeian domain of Ideality to feckless philosophers & "soft" scientists. IMHO though, theoretical scientists, like Einstein, are actually philosophers, who serve the needs of noble empiricists by converting their sensory swine into savory pork for the plate. (Please pardon the tongue-in-cheek metaphors)
In physical Reality, everything is Particular, except that rational minds somehow "see" General (holistic) patterns, known as "Universals" & "Principles". And the most innovative philosopher/scientists refer to those Ideal (unreal) Universals in order to "decide what constitutes evidence". Physical evidence -- to be meaningful -- must fit the metaphysical pattern of Laws & Principles & Universals.
Ontology, as the study of Being, could divide Existence into a> Real things and b> Ideal concepts about things. Knowledge of reality is necessarily a posteriori sense experience, but where does a priori (non-sense) knowledge come from? Aristotle seemed to assume that humans are born with an innate sense of Reason*1, that fills-in the gaps between instances, to imagine the invisible logical structural patterns of reality (wholes & holons).
The theory of a posteriori knowledge presumes a "blank slate" to write upon, while the hypothesis of a priori information assumes that Reason is the (god-given or Darwin-bestowed?) innate writing instrument in the human mind. Reason perceives Logical patterns and conceives abstract representations on the immaterial chalkboard of the mind.
Imperial empirical Science daintily uses its forks & knives to slice & dice Ontology into easily digested chunks of physical information. Yet, Philosophy greedily gulps down un-pre-masticated lumps (holons) of metaphysical information, leaving it to innate intuitive Reason to digest into relevant meanings. Scientists assume, without hard evidence, that there are a priori innate Laws that the instances of evidence are supposed to add-up to. But where did those rules-for-Reason come from? And why do philosophers also assume the existence of such Ideal Forms, to serve as axioms by which to reason? :nerd:
*1. a priori :
I'm not sure exactly where Aristotle thought the pre-existence (or from the beginning) of universals & principles might originate. Since he seemed skeptical of a literal Ideal realm, could a priori be the Mind of God? Or is it just an innate skill, that today we might say was an evolutionary adaptation?
Quoting Wayfarer
Which is why the case of math is so interesting. Is it your contention that humans have an innate knowledge of the divine?
Quoting Wayfarer
Does this make you a Kantian?
Quoting Wayfarer
Interesting, can you say some more to clarify this point? Are you saying, for instance, that space/time is part of human's innate cognitive apparatus - it constructs our understanding of reality?
I suggest that we drop the ocular metaphor and talk about dancing. In other words, we perform 'universals' in the way we trade marks and noises. This 'seeing' of 'form' (this metaphorical interpretation of our situation) has its pros and cons. It's helped us trick ourselves into believing in ghosts.
Quoting Gnomon
I suggest they evolved and continue to evolve among / between social animals. We can only look at our own intellectual history. We've invented new ways of thinking, left old ways behind. The complexity of our culture has increased. We have more concepts than before.
If one insists that X installed such concepts in us, without being able to provide details, where X is more mysterious than we are ourselves, then this allusion to X is a sentimental antiexplanation, a hiding-from rather than an addressing-of our lack of clarity about of our nature. Or so I claim.
:up:
Quoting Wayfarer
Pure maths has been revised. I suggest looking into the great ideological civil war of mathematics.
I don't deny that basic arithmetic is going be to extremely stable from now on, but there was a time before zero, a time before negative numbers. Math tends to be built so that useful ideas are preserved with any extension. Platonism sometimes seem to merely assume its own conclusion.
In set theoretical terms there are an infinite number of ways to construct the natural numbers. Which one is Real ? How would we know ? All that matters is structure. See Benacerrafs What Numbers Could Not Be. Along these lines, there are many constructions of the real numbers, but real analysis is independent of such constructions, appealing only to a structure which they all share (in order to be considered as such a 'construction'), to a system of interdependent roles (not unlike Saussure's linguistic system of differences without positive elements.)
Why 'divine'? Everyone does that when this idea comes up. Why is it associated with religious philosophy? That's the really interesting meta-question. ('Divine' is related to the Sanskrit (proto-European) 'deva' or god.)
I've explained numerous times that my particular epiphany about Platonic mathematics was a very simple one: the objects of mathematics are not compounded and are not subject to change. For the ancients, this signified that intelligible objects have qualities and attributes which were not found in the corruptible objects of sense, all of which are conversely composed ot parts and subject to decay. But I don't think that in itself is a specifically religious idea. More a philosophical insight, or 'quasi-religious' in the sense that Spinoza was. I suppose it is associated with rationalism in philosophy, and Western, specifically anglo-american, philosophy is overwhelmingly empiricist in outlook - all knowledge from experience, rejection of innate ideas. That's what is behind a lot of the animus in respect of platonic realism.
Just now watched a CTT interview with Paul Davies on the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics'. Davies is much more open to the 'mysterious convergence' kind of view (as opposed to the 'happenstance' or 'brute fact' kind of view). He acknowledges he's in the minority but I think he's on the mark.
Quoting Tom Storm
This is the kind of topic which no respectable professional philosopher would touch with a barge pole. They concentrate more on minutae. . But the intuitive view I am developing is that the rational order of the mind, and the rational order we perceive in the universe, is the same order, basically. That somehow, the relationship of ideas and causal relationships are connected. That's because the order we perceive is imposed by the mind - this is once again Charles Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order. But because of our sense of separation of observer from observed, we can't perceive that, and then wonder where the order comes from, or why it exists.(Schopenhauer: 'materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets himself'.)
The other idea that is converging with this one, is that the domain of a priori truths is the domain of logical necessity. Would it be possible for a world to exist where, say, the law of identity did not obtain? Or basic ratios and constants didn't hold? :chin:
Have I ever discussed this article with you - The Indispensability Argument in Mathematics? It makes reference to a 1963 paper by Paul Benacerraf which is apparently canonical. The maths experts on this forum generally know it and judge it accordingly. But some of the statements made illustrate what I see as the basic philosophical point, to wit:
Why is this? Because apparently our 'best epistemic theories' include the assumption that
Whereas,
The basic drift of the remainder of the article is this:
What am I not seeing here? Why would it be that one of the purportedly major 20th c philosophers wants to 'avoid any appeal to rational insight?'
The problem with such appeals is that they don't explain much, if anything. In-sight is a mere metaphor. An organ is simply postulated (as an 'eye') along with a realm or dimension that only that 'eye' can see. This metaphor gets something right. We tend to agree more of arithmetical issues than on other issues, but it's a bit of a ghost story. While some philosophers might dislike ghost stories because they dislike religion, others merely object to shirking the conceptual labor required. What's needed is an explanation that connects to the rest of our knowledge. I claim that, more or less explicitly, we strive for systematic / compact / cohesive knowledge.
Another point is that mathematical objects do indeed exist. They are deeply involved in our inferences, so it's basically confused to deny them. The issue becomes clarifying how they exist. Personally I expect such clarification to go one forever, as for all of our concepts. We perform them together, in a self-referential and self-critical way that allows for an increase of that performance's complexity.
That's right. But the problem is, in the current lexicon, 'existence' is a univocal term - something either exists or it doesn't. There is no scope for different kinds of existence, or I don't think so, anyway. But don't you think the requirement for there to be an argument for the indispensability mathematics says something? What makes it necessary to defend mathematical insight? Don't you think this is an ideological argument?
But you are among philosophers here, no? That 'existence' is not univocal is stressed in the intro of Being and Time. If memory serves, Austin had a party with showing how complex our use of 'real' was. Then there's Wittgenstein, Derrida, Foucault, etc. Or consider Braver's synoptic narrative in A Thing of This World.
Quoting Wayfarer
All claims, and all tacit assumptions, one we've dug 'em out, stand before the divinized tribunal of reason. Socrates is and always will be an annoying asshole who refuses to take things for granted, who delights in finding out the confusion in every pontification.
Some Kant quotes that seem relevant:
[i]The difference between truth and dream is not decided through the quality of the representations that are referred to objects, for they are the same in both, but through their connection according to rules that determine the combination of representations in the concept of an object, and how far they can or cannot stand together in one experience.
Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. no person bears more authority than any otherGW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (A738f/B766f, translation modified)[/i]
We are, as philosophers, Reason's 'infinite' self-critique.
Take your point. Obviously different kinds of existence are considered in philosophy, but on the whole, naturalism and popular philosophy tends towards a flat ontological structure, rejecting the kind of Aristotelian distinctions between different kinds of being, doesn't it?
(Still feel as though the point I was labouring has somewhat slipped the net here.)
I tend to hold that such absolutes are probably how human minds are cognitively arranged in order to make sense of reality. Do they map to 'reality'; do they operate outside of a human perspective?
Could be.
Quoting Wayfarer
Nicely crystalized.
I think you can find some bad philosophy like that out there, yes. But it's mostly among those who don't care enough to catch up with the conversation. I'm not saying anyone ever catches up completely, and the conversation won't stop and wait for them either.
FWIW, I also dislike crude scientistic positions that think marriages and promises [ and scientific norms ] are less Real than protons and porcupines. We both see that 'the subject' has to be explained with everything else. In other words, an explanation of the world has to explain its own engendering and legitimacy.
This to me is the genius of Kant and Hegel as interpreted by Brandom (pragmatic rationalism). We live and move and have our being in a normativity, in a social space in which we all keep score on one another.
(1) Look at which inferences are treated as valid.
(2) Look at [ discursive] selves as avatars held responsible for their claims.
(3) Claims are semantic atoms, not concepts. (We can talk about this if you want.)
Logical 'absolutes' (which are still just norms and in that sense relative) are roughly the most fundamental norms that we'd expect every discursive culture to adopt and articulate. They are perhaps like the incest taboo.
Selves also are almost logical absolutes. The tradition of a ghost in the machine of the body, which is held responsible for telling a coherent story, seems unavoidable. A culture without selves like this would be like a culture without wheels or fire. It's a technology so basic we think it came from god.
That's a deep question. As a jolly metaphysician, I'll argue for the primordial unity of the lifeworld. We live in our symbolic sediment which is there in the world as part of its structure. Some people like to think of the image that physics presents as the bottom layer which is finally real. Some say that even this is just projection, that the bottom layer is unknowable (outside the human perspective.) But I say it's all encompassed by the lifeworld , which is just the world before we skim off the human cream as unreal.
Perhaps we can say that some beliefs seem less likely to become incorrect than others, including basic norms (which are often explications of concepts or tautologies anyway ? )
How so ?
As I see it, we start from something like:
Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.
What is it we are trying to explain ? Our sociality, our reason, our language. 'Mental experience' and 'images' say something but very little. We have to tell a coherent, plausible story.
As far as I know, we evolved from simpler organisms, and our language also evolved. So any story has to account for the genesis as well as the structure of whatever concepts turn out to be.
I think we both very much care about how logical/rational norms are to be accounted for. A naturalist approach would see us as cooperative beings articulating a more and more complex set of mostly tacit rules. Eventually we learn to talk about these tacit rules, grasp them explicitly, amazed at what we've achieved.
You and I inherit millions of years of research and development. Our DNA and our culture are timebinding or even bound time, compacted trial-and-error.
That's a cool way of framing things.
Thanks!
The question I was asking, is how come esteemed philosophers, such as W V O Quine, sought to 'avoid any appeal to rational insight?' Why does the paper that this article was based on deny that there could be knowledge of mathematical objects? What is behind those denials?
Are we not verging here on folkpsychology which cuts both ways ? To me that's a distraction from the hard work. What's needed is a detailed case for rational insight (some kind of platonic organ) and not accusations of bias.
It's not an 'accusation of bias', I'm trying to understand the rationale behind the article, and why the faculty of reason was called into question in the first place. And, pray tell, how could one make a 'detailed case' for reason, without relying on reason to make the case?
Sorry if I came off as rude or misread you.
This is a strange question.
Of course we are always already embedded in rational/semantic norms. We inherit a culture in which certain inferences are treated as valid and others not. It has always been only in terms of current norms that such norms could be questioned. Neurath's boat. One part of us questions another part of us. We also make tacit norms explicit, draw out concepts. This is the hermeneutic circle. We 'know' what rationality and being are, but we aren't done knowing what they are.
Quoting plaque flag
To put that another way, although science relies on the efficacy of scientific law, the nature of scientific law is not itself an empirical question. As soon as you wonder whether the laws we know - like Newton's laws - could be different to what they are, then you're straying into metaphysics, knowingly or not. I've noticed articles come up in my news feed by physicists calling the idea of scientific or natural laws into question (e.g. this one). They seem motivated by a similar impulse to that which prompts scepticism about mathematical knowledge.
I think, maybe, it's because reason is the faculty which explains, not something to be explained. And that this sits uneasily with naturalist philosophy.
:up:
Quoting Wayfarer
I have to disagree here. As I have seen from interviews, some physicists freely imagine different versions of reality. Models are just videos games, and Jim Gates confirmed a similar view in his interview with Lex Fridman. So they are comfortable with the contingency of these laws. They are painters at a canvas, and they project/contemplate how this or that invented law would fit in with other commitments (and measurements of course).
If you mean this :
In philosophy, naturalism is the idea or belief that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe.
then maybe some of them.
How typical is such crudity among serious philosophers though? Maybe you can find it, but I hope it's rare. Reasoning about reason is much of what we do.
What is behind the requirement to 'avoid any appeal to rational insight?' Why is it that mathematical insight is said to call into question our nature as 'physical beings'? Isn't that the very point at issue?
We need true explanatory force. 'By means of a faculty' is not really an answer. But people who know biology can connect an organ like the liver with all of the other organs.
Quoting Wayfarer
In my opinion, only a bad philosopher would say we were 'just' physical beings. What 'physical' means isn't terribly clear anyway, no more than 'supernatural' is exactly clear. Maybe it's the case that the stuff that we call mental is the highly patterned movement of stuff that, when it's not moving with memory and purpose, not binding time, we wouldn't call mental.
Whatever we are (which seems to largely be whatever we decide we are), we aren't like rocks or even like chimpanzees. We live in or as 'spirit' (deeply and essentially in a socially constructed and preserved symbolic layer of the lifeworld). Or something like that....We don't need platonic integers to be assured of our transcendence of every other entity we've seen.
Yes, the meaning world. I quite agree. Thanks for the discussion.
:up:
How about the self as a social habit, something we all perform and insist that others perform ?
I missed this post the first time. Good link !
This is why it's hard to not understand Hegel as making all of the world God. It's the only entity without otherness, without negation, truly infinite.
Great stuff ! Reminds me of Jung's individuation process and the integration of the shadow. Also reminds me of Siddhartha with the ferry man in Hesse's novel. Nothing human is alien to me. The highest position (which may always be only the highest so far) is maybe just a harmonious fusion of all that came before, with nothing wasted. This justifies what looks like error as determinate negation, a mistake made and marked so not to be made again. Two wrongs, if they meet perpendicularly perhaps, can make a right.
I also think of Shakespeare, who must have known all his heroes and villains and clowns in himself. But he was also the spirit in the balcony, a magic circle embracing them all, aware of being their unity along with a view from outside this ring of personalities.
Dunno, but Quinne at least, wishes to avoid such appeal by substituting ontic necessity, in that if a scientific theory is grounded by abstract mathematical objects, and the theory is believed to hold, then those objects are necessary, re: indispensable.
Apparently, the escape from rational insight reflects the disregard for the origin of those abstract objects, and those a priori conditions by which they are even possible. In other words, such objects are merely given, hence the rational insight for their origin is not required, insofar as the accepted theory is concerned, it doesnt matter.
As for the avoidance of rational insight altogether, Quine 1981, abandonment of the goal of a first philosophy , re: naturalism writ large, relegates all rational insight to the back burner, when the goal of a first philosophy is the deduction to principles by which natural science itself is possible, which seems a perfect way to shoot yourself in the foot.
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Quoting Wayfarer
I would like to think I helped put it back.
There is a 'compromise' to this problem with "rational insight" which allows for both of these positions, it's called dualism. This is the position presented by Thomas Aquinas. The immaterial soul, in its present condition, as united with a material body, in the human being, is restricted in its capacity to know the truly immaterial Forms (God and the angels) because of that union with matter, and the human being's dependence on the material body. The soul itself is not dependent on the material body, but the human being is, so it is not the immaterial soul itself which is limited in it's capacity to know immaterial Forms, but the human being is.
The human being, in its present condition, as an immaterial soul united with a material body, is limited in its capacity to truly know immaterial objects because human knowledge is dependent on the material body. So the human being's knowledge of the immaterial is always through the means of material representations. In the case of mathematical objects and other logical forms, the material representations are symbols. The need to use material representations, and therefore the material body with its sense organs, in the human mode of understanding, greatly hinders our capacity to grasp the reality of the truly immaterial. Monist materialists for example will refer to these material aspects as evidence that there is no need to assume anything immaterial, thus hindering the advancement of this knowledge which is already restricted.
For Aquinas there is a proposed condition of the soul posterior to the existence of the human being, when the soul is freed from this dependence on the material body. It is only in this condition, when the soul is freed from the human being's dependence on the material body, that the soul can truly know the immaterial Forms. You'll notice how Faith is a requirement here. If we cannot truly know the reality of the immaterial Forms when we are immaterial souls united with a material body, in the human condition, then the whole reality of such Forms within the human conceptual structure, therefore the "rational insight" which you refer to, is subject to skepticism. Materialism, (physicalism included), which is best characterized as a radical skepticism, undermines faith, and the capacity of the immaterial soul to know itself as such, consequently the capacity to know all immaterial Forms is corrupted.
Yes. It seems likely that functional brain structure may establish the basic categories into which we catalog our sensory experience. But a quick Google search didn't find much corroboration. However, Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate argued against the then-prevailing cultural bias of the Nature vs Nurture and Gene vs Environment politics. He provided evidence to support the notion that much of characteristic human behavior (perhaps including reasoning facility) is built-in at birth. Even Intuition may indicate that, prior to conscious thought, we instinctively recognize the logic behind sensory inputs : categories plus experience. Maybe Idealism is related to those innate epistemological categories (what ought to be true), and Realism is more influenced by our direct personal experience of the world (e.g. poverty or wealth). Surely some scientist or philosopher has investigated the roots of a priori and a posteriori knowledge. :smile:
In epistemology, Innatism is the doctrine that the mind is born with ideas, knowledge, and beliefs. The opposing doctrine, that the mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate) at birth and all knowledge is gained from experience and the senses, is called Empiricism. ___Wiki
Since humans are primarily visual creatures, our metaphors tend to emphasize imagination. But we also have some limited sense of "natural rhythm". So, maybe we "dance" to the tune that harmonizes with our innate rhythmic patterns. However, it may also be possible that we "hear" a tempo that we are predisposed to rock to. Dancing with ghost music? :joke:
Quoting plaque flag
Unfortunately, the mysterious "installer", Mr. X, could be either Nature or God or some other First Cause. As noted above, "functional brain structure may establish the basic categories into which we catalog our sensory experience." {my interpretation} But, the details to support that natural explanation are scarce.
Even the notion of "Nature" as an "installer" agent is an imaginary humanoid rationalization of a trial & error process. So, it seems that the ultimate source of human conceptual ability remains a mystery*1, missing in the a priori gap of Big Bang theory, which doesn't actually begin at the beginning. Therefore, any "Installer" we might posit might be a "sentimental antiexplanation". Nevertheless, I have developed a non-empirical, and un-sentimental theory of my own : X = Enformer. :cool:
*1, How could random chance produce rational thought, and unreal Ideals?
That's pretty much what I thought. Glad there's someone else who sees the point.
Quoting Gnomon
That would be Immanuel Kant, it was the subject of the Critique of Pure Reason.
Plato believed that we had mathematical knowledge because the soul acquired it before birth. I sometimes wonder if that is poetic analogy for the existence of faculties which had actually been acquired during the course of evolution. (I'm sure someone has thought of that.) Notice also that Noam Chomsky is a proponent of innatism via his (contested) theory of universal grammar.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think I subscribe to a from of dualism, with the caveat that I reject any idea of a 'spiritual substance' or objectively-existing mind, or of mind and body as separate substances. Mind is the capacity to grasp meaning and is present in very rudimentary form even in the simplest organisms. In rational sentient beings it attains the capacity for reason and self-knowledge.
:fire: re: Homo [confabulator]!
Quoting plaque flag
:up:
'Theory of Forms' (universals) via reification + circular reason fallacies. Later 'deconstructed' as the problem of the criterion, no?
Quoting plaque flag
:clap: So on point brilliantly succinct!
You blinded me with Science (again)! :up:
Quoting plaque flag
:100:
... or metacognitive bias (via neo-natal bonding + mirror neurons > developing 'theory of mind'). :chin:
As far as I can tell, the only 'mystery' (and I think @180 Proof agrees ?) is that of any postulated origin, because we can always ask but why ? Why this and not something else ?
Thank you for the kind words. It helps keep me reaching.
That sounds right. I really ought to know more about the brain. I'd like to study it as a prediction machine, especially in the light of what transformers are doing. Attention is drawn to surprise, right?
:cool:
And mirror neurons might give us that strong illusion of sharing platonic ideas and the same sensations ?
How about mind as the body's performance of meaning ? As you say, it's there from the beginning. But with us there is intense timebinding. I see this 'spirit ' or thickening-stacking software as what differentiates us.
Yeah, novelty usually pricks one from one's mneumonic slumber.
It's maybe like an employee running for the manager when they don't want responsibility for the decision.
I don't know. My guess is that "platonic ideas" (universals) are quixotic (mis)uses of language rationalized whereby (formal and nonformal) abstractions are fallaciously reified. We share 'semantic illusions' discursively as a matter of course "mirror neurons", I think, only play a significant role in prelinguistiic cognition (i.e. before babies habitualize language-use).
:up:
Have you considered an equivalence class approach to thinking about ideas ? In other words, an idea is just a blurry set of expressions that are used in basically the same way, for the same purpose. This way sentences need not be thought of as containers of Content.
I think the point you are referring to is the idea of rational intuition. That idea is very much out of favour among contemporary philosophers, but that is a merely a matter of normative correctness, of fashion. The idea may come back into favour again for all we know.
The problem is that it is not in any way demonstrable, so in light of that, I think it is not something that can really be cogently argued for, or against. Its detractors will say that there is no reason to believe in rational intuition, probably because they don't feel any "rightness" in the idea, or they are hoodwinked by feeling a need to be "correct", and, of course, on the grounds that it cannot be demonstrated to be true. Its supporters find reason to believe in it just because they feel it is right, and because it cannot be demonstrated to be false.
The thing is, if you feel you have rational intuition into the nature of reality you will have a very different vision of life than those who reject the idea. So, for me the real issue is an ethical one: how do I want to live and what kind of vision do I want to live by? For me, that would be the only way to decide between rational intuition or no rational intuition, God or no God, and so on.
These kinds of questions will never be definitively settled by philosophy, simply because what constitutes philosophy is itself a contentious question. There are several mutually exclusive understandings of what philosophy is and/ or should be.
So the question is whether this participation metaphor is the best one. Why isn't it just that wings need to be flat ? Adjectives look like classifications which I'd expect to have inferential consequences. Because that wing is not flat enough, the plane it's on won't fly.
Perhaps I'm somewhere in the middle on this. Concepts exist in some sense. Note that they are objective or public. There is a right way to use them. None of us individually govern them, and they make philosophy possible.
I think you mean 'nonphysical,' but even this is not obvious. Concepts could be the patterns in the movement of otherwise nonconceptual stuff. It is way too easy in my view to forget time and motion.
Are dances nonphysical ? Or are we too quick to think of motionless stones when 'physical' is used ?
I like structuralism (Saussure on language and Benacerraf on math), which thinks in terms of roles in structures. So the numeral 4 is like the wooden bishop (the material token) in Chess is like one of the many ways to say 'hello' in 45 languages. Along these lines, translation is just finding a phrase that does basically the same thing in the target context as it did in the source context, so it is not moving some immaterial content from one material container to another. I think we both reject the container metaphor, so I'm elaborating for others too.
This 'voluntarism' seems to beg the "intuition" question. I'm with Freddy here: judge by example how one actually lives, particularly one's manifest habits insofar as they embody some "kind of vision" one lives by practies before principles.
:up:
Respectfully (and I hope helpfully), I suggest (1) you study the theory of evolution [to understand complexity emerging from simplicity] and (2) read more philosophy [ to question Everyman prejudices about 'unreal' or 'immaterial' ideas] .
Smart people have made some real progress on this stuff, and (as you mention) it's inexpensive entertainment.
Sure, but you're looking at the life in question from the outside. We all live our lives from the inside; what's important to the indivdual is the quality of life as it seems to them.
So, of course hypocrisy is possible and "by their fruits shall ye know them", but one must first want to live in a certain way and then strive to embody that personal vision of the good life. Apart from hypocrisy, there are many possible explanations why one might fail to live in accordance with the way one thinks is the most desirable.
Am I? I wrote "one", not you or him/her or people or them. Also, I took your comment about "rational intuition" to be philosophical, not sociological, so it was (meant to be) prescriptive as well as descriptive.
I thought you were looking at it from the outside because you seemed to be counting behavior as paramount. What I wanted to counterpose was the idea that we look at the quality of our lives from the perspective of how they feel to us. Well, I know I do at least, and I imagine that others feel the same way.
Am I saying people should think this way? No, I'm saying I think they mostly do. As I keep hammering on this theme: I think the idea of rational normativity (beyond consistency) is an abomination; it is anathema to me, at least.
This is consistent with Aristotle's description, but the issue which necessitates dualism logically, comes down to what we might call the first living organism. Such a material body came into existence as an organized body, with that rudimentary capacity. Now there must be a cause of that organized body with that capacity, and this cause must be an actuality. This supports the concept of an immaterial soul, as the actual cause of existence, 'the first actuality" of that organized body. As the actual cause, it is necessarily prior to it, and in that sense not dependent on the material body.
The same principle is shown to be applicable to the entire universe through the cosmological argument. Since all material things have some degree of organization (form or actuality) in order to exist as a "thing", and matter itself without form would be pure potential without the actuality required to cause actual organized existence, we must conclude an actuality which is prior to all material things, as cause of them. In theology this is God.
As I see it, the reason why dualism is called for is that the forms which we come to know in our minds, as intelligible objects, are derived from the material objects, through the means of sensation. But the forms which are shown logically to be independent from material objects, are prior to the material objects as cause of them. This leaves a medium of "matter" which lies between, and separates the forms within the human mind, as dependent on the material body, from the truly separate, immaterial forms which are prior to and not dependent on material bodies.
Quoting plaque flag
Notice how this comes down to a question of "why". And questions of "why" are readily answered when intention is the cause. So when the question "Why this and not something else" is asked, it is easily answered with, that was choice of the intentional agent. When we overcome the physicalist prejudice, which inclines us to believe that all causes must be physical, then we can understand the reality of intention and free will as truly non-physical causes. And when we come to understand that this type of non-physical cause is very real, and prior to, rather than posterior to the activities of material objects, we can apprehend how this sort of cause must pervade the entire physical universe.
To me that looks like superstition.
It's not a bias toward the physical on my part (I don't think 'physical' is a fundamental concept) but just a care for whether socalled explanations are just sentimental stories about gods more complex than what they are supposed to explain. To me the concept of free will is mystification of our enacted convention of selfhood as a focus of responsibility.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm surprised that you would say so. The obvious next question is : 'why did that intentional agent make such a choice?' One does not explain something relatively simple (a natural world without life in it yet) in terms of something hopelessly complex (the psychology of a superior being, perhaps of a god.) This is anti-explanation.
But why do some think it is a genuine explanation ? Because it makes them feel good. It gives them an emotional orientation. Fine. Let people have their religion. But I like explanation and clarification, which is joyful sober hard work. For me this is essentially social / normative. Serious critical minds come together to tell a truer and truer story about our shared world.
Why would you think that free will, the capacity to make a choice, is superstition? Do you really believe that you do not have the capacity to choose?
Quoting plaque flag
Oversimplification of that which is inherently complex, is not a way toward understanding. It is misunderstanding. The problem with your approach, obviously, is that there is no such thing as "a natural world without life in it yet". So this counterfactual proposition is completely misguided. You propose this as a means of simplification, to produce the logical conception of a simplified world. But it's based on a false premise, a counterfactual.
However, what this counterfactual reveals is that this simplification renders "the world" as unintelligible, incoherent. "Emergence" fails as a rational proposal for understanding the becoming of the universe, and we are left to accept the reality that the proposition of "a natural world without life in it yet" is fundamentally flawed.
The issue here, and the obvious deficiency, is that you cannot remove the observer from the observation. So, "a natural world without life in it yet" is not a true proposition which a life form can make. Therefore this does not give us an acceptable, true ontological starting point. Instead, we must take as the staring point, the perspective of the life form making the observation. And, since choice and intention are fundamental aspects of this life form, we need a thorough understanding of these before we proceed toward any hypothetical removal of the observer from the observation. This is because to remove the observer from the observation requires that we remove all the influence which the observer contributes to the observation. And, we know that choice and intention have great influence on observations.
Quoting plaque flag
That's pathetic. You reject "feeling good" and choose "hard work", and you pretend there's something "joyful" about this choice. Where are your priorities? That your "explanation and clarification" is directed toward a "truer story" is demonstrably false, as analysis of your counterfactual premise displays. Therefore you ought to realize that any such hard work of explanation and calculation will be misdirected, fruitless and endless. Where is the joy in fruitless hard work? Next, you will need to direct this hard work toward hiding the deficiencies of your metaphysics, rather than toward a truer understanding. So not only will you be claiming to be enjoying the fruitlessness of your hard work, but also the hard work of covering up that fruitlessness. That becomes deception. So the honourable course here is to admit to the mistake of oversimplification, and get back on track toward understanding the true complexities of reality.
I'll leave you to your monologue.
Not in the libertarianist sense. Either our decisions are determined by some prior cause or they occur spontaneously, neither of which seem to satisfy libertarian free will.
We might not even have it in the compatibilist sense. See unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain:
Since the Big Bang Theory didn't begin at the ultimate beginning, I'd call that missing "ultimate source" the Big Mystery. Are you aware of any inherent limits on empirical Science? Such as the explanatory gap called "The Singularity" (defined by lack of definition). Despite the lack of data from the Great Beyond, many scientists have continued to probe into the darkness before the postulated Big Bang --- Inflation, Many Worlds, Multiverse --- with no grounds other than speculation on "what if?" based on limited knowledge of "what is".
Philosophy is built upon conjectures into the unknown, with no "grounds" except the human talent for inference : Reason. If you want to know "what is?", post on a Science site. But if you want to know "what if?", post on a Philosophy forum. Pragmatic Science doesn't ask "why?" questions. Why ask "why?" if you don't want to hear conjectures? "Why" questions tend to put devout Materialists on the defensive. Give a high five for me. :smile:
PS___I wasn't using the term "mystery" as a black box into which you can postulate any possibility. Instead, it was simply a pragmatic admission of limitation, and an aspirational challenge to go beyond physical limits with imagination and rational speculation. If you don't like a conjecture about a "mystery", refute it with "observations", not sarcasm . :joke:
The Big Bang: Solid Theory, But Mysteries Remain
https://www.space.com/8066-big-bang-solid-theory-mysteries-remain.html
Mystery behind the Big Bang theory revealed!
https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/mystery-behind-the-big-bang-theory-revealed-and-some-tech-and-gadgets-that-caught-it-71663128550229.html
Conjecture :
In scientific philosophy, Karl Popper pioneered the use of the term "conjecture" to indicate a statement which is presumed to be real, true, or genuine, mostly based on inconclusive grounds, in contrast with a hypothesis (hence theory, axiom, principle), which is a testable statement based on accepted grounds.
https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Conjecture
[i]What does Popper mean when he says science cycles through conjectures and refutations?
He claimed that all testing in science has the form of attempting to refute theories by means of observation. And crucially, for Popper it is never possible to confirm or establish a theory by showing its agreement with observations.[/i]
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7208/9780226300610-006/pdf
:100:
It would be more helpful if, rather than point fingers, you would try to answer the "how" question above. Did you really think I was unaware of evolutionary theory, and the prevalence of "everyman prejudices" about immaterial ideas? Are you aware of any Material Ideas? What kind of atoms are Concepts made of? Did Darwin propose a theory to explain the origin of Reason?
FWIW, My non-academic thesis & blog are built upon 18th century evolution theory, plus 21st century Systems Biology, and other cutting-edge ideas about ideas. I even have my own hypothesis (conjecture?) about how "random Chance", plus non-random Selection, could work together (like a computer program's Data + Criteria) to evolve rational thinking beings. For years, I've been following the Santa Fe Institute's research into Complexity (in general), and Complex Adaptive Systems (in particular). So I'm better informed on such questions than the average layman. And, like the Institute scientists, I like to think outside the conventional box. :smile:
Santa Fe Institute
the scientists sought a forum to conduct theoretical research outside the traditional disciplinary boundaries of academic departments and government agency science budgets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Institute
Systems Biology
Denis Noble, Oxford University & Santa Fe Institute
https://irp.nih.gov/catalyst/19/6/systems-biology-as-defined-by-nih
A Holistic approach to living organisms that goes beyond the self-imposed limitations of traditional Reductive scientific methods. A Systems View of the world only became doable since computers accelerated & expanded the pace & reach of human inference. Reductive methods are an old-fashioned hang-over from the times when scientists used pencils & chalk to record their thought processes.
As you wish, simpleton.
Quoting Michael
What's wrong with the idea of free will choices occurring spontaneously? That looks like an adequate descriptive word for libertarian free will to me, though I suppose you might have a different idea of what constitutes libertarian free will. Wouldn't it be necessary for the will to act spontaneously, in order for one to be quick witted? Spontaneity appears to be very consistent with free will. So, of your two choices, let's go with "spontaneously", and that seems to satisfy libertarian free will.
Quoting Michael
"Determinants" is not a problem to the concept of free will. It is well known that there are numerous determinants, but free will takes numerous determinants and produces one act which is not determined by any one of those determinants, nor is it the sum of any number of determinants. That is why it is proper to say that our freely willed actions are affected by these determinants, but we cannot say that they are the effect of these determinants. We must look elsewhere for the cause of these actions.
From what I can see, the article you linked doesn't seem to have any real evidence against the reality of free will. I could decide today, what I will do tomorrow, and that's a lot longer time span than ten seconds. But that time span is irrelevant. The critical point in time is when I spontaneously move to act on what I previously decided to do, that's when the will acts. That the will to carry out the act does not occur at the same time the decision to act is made, is evident from the reality of procrastination and changing one's mind.
That's why Augustine divided the intellect into three parts, memory, reason, and will. The will, being free, does not necessarily follow reason. That is why a person sometimes does what one knows ought not be done, and has even decided not to do it, in the case of bad habits and temptations for example.
You are just proving my point.
What point are you pointing at? That I think outside the box of conventional science? Well, duh! What else do you expect on a freaking Philosophy Forum? Goose-stepping ideologues?
FYI, I'm merely reflecting your challenge back at you. Are you afraid of philosophical mysteries? Is Idealism too scary to think about? Are you trying to prove that you are a doctrinaire disciple of Scientism, as the final authority on all things? Try to think for yourself once in a while. Step outside the creed, and sample the infinite varieties of reality and ideality. :joke:
From previous post : If you don't like a conjecture about a "mystery", refute it with "observations", not sarcasm
[i]What does Popper mean when he says science cycles through conjectures and refutations?
He claimed that all testing in science has the form of attempting to refute theories by means of observation. And crucially, for Popper it is never possible to confirm or establish a theory by showing its agreement with observations.[/i]
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/ ... 10-006/pdf
The Myth of Objectivity :
What we know is generally considered to be the result of our exploration of the real world, of the way things really are. . . . How we know is a far more vexing problem. To solve it, the mind needs to step outside itself, so to speak for at this point we are no longer with facts that apparently exist independently of us in the outside world ...
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4613-0115-8_2
Quoting plaque flag
Are you a Materialist or Mysterian or both? Are such ultimate questions off-limits on a Philosophy Forum? Of course such topics are beyond the scope of physical Science, but we're talking about non-physical Mind here, on a Philosophy forum. AFAIK, the only thing blocking the human mind from contemplating its own genesis is a Physicalist prejudice. I can respect the Mysterian position on scientific topics. But in this thread, we're discussing abstract subjective general Principles, not concrete objective specific Objects. Aren't we? :smile:
Philosophy's explanations are grounded in arguments of principles, while science tries to explain based on experiment results, observable facts, and objective evidence.
http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/career-education/difference-between-science-and-philosophy/
Mysterian :
of thinkers, known as mysterians, who claim that, although we know that the conscious mind is nothing more than the brain, it is simply beyond the conceptual apparatus of human beings to understand how this can be the case.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/mysterian
Noe -- How do "we know" that Consciousness is nothing more than a Brain function. That's a tautology, not a scientific fact.
The term physical is just kinda like an honorific word, kinda like the word 'real' when we say 'the real truth'. It doesn't add anything, it just says 'this is serious truth'. So to say that something is 'physical' today just means 'you gotta take this seriously'.
? Noam Chomsky
Note -- From a Physicalist perspective, if it ain't physical you shouldn't take it seriously. But, on this forum, non-physical topics are de rigueur. And some of us take Subjective ideas very seriously.
Ontology
To me, that is the major subject of philosophy. It is the domain of the a priori, but it's not as if there's evidence for them, so much as that we rely on them to decide what constitutes evidence. Wayfarer
I apologize for the defensive response above. But used to begin his sarcastic put-downs with a disrespectful "respectfully". Instead of responding to my itemized conjectures with specific refutations, he would dismissively recommend that I submissively "educate" my ignorant self -- "study", "understand", "read" -- on The Truth (whatever "settled" Science says). Presumably, anything that fits his scientific paradigm is respectable, and anything else is not suitable for philosophical discussions.
With no formal training in academic philosophy, I used to be uncertain, unassertive, and easily pushed around by sophist bullies. Now, after years of retirement leisure, and forum philosophizing, I tend to respond to derogation with a flood of information. Not expecting to change his shuttered mind, but merely to show that I've done my homework . . . even though not on the required reading list. I no longer waste my time trying to dialog with him. So, you can tell him how you detected bullshit and bashed baloney. :smile:
PS__Yes, I am familiar with Carl Sagan's "baloney detector" for pseudoscience. But the topic of this thread is, by your own admission, beyond current scientific proof or disproof. So, why not let philosophy have a go at it?
PPS__Typically superciliously refers to self-defense posts like this as "whining". Yet it's merely intended to reopen the dialog without the disrespect. Do you think that sarcasm & arrogance are appropriate philosophical forum etiquette? How would you respond to a put-down post?
Supercilious : behaving or looking as though one thinks one is superior to others.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/792659
Apparently, I'm still living la vita loca & rent-free in the tin-foil hatted head of the leader of TPF's Quantum-Woo Crew. :lol: :party: :up:
Interesting. "Causality", as far as I have heard it used in the literature, is the idea of how material objects interact with each other or how mind-independent parts explain one another. Depending on the flavor of idealism, causality may still exist (e.g., schopenhauer's epistemic dualist view allowed for causality as the extrinsic representation of mentality); however, the mentality itself has no causality: what are you referring to by 'causality' in idealistic metaphysics? I don't see what the causal relationships would be between mentality--it is all immaterial mind operations.
Bob
But whenever we apply the results of logic and rational inference to a practical outcome, isn't that an instance of mental causation, in some sense?
Have a look at this title - Rational Causation - I haven't yet read it myself but it was pointed out in another thread on a related topic.
That's fair. The "mental causation" would be simply reasons that determined a choice (to some extent) whereas "physical causation" would be the interaction of either mind-independent parts or phenomenal objects. Thank you for sharing!
Bob