At least that was a start - but it doesn't develop. The expression 'a setting devoid of anything conscious but an observer' is very confusing, indicating you hadn't really come to terms with the basic problem. — Wayfarer
Again indicating you have no grasp of the philosophical issue. — Wayfarer
Demonstrate to me these things are non-physical, and I will agree. You noted there are some suppositions and debates about this. This means there are people who think these things are material. That isn't evidence. That's just indicating what we don't understand. — Philosophim
That is on you. If you expect to throw a linked set of debates that would require me hours of reading without any guidance or lead on your part, then its just a convenient excuse for you to run away from the issue. — Philosophim
You need to understand why mathematical Pplatonism is incompatible with materialism. That article spells it out in two different quotes. — Wayfarer
A very good question. First, it needs to be something falsifiable. By that, I mean that there needs to be some way of clearly defining what the non-physical is, and testing it. — Philosophim
to illustrate my point, consider the argument about the reality of numbers (see What is Math?). The argument is, on the one side, that numbers are real, independently of anyone who is aware of them - which is generally known as mathematical realism or mathematical platonism. It grants mathematical objects reality, albeit of a different order to empirical objects. — Wayfarer
The argument is, on the one side, that numbers are real, independently of anyone who is aware of them - which is generally known as mathematical realism or mathematical platonism. It grants mathematical objects reality, albeit of a different order to empirical objects. — Wayfarer
"I believe that the only way to make sense of mathematics is to believe that there are objective mathematical facts, and that they are discovered by mathematicians,” says James Robert Brown, a philosopher of science recently retired from the University of Toronto. “Working mathematicians overwhelmingly are Platonists. They don't always call themselves Platonists, but if you ask them relevant questions, it’s always the Platonistic answer that they give you.
Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.
Yes. That's why I said "physicalism" was not an issue for them. They seemed to assume that Reality was both Material & Spiritual. But they didn't worry about how a spiritual Mind could emerge from a Material substrate. They just assumed that "god did it".Physicalism was probably not a major intellectual issue for the Greeks & Romans & Jews. Because, except for a few unorthodox philosophers, they typically took Spiritualism for granted. — Gnomon
Not at all. The Stoics, Epicureans and Atomists were materialists. Materialism has always existed as part of philosophy - even in ancient India. — Wayfarer
I'm not asking you to use the scientific method. I'm asking you to provide something that has falsification. — Philosophim
However, Einstein discovered that intangible Energy & tangible Matter (Mass) are correlated mathematically. — Gnomon
To say that information exists in and of itself is akin to speaking of spin without the top, of ripples without water, of a dance without the dancer, or of the Cheshire Cat’s grin without the cat. It is a grammatically valid statement devoid of sense; a word game less meaningful than fantasy, for internally consistent fantasy can at least be explicitly and coherently conceived of as such. — Kastrup
...we don’t need the word games of information realism. Instead, we must stick to what is most immediately present to us: solidity and concreteness are qualities of our experience. The world measured, modeled and ultimately predicted by physics is the world of perceptions, a category of mentation. The phantasms and abstractions reside merely in our descriptions of the behavior of that world, not in the world itself.
Where we get lost and confused is in imagining that what we are describing is a non-mental reality underlying our perceptions, as opposed to the perceptions themselves. We then try to find the solidity and concreteness of the perceived world in that postulated underlying reality. However, a non-mental world is inevitably abstract. And since solidity and concreteness are felt qualities of experience—what else?—we cannot find them there. The problem we face is thus merely an artifact of thought, something we conjure up out of thin air because of our theoretical habits and prejudices. ....
The mental universe exists in mind but not in your personal mind alone. Instead, it is a transpersonal field of mentation that presents itself to us as physicality—with its concreteness, solidity and definiteness—once our personal mental processes interact with it through observation. This mental universe is what physics is leading us to, not the hand-waving word games of information realism.
— Kastrup
Again - the reason that Popper devised the falsification criterion, was to differentiate scientific from non-scientific theories. So, what you're asking for is a scientific theory. — Wayfarer
If you think you can explain maths in a couple of paragraphs, that it's 'obvious' and 'natural' what maths is, what numbers are, then you need to do more reading. — Wayfarer
You can find genuine people who are willing to engage the subject rationally, but I would say a lot of the motivation is not rational curiosity, but a desire for a particular emotional outcome. — Philosophim
https://iep.utm.edu/gadamer/#SH3bPrejudice (Vorurteil) literally means a fore-judgment, indicating all the assumptions required to make a claim of knowledge. Behind every claim and belief lie many other tacit beliefs; it is the work of understanding to expose and subsequently affirm or negate them. Unlike our everyday use of the word, which always implies that which is damning and unfounded, Gadamer’s use of “prejudice” is neutral: we do not know in advance which prejudices are worth preserving and which should be rejected. Furthermore, prejudice-free knowledge is neither desirable nor possible. Neither the hermeneutic circle nor prejudices are necessarily vicious. Against the enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice” (272) Gadamer argues that prejudices are the very source of our knowledge. To dream with Descartes of razing to the ground all beliefs that are not clear and distinct is a move of deception that would entail ridding oneself of the very language that allows one to formulate doubt in the first place.
Yes. This doesn't make human interactions any less meaningful. How we function does not change the reality of our function. — Philosophim
I agree. I'm personally interested in celebrating how 'miraculous' the so-called ordinary already is. — lll
I'm a longtime atheist, and it'd be quite an inconvenience for me if I had to rewire myself to take god chatter seriously again (as I did when exposed as a child to it.) — lll
Sometimes I think on the fact that I exist at all, and am filled with absolute wonder. It is truly astounding that existence "is", and that I am one of the lucky few bits of material existence to realize it all. — Philosophim
When did I say empirical evidence? All I'm noting for the condition of falsification, is that we have a clear postulate we can put forward that would show when the proposition was false. If A=~A, then A=A would be false right? Take the simple note above and try to explain to me why A=~A is not a negation of A=A. — Philosophim
Have you heard of the phrase "when pigs fly?" It is a adynaton, namely in that when it postulates a subjunction believed to take on a highly implausible (or impossible) premise to ridicule on whatever follows. A is A in any valuation of A, so A is not A is simply never true. But entertaining A is not A simply entails trivialism in classical FOL, where any proposition you want to follow follows. (This is well known as the principle of explosion). — Kuro
Then you agree with me. The potential for something to be proven false, does not mean it can be proven false. — Philosophim
And again, if something is provably true, it doesn't mean we can't invent a scenario in which it would not be true. The invention of the scenario in which it is not true, also does not mean it can be concluded that it is not true. You seem to be under the impression that falsification means "likelihood or chance" that it can be proven false. That's not what it is. Its just the presentation of the condition in which a claim would be false. And A=~A is that falsification presentation. It is of course, NOT true, which means that A=A is not false. But it can still be falsified. Does that clear it up? — Philosophim
That is because you are not understanding what I am saying. I am not saying 6=5. I'm just noting a case that IF 6=5 was true, then 5=5 would be false. Thus 5=5 can be falsified. It doesn't mean that 5=5 is false. — Philosophim
Correct. But in both cases, there is a possible negation to consider. We may conclude that negation is impossible, but we can conceive of its negation, and what it would entail. — Philosophim
Can you address the point in which I provided an example of God vs. Jesus when it was not possible for there to be falsification? In the God example, there is not a consideration of anything which could be considered falsifiable. Let us not forget this debate is about providing evidence that is falsifiable for or against consciousness being physical vs non-physical. — Philosophim
It would be a counterexample to the proposition "God exists and made the world" because that proposition is not a tautology. But "God is God" or "Making the world is making the world" is a tautology that is always true regardless of whether God existed or not. In the same fashion that "Santa is Santa" is a tautology with no falsity conditions. — Kuro
I'm slightly confused because while the debate of physicalism is not uninteresting, but it does not strike me to have such importance of a philosophical topic to be this dominant in general discourse. Surely, other subjects even within metaphysics itself like time or mereology are just as relevant as that topic — Kuro
To say that information exists in and of itself is akin to speaking of spin without the top, of ripples without water, of a dance without the dancer, or of the Cheshire Cat’s grin without the cat. It is a grammatically valid statement devoid of sense; a word game less meaningful than fantasy, for internally consistent fantasy can at least be explicitly and coherently conceived of as such. — Kastrup
...we don’t need the word games of information realism. Instead, we must stick to what is most immediately present to us: solidity and concreteness are qualities of our experience. The world measured, modeled and ultimately predicted by physics is the world of perceptions, a category of mentation. — Kastrup
Perception' points into a secret interior space which must remain epistemologically useless. — lll
All that is objective, extended, active—that is to say, all that is material—is regarded by materialism as affording so solid a basis for its explanation, that a reduction of everything to this can leave nothing to be desired (especially if in ultimate analysis this reduction should resolve itself into action and reaction). But we have shown that all this is given indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and ever active in time. From such an indirectly given object, materialism seeks to explain what is immediately given, the idea (in which alone the object that materialism starts with exists), and finally even the will from which all those fundamental forces, that manifest themselves, under the guidance of causes, and therefore according to law, are in truth to be explained. To the assertion that thought is a modification of matter we may always, with equal right, oppose the contrary assertion that all matter is merely the modification of the knowing subject, as its idea. — Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
I've never implied that potential to be false is the same as falsity and I've clarified this an awful amount of times in my earlier post once again... you're beating the same strawman that I clarified isn't my position. — Kuro
It would be a counterexample to the proposition "God exists and made the world" because that proposition is not a tautology. But "God is God" or "Making the world is making the world" is a tautology that is always true regardless of whether God existed or not. In the same fashion that "Santa is Santa" is a tautology with no falsity conditions. — Kuro
He's therefore questioning the normally-assumed primacy of the objective - that the so-called 'objective domain' is the fundamental reality. — Wayfarer
The 'objective domain' is perhaps best understood as that realm about which we can reliably make objective (unbiased) claims. — lll
The problem with solipsistic idealisms is related to the self-cancelling 'it's all just opinion' thesis, which pretends to be an opinion-transcending fact. — lll
As I elaborate extensively in my new book, The Idea of the World, none of this implies solipsism. The mental universe exists in mind but not in your personal mind alone. Instead, it is a transpersonal field of mentation that presents itself to us as physicality—with its concreteness, solidity and definiteness—once our personal mental processes interact with it through observation. — Bernardo Kastrup
Hegel believed that the ideas we have of the world are social, which is to say that the ideas that we possess individually are utterly shaped by the ideas that other people possess. Our minds have been shaped by the thoughts of other people through the language we speak, the traditions and mores of our society, and the cultural and religious institutions of which we are a part. Spirit is Hegel’s name for the collective consciousness of a given society, which shapes the ideas and consciousness of each individual.
Any 'critical' or 'rational' dialog tacitly presupposes a shared reality about which one can be (something like) righter or wronger. — lll
The argument for platonism in that article is given in brief by James Robert Brown: — Wayfarer
To the assertion that thought is a modification of matter we may always, with equal right, oppose the contrary assertion that all matter is merely the modification of the knowing subject, as its idea. — Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
Wayfarer is literally telling me Santa exists, and when I persist on a definition of who Santa is and how I can know he exists, he can't. — Philosophim
I think a softer version of Wayfarer's point would be something like: our world is intelligible. We can talk about stuff. — lll
Math platonism looks like a leap of faith. How can we see around our own cognition and check if numbers are 'really' there, assuming those signs have sense ? — lll
In his seminal 1973 paper, “Mathematical Truth,” Paul Benacerraf presented a problem facing all accounts of mathematical truth and knowledge. Standard readings of mathematical claims entail the existence of mathematical objects. But, our best epistemic theories seem to debar any knowledge of mathematical objects. Thus, the philosopher of mathematics faces a dilemma: either abandon standard readings of mathematical claims or give up our best epistemic theories. Neither option is attractive.
Some philosophers, called rationalists, claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought. But, the rationalist’s claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.
.'...we may be sorrrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to nor derives from them in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined by nature, or by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual I.' — The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy, Alfredo Ferrarin
One might also ask where 'really existing' platonic entities end and stuff we cook up from them begins. — lll
How can we see around our own cognition and check if numbers are 'really' there, assuming those signs have sense ? — lll
But when I ask for evidence, the honest thing to reply is, "I don't have any, its just a belief of mine," I would accept that. — Philosophim
I was not referring to Kastrup's article in the excerpt above. It was a top of the head remark.However, Einstein discovered that intangible Energy & tangible Matter (Mass) are correlated mathematically. — Gnomon
:down: No, you're on the wrong track here. And that's not even supported by the post you provide from Bernardo Kastrup (of whom I'm a keen reader, having just finished his Schopenhauer.) — Wayfarer
Of course one can always imagine that 'things could be completely otherwise' - but they're not. I find those kinds of arguments entirely void of merit. — Wayfarer
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.