• flannel jesus
    1.4k
    The speaker of such statements doesn't say, in first person singular, what he thinks, feels, intends, wants, but makes claims about the other person, esp. about their inner life.baker

    And why do you think scientists are telling you what you think so frequently?

    Disagreeing with scientists potentially comes with a cost.baker

    Do you think that's unjust in some way? What specific examples of this unjustness have you experienced?
  • baker
    5.6k
    And why do you think scientists are telling you what you think so frequently?flannel jesus
    Because they want to have control over people.
    It's a standard mode of operation for people anyway; scientists have just elevated it to a whole new level, much like religion/spirituality.

    Disagreeing with scientists potentially comes with a cost.
    — baker
    Do you think that's unjust in some way? What specific examples of this unjustness have you experienced?
    Well, you can always dismiss my experience on the grounds of them being a statistically irrelevant sample.
    All in all, I think it makes for a waste of time to utter words without actually communicating.
    You can see the downside of this mode of non-communication in medicine (as an applied science) when doctors don't listen to people describing their symptoms and instead jumping to conclusions, followed by wrong medical treatment, side-effects, wasted time, money, and missed opportunities for healing.
  • flannel jesus
    1.4k
    Because they want to have control over people.baker

    sorry, my question was ambiguosly worded. Im not asking you for what you think their motivations are, I'm asking you what has led you to believe they are doing that. I haven't seen any of that myself, so I don't know why you have that belief, it's not obvious to me how you came to believe that - or what evidence you might show me that might lead me to believe the same.

    Well, you can always dismiss my experiencebaker

    I haven't read any specific experiences from you to dismiss.
  • Kizzy
    62
    All in all, I think it makes for a waste of time to utter words without actually communicating.baker
    I see you now, and can admit that I still go back and forth with you on this one, baker.
  • Joshs
    5.3k


    And why do you think scientists are telling you what you think so frequently?
    — flannel jesus
    Because they want to have control over people.
    It's a standard mode of operation for people anyway; scientists have just elevated it to a whole new level, much like religion/spirituality
    baker

    Are you talking about the influence of positivism on science? Not all approaches in science are positivistic. There are postmodern sciences, for instance.
  • baker
    5.6k
    Im not asking you for what you think their motivations are, I'm asking you what has led you to believe they are doing that.flannel jesus
    The language they use; namely, you-statements; and we-statements (which are veiled you-statements).

    Pick up any scientific piece of writing, and insofar it makes claims in the form of "we humans", as if the generalizations the writer makes apply to all people.

    Obviously, the texts in the hard sciences will have less of that. But those in the humanities, neuroscience, neurobiology will have plenty.
  • flannel jesus
    1.4k
    I've read a lot of scientific material and I don't see what you say is there
  • baker
    5.6k
    Possibly because you don't see any meaningful difference between I-statements and you-statements.
  • flannel jesus
    1.4k
    can you show me an example that you think I wouldn't see a difference in?
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    2k


    I know this thread is quite old, but I do find the topic interesting.

    In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary.

    On the bolded, I wonder how common belief in the primacy of particles still is? It does not seem to have a particularly strong standing among the whose who of the physics world. Strong commitments to reductionism in terms of particles seems to be more popular in the special sciences and then strongest in the laity.

    As far as arguments in metaphysics go, I find Nicholas Rescher's survey of arguments for process metaphysics about as convincing as any. Mark Bickhard in "Systems and Process Metaphysics," lays out a concise summary of these as well, and then Terrance Deacon touches on them in his "Incomplete Nature," although less fully. You can even find some of this in Aquinas.

    Since I've quoted these all at length in different places, I'll just throw them out here:

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/826619 -Bickhard
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/885631 - Rescher and Aquinas
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/837241 - Deacon

    I think this view helps out with both of the problems listed.

    This doesn’t mean that scientific knowledge is arbitrary, or a mere projection of our own minds. On the contrary, some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this. But these tests never give us nature as it is in itself, outside our ways of seeing and acting on things. Experience is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals.

    Knowledge of how things are "in themselves," as they "relate to nothing else," is not only unattainable, but useless, telling us nothing about the world. Things only make a difference to other things in the world to the extent that they interact with them. These interactions are both what we care about and what we can know (see the quotes from Rescher and Clarke on Aquinas above for an elaboration). Further, the preferencing of mindless interactions over ones involving phenomenal experience is arbitrary, and the rationale for it confused. The logical positivist doctrine that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," ends up in the absurdity that things "really look the way they would be seen without eyes" — that the world "is the way it would be conceived of without a mind."

    Process metaphysics helps here in elucidating the fact that the universe is can be seen as just one, unitary process. Yet we experience a multiplicity of beings and there is a multiplicity of minds. The old One and the Many problem. What I think it can help us bring out though is that there is no reason to see processes that don't involve phenomena as somehow "more real" than those processes involving bodies, objects, and environments that lead to phenomenal awareness.

    I think information theoretic approaches to the sciences, particularly physics, and applications of semiotics to the sciences, are both instructive here. Through these lenses we are able to see how perspective and context end up being relevant for all interactions, which is another reason for not preferencing processes that don't involve phenomena over those that do.

    I believe there is a strong argument that runs through Plato, Aquinas, and Hegel that the processes that involve phenomena might actually be thought of as "more real," as they relate to essences, but this is more secondary, and requires a lot of elaboration.

    The second problem concerns physicalism. According to the most reductive version of physicalism, science tells us that everything, including life, the mind and consciousness, can be reduced to the behaviour of the smallest material constituents. You’re nothing but your neurons, and your neurons are nothing but little bits of matter. Here, life and the mind are gone, and only lifeless matter exists.

    The shift to the process view helps here because you lose the problems of reductionism. Some authors claim that "process metaphysics allows for strong emergence," but it might be more accurate to say that it doesn't need it. More is different in process, there are no "fundemental building blocks," such that getting anything distinctly new violates the Parmenidean concern about getting "something from nothing." Phenomena are produced by some, but not all subprocesses of the universal process. It perhaps doesn't make sense in this context to have any sort of ontological distinction between physical and mental, at least not in the way physicalism versus idealism is normally framed.
  • baker
    5.6k
    Are you talking about the influence of positivism on science?Joshs
    It's earlier than positivism, you can see it with the ancient Greeks already. That characteristic brand of normativisim -- "It's like this and no other way".

    Not all approaches in science are positivistic. There are postmodern sciences, for instance.
    What/whom do you have in mind?
    Surely postmodernists can go beyond the positivism that the OP likes to criticize.

    But there's something else, that I'd like to get at with your quoting Thompson several times by now --

    "In Buddhism, we have a case study showing that when groundlessness is embraced and followed through to its ultimate conclusions, the outcome is an unconditional sense of intrinsic goodness that manifests itself in the world as spontaneous compassion.”

    You say, "But I never understood how assuming a groundless ego leads to spontaneous compassion and benevolence."

    To which I replied earlier that what Thompson is stating as fact is actually Mahayana/Vajrayana doctrine; it's not even universally Buddhist (he should have named his book "Why I am not a Mahayani/Vajrayani/modernist Buddhist", because this is all that he says he isn't, as far as Buddhism goes).

    I'm baffled that anyone would even try to understand specific terms from a particular Buddhist discourse in an atomistic, context-independent manner.

    Would it even be possible for someone outside of Mahayana/Vajrayana to "embrace groundlessness" and "follow it through to its ultimate conclusions"? At best, such a person would have to work with whatever they think those terms mean, and the outcome would be who knows what (possibly a mental breakdown, as is not that rarely the case for "spiritual practitioners").
  • baker
    5.6k
    Present three sentences from scientific texts of your choosing that contain the word "we" and talk about mankind in general and I'll explain it on your examples.
  • Corvus
    3k
    well, how can a subjective experience be compared to another without being in accordance to a standard of some kind? I think every subjective experience has something to do with objective knowledge...does the knowledge itself become or is/can be subjective when used from/obtained from a single subjective experiences alone?Kizzy

    I was asking the relations between subjective and objective knowledge. How are they linked? Or are they linked at all? Is one pre-condition of the other?

    Problem of scientific knowledge is that the foundation of the knowledge is based on observational activities which are subjective perceptual processes. How do they elevate one's perceptual observations with possibility of fallibilities and subjective in nature into objective apodictic knowledge?
  • flannel jesus
    1.4k
    How do they elevate one's perceptual observations with possibility of fallibilities and subjective in nature into objective apodictic knowledge?Corvus

    There's a layer of underlying assumptions, but once you accept those assumptions (and they're all pretty reasonable), scientific observations become more and more trustworthy the more scientists make those observations. This isn't only the case in science, in all sorts of venues in life, people will trust a story about something happening if more people also say they saw the same thing happen.

    You use the phrase "objective knowledge", but it should be explicitly noted, 100% certainty in science is not attainable.
  • Janus
    15.5k
    Science is normative in the sense that there are methodologies to follow and peer reviewing of work. Really, all aspects of culture are normative.

    On the other hand, scientific theses and results are judged as good or bad on account of whether they are consistent and coherent with the whole body of scientific understanding and whether they work, i.e. whether they have useful applications; so, science is preeminently pragmatic.
  • Wayfarer
    20.8k
    And finally, I personally think there's an alternative term for what the paper calls 'lived experience', which helps to orientate the discussion more clearly in the context of the philosophical tradition. I wonder if there are any guesses as to what this word might be?
    — Wayfarer

    "Lived experience" sounds like a historical topic due to the word "Lived". What about "Having been lived"?
    Corvus

    The word I was thinking of was 'being'. Likewise, in David Chalmer's important paper, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, his rather awkward terminology of 'what it is like to be' could also be interpreted as a reference to being. It is a word which we use in almost every sentence, but it has many layers of meaning, and is especially relevant in relation to this topic.

    Pick up any scientific piece of writing, and insofar it makes claims in the form of "we humans", as if the generalizations the writer makes apply to all people.baker

    Well, I can see what you're getting at there, but I can't go along with:

    Science is based on someone's particular, ideologically driven idea of human experience (or how it should be).baker

    Let's step back a bit. Classical (Newtonian) physics, which, along with several other elements, provided the paradigm for modern science, operates context-free. The results of its predictions and calculations are indeed the same for anyone who performs the same experiments or makes the same observations. That is the sense in which they are universal - they apply anywhere, for any observer.

    The problem of 'scientism' arises from trying to generalise that methodology to the whole of existence - to absolutize it, in other words. And in fact the limitations of this already became clear in what we could call the post-modern science that was initiated by quantum mechanics, in the form of the 'observer problem in physics'. Without wading into the troubled waters of interpretations of physics, at the very minimum, it became obvious that context was a factor in determining the experimental outcome, 'context' being the experimental set-up that produces an observation. From one point of view, it's a wave, and from another, it's a particle. There is nothing like that in classical physics (which is why in mid-20th century there was a fair amount of popular science literature on 'the new physics' by writers like Paul Davies.)

    Add to this the emergence of phenomenology, which sought to return philosophy to the awareness of lived experience, rather than understanding it in terms of mathematically-precise objective measurement, and you several of the major ingredients for The Blind Spot. But the authors of that article stress that they're not anti-science. They acknowledge right up front that science is effective, that it delivers better ways of understanding things and getting things done:

    some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this. But these tests never give us nature as it is in itself, outside our ways of seeing and acting on things. Experience is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals.

    What they're critiquing is science as an ideology, preached by public intellectuals like Dennett and Dawkins, who make 'scientific thinking' and 'the scientific method' a kind of quasi- or pseudo religion:

    Objectivism and physicalism are philosophical ideas, not scientific ones – even if some scientists espouse them. They don’t logically follow from what science tells us about the physical world, or from the scientific method itself.

    So, if that's what you're saying is 'ideologically-driven', then I agree, but I don't agree it is characteristic of science as such.
  • Corvus
    3k
    You use the phrase "objective knowledge", but it should be explicitly noted, 100% certainty in science is not attainable.flannel jesus

    "Objective Knowledge" does not have explicitly and necessarily 100% certainty. All scientific knowledge is bound to be disproved at any time.
  • jgill
    3.6k
    Math is not a science, of course, but it is very much a social activity. In general, if one states a proposition one needs to convince others of its validity. For relatively simple results this might be fairly easy - following the logical steps the author has presented. At times, however, even this task is so complicated that verification is illusive. The great mathematician, Poisson, regarded Galois theory as presented by its creator, as unintelligible. And in rare instances computer programs must be brought into play for analyzing huge numbers of examples.

    If anything, math is dependent on human involvement to an even greater extent than areas of science. But in a different way. And if the foundations are shifted results may be reinterpreted.
  • Wayfarer
    20.8k
    I wonder how common belief in the primacy of particles still is?Count Timothy von Icarus

    Maybe the belief in the primacy of particles, as such, has waned, but in some ways the assertion of the primacy of scientific method still evokes it. Recall that the original impetus behind atomism was to reconcile the relation of 'the One and the Many'. Atomism provided a way to do this, by attributing to the atom the attributes of the One - imperishability and changelessness. So while the atoms were changeless in themselves, by being combined in multifarious ways (and by their unpredictable 'swerving' which provides an element of spontaneity), they could be said to account for the Many. (I did an undergraduate essay on Lucretius, as part of a Philosophy of Matter unit.) In any case, I see the appeal of 'the atom' as being that of a kind of 'ultimate object', the indivisible core of material reality. Quarks are sometimes still referred to in that sense, although nowadays fields are usually assigned primacy, and their nature is considerably more elusive.

    Knowledge of how things are "in themselves," as they "relate to nothing else," is not only unattainable, but useless, telling us nothing about the world.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Maybe the world is too much with us. Of those passages you link too - and boy, they're pretty dense! - I find the Thomist example most of interest.

    The logical positivist doctrine that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," ends up in the absurdity that things "really look the way they would be seen without eyes" — that the world "is the way it would be conceived of without a mind."Count Timothy von Icarus

    Agree. Also very much the point of my Mind Created World OP. Logical positivism is scientism par excellence.
  • flannel jesus
    1.4k
    so what do you mean by "objective knowledge"? You referred to scientific knowledge as if it's "objective knowledge" as distinct from personally gained knowledge, I don't think I know what you mean by that.
  • Corvus
    3k
    what do you mean by "objective knowledge"?flannel jesus

    Objective knowledge just means that it is the agreed knowledge publicly or academically. If you went to the garden, and found something scientific for the first time in history, and you are the only one who knows about it, then it is a subject knowledge.
  • flannel jesus
    1.4k
    Ah, so then let's reword your previous question:

    "How do they elevate one's perceptual observations with possibility of fallibilities and subjective in nature into objective apodictic knowledge?"

    This means essentially, how does one person take their knowledge, and convince enough other people that it's true so that it becomes widely publicly or academically accepted.

    There are a variety of ways that happens. One way is, in medical science, you conduct a double blind study with placebo on the efficacy of a medicine in treating an ailment, you publish your study, and then other people can go on and repeat that study. Eventually, in successful cases, the studies are so successful that the rest of medical science comes to be convinced that that medicine does in fact effectively treat that ailment, and that's how it goes from personal knowledge to "objective knowledge".

    Not all things you might call "objective knowledge" happen in simliar ways. That's just one possible, but relatively common, narrative.
  • Metaphysician Undercover
    12.5k
    The shift to the process view helps here because you lose the problems of reductionism.Count Timothy von Icarus

    The process view has its own problems, such as how to explain the reality of mass, as that which stays the same while time passes, inertia.

    The two different perspectives, the perspective of "being" and the perspective of "becoming" (process), each if taken to account for the totality of reality are reductionist. The former reduces reality to particles which themselves remain the same as time passes, and in their relations produce the objects we know. The latter reduces all beings to basic units of activity, processes, which in their relations to each other constitute the objects we know.

    The problem is that the two, the perspective of being and the perspective of becoming, are fundamentally incompatible as Plato found out, and since reality is revealed to us as consisting of both, the entirety cannot be reduced to one or the other. This is why dualism cannot be dismissed because it provides the only true foundation for a complete understanding of reality.
  • Corvus
    3k
    Ah, so then let's reword your previous question:flannel jesus
    The two different perspectives, the perspective of "being" and the perspective of "becoming" (process), each if taken to account for the totality of reality are reductionist.Metaphysician Undercover
    There are a variety of ways that happens. One way is, in medical science, you conduct a double blind study with placebo on the efficacy of a medicine in treating an ailment, you publish your study, and then other people can go on and repeat that study. Eventually, in successful cases, the studies are so successful that the rest of medical science comes to be convinced that that medicine does in fact effectively treat that ailment, and that's how it goes from personal knowledge to "objective knowledge".flannel jesus
    Yes, it seems a good explanation for the process of objectifying some subjective knowledge.

    Not all things you might call "objective knowledge" happen in simliar ways. That's just one possible, but relatively common, narrative.flannel jesus
    There must be also the underlying principles for objectifying subjective knowledge such as "consistency" of the knowledge. For example, when Newton saw the apple dropping from the tree in his garden, he induced the law of gravity. At that moment of time, it must have had been his own subjective knowledge. But through the objectifying processes, it became an objective scientific knowledge ever since.

    There must be "consistency" in the details of the knowledge for that to happen. If apple dropped in Japan, and it kept on floating in the air instead of falling down to the ground, or landed in the kitchen table by itself as soon as it dropped, then it couldn't have been accepted as an objective scientific knowledge or law. But it must have been falling down straight onto the ground as soon as apple dropped from trees wherever in the world, that consistency of the movement was the base of the objective knowledge.

    I was wondering if there would be any other conditions like that in the process of subjective knowledge becoming objective knowledge.
  • flannel jesus
    1.4k
    If apple dropped in Japan, and it kept on floating in the air instead of falling down to the ground, or landed in the kitchen table by itself as soon as it dropped, then it couldn't have been accepted as an objective scientific knowledge or law.Corvus

    Right. "Totally different things happening in different places in the world" kinda makes it a bit more tricky. If things didn't fall at 9.8m/s/s everywhere on earth (air resistance notwithstanding), then making gravity into commonly accepted scientific knowledge would have been... much more challenging.

    "Totally different things happening in different places in the world" is kind of how spirituality works, and why there are no universal spiritual facts like there are universally accepted facts about physics, chemistry and medicine. One person prays on one side of the world and finds the book of mormon, another person prays on the other side of the world and composes the Quran. That's, I think, perhaps a lot like dropping an apple in England and seeing it fall, and dropping an apple in Japan and seeing it float.

    It's also, I suppose, dislike that in some important ways as well. It's going to be a strained analogy if we take it too far.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    2k


    'the One and the Many'.

    I do believe this remains a primary issue even with the waning of particle-based conceptions of being and the rise of process-based (pancomputationalism, "It From Bit") conceptions and ontic structural realism (e.g. Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, the book "Every Thing Must Go."

    The move to focusing on universal fields actually makes the problem more acute in some ways. If space-time is really a "metric field" rather than a receptacle-container thing, and if unification suggests a grand "field of fields," what you are left with is a conception of reality that is just one single, unified process. There is no multiplicity.

    But then, there obviously is multiplicity. You might try to demote the existence of multiple types of "thing" to the status of "mere appearance" but the very existence of appearance itself underscores the obvious existence of multiple, distinct minds existing in this unified omni-process. Barring solipsism and a radical sort of idealism, it seems that this omni-process gives rise to a multiplicity of phenomenal horizons, and then these also seem to contain a multiplicity of things in them that also must be explained.

    I do see some possible ways of addressing this, at least in their outline, primarily in Hegel and St. Aquinas. In Aquinas, there is the intuition that the things that are most truly discrete and self-determining are precisely those beings in whom a unity of phenomenal awareness emerges. Then, in Hegel there is the intuition that a proper explanation of the world requires something that wraps around the objective/subjective, nature/mind distinction, and explains how multiplicity emerges from mind and nature. Both are also realists re universals in some sense, which I think is essential. Nominalism tends to throw all of the multiplicity on the mind side of the equation, making it impossible to say what causes it, which in turn makes it impossible to describe the whole.

    Agree. Also very much the point of my Mind Created World OP. Logical positivism is scientism par excellence.

    Exactly. The sort of scientific discourse embraced by positivism is useful at times but incomplete. Good science, particularly theoretical work and paradigm defining work, tends to slip between this sort of scientific discourse and the philosophical mode of discourse readily.



    The process view has its own problems, such as how to explain the reality of mass, as that which stays the same while time passes, inertia.

    How exactly is mass a particularly thorny issue? The convertibility of the main definitions of mass is generally employed to explain it processual terms, mass to energy to gravitational fields, etc. "Fundamental particles," can be thought of as stabilities in process, and the fact that they appear to have beginnings and ends (e.g. the destruction and spontaneous formation of quark condensate) seems to go along with this nicely as far as I am aware.

    The problem is that the two, the perspective of being and the perspective of becoming, are fundamentally incompatible as Plato found out, and since reality is revealed to us as consisting of both, the entirety cannot be reduced to one or the other. This is why dualism cannot be dismissed because it provides the only true foundation for a complete understanding of reality.

    I agree with this. Natural numbers, essences, universals, the sorts of stabilities that can form in the world, these seems to exist, or at least subsist, in a sort of eternal frame. Things can be said of this multiplicity regardless of their actualization, and they would seem to subsist in some way as potentials prior to their actualization. So, being can't be reduced to becoming. Although Hegel's conception of becoming emerging from being/nothing seems to offer up a potential way to balance these issues if the dialectical is thought of in an ontological sense, as in Jacob Boheme and Eriugena, Hegel's big forerunners.
  • Wayfarer
    20.8k
    I do see some possible ways of addressing this, at least in their outline, primarily in Hegel and St. Aquinas. In Aquinas, there is the intuition that the things that are most truly discrete and self-determining are precisely those beings in whom a unity of phenomenal awareness emerges.Count Timothy von Icarus

    I'm reading a book I was alerted to in Vervaeke's online lectures, Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, Eric D Perl. He traces the lineage of metaphysics from Parmenides to Aquinas - I'm up to the section on Aquinas 'existence and essence', which I'm finding rather difficult, but overall it's been a highly clarifying read. It really helped me understand the original intention of the Platonic forms.

    Part of the implicit (but rarely stated) background to metaphysics is the 'unitive vision'. That is where the idea of 'the One' originates. In the chapter on Parmenides, we read:

    (as) the poem is presented as the speech of the Goddess, this grasp of the whole is received as a gift, a revelation from the divine. The very first full-fledged metaphysician in the western tradition, then, experiences his understanding of being in religious terms, as an encounter with divinity. It is no surprise, therefore, that, according to the Goddess, the road Parmenides takes “is outside the tread of men” (B 1.27). Thus the Goddess draws a sharp distinction between “the untrembling heart of well-rounded truth” on the one hand, and “the opinions of mortals” on the other. The implication is that truth, as distinct from mere human seeming, is divine.

    I think it's highly likely that modern culture, with its rejection of religious revelation, is grounded wholly in 'human seeming', hence its intractable metaphysical conundrums (although perhaps books like The One at least grapple with it.)

    Natural numbers, essences, universals, the sorts of stabilities that can form in the world, these seems to exist, or at least subsist, in a sort of eternal frame.Count Timothy von Icarus

    :clap: Russell mentions in his useful chapter on universals, using that very term:

    Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists (!) independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. This is, of course, denied by many philosophers, either for Berkeley's reasons or for Kant's. But we have already considered these reasons, and decided that they are inadequate. We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.

    This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation 'north of' does not seem to exist in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relation exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or time where we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something.

    The way I parse it is that universals are real but not existent qua phenomena. I think, arguably, they provide the real meaning of 'noumenal objects' but, of course, in a very different way than Kant uses the term 'noumena', so it's a can of worms.
  • Lionino
    1.5k
    Perhaps in these seventeen pages someone has made this same point, but:

    To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty
    Why? Because physical science – including biology and computational neuroscience – doesn’t include an account of consciousness
    Well, that is not the point of physicalism. And the issue is:
    f ‘physical reality’ means reality as physics describes it

    Physical reality is reality as physics could describe it, not as it describes it currently. Perfective and imperfective moods, it is the little things in language.

    because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like, especially in relation to consciousness.

    This is true, but if future physics is anything like current physics, it is not an empty claim.
  • Metaphysician Undercover
    12.5k
    "Fundamental particles," can be thought of as stabilities in process, and the fact that they appear to have beginnings and ends (e.g. the destruction and spontaneous formation of quark condensate) seems to go along with this nicely as far as I am aware.Count Timothy von Icarus

    "Stabilities" are represented as equilibriums which are artificial ideals that have no real independent existence. So the ideal equilibrium is compared to reality in modeling, and how reality strays from the equilibrium, is known as change. But the reality is that things are changing, whether fast or slow, so the equilibrium is just an artificial tool, and does not represent any thing really independent. It's a fabricated mathematical tool.

    Then the reality of the situation, how it is possible that a rapidly changing world can maintain the semblance of stability within some aspects, gets completely neglected. The "being" which is represented as a stability, equilibrium, symmetry, or whatever, is taken for granted as conforming to the ideal principle, the equilibrium, when it really does not conform. None of the supposed stabilities could be anywhere near eternal in reality, and the representation just misleads us into thinking that ideal equilibriums are real existing things, which are being caused to surrender their equilibrium by the actions of various forces. Then when we get to the fringes of our understanding, instead of recognizing that the proposed equilibriums are simply not real, and that they get further and further from being an accurate representation as we head to these fringes, the trend is to employ concepts of chance as a cause, like "symmetry-breaking". .

    . Although Hegel's conception of becoming emerging from being/nothing seems to offer up a potential way to balance these issues if the dialectical is thought of in an ontological sense, as in Jacob Boheme and Eriugena, Hegel's big forerunners.Count Timothy von Icarus

    I don't think Hegel provides a solution because his proposals lead to the violation of the law of non-contradiction in dialectical materialism and dialethism when being/not-being are subsumed by becoming.
  • Mww
    4.6k
    If we ask 'Where and when does this relation exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'.

    To ask of a relation presupposes a content; how can that which necessarily has content be nowhere and at no time?
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