Realism and Anti-Realism
Mattias Wikström
Suppose I tell you a tale and that in the midst of the story you interupt
and ask why the hero did not die. I tell you it was because "magical powers
were present". Then you ask me whether magical powers really exist, and in
reply I say "Of course not, this is just a tale."
First I said magical powers existed and then that they did not. Have I not
contradicted myself? Since this is how we normally talk, any semantical
theory must be false that renders what I said as a contradiction.
When asked "What is there?", I think many philosophers would start as
follows: "We exist, and we are surrounded by physical objects. We have
thoughts, and we express them in our language." If it is asked whether
things in fairy tales exist, then (at least) two sorts of replies are
possible:
Realist: "They exist as social and cultural objects."
Anti-Realist: "We talk about them in our language, but we must not compare
them to concrete physical objects."
My idea on how to resolve the conflict is to take seriously the way of
talking I used when telling the fairy tale: only when a question moves the
context outside the tale do I give an answer that is applicable outside the
tale. When I said that "Magical powers were present" I meant just that.
Seeing my statement as an abbreviation for something like "In this tale
magical powers were present" is wrong. This notwithstanding, if after I have
said that "magical powers do not exist" you go on to ask me what I meant
when I said they did, then I say I meant that "In the tale they do," again
without contradiction.
In this one can see a method of resolving problems in philosophy. It is
applicable to questions explicitly about "what there is", to the apparent
contradiction between things like Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, to
claims such as "all of mathematics is set theory", to the claim "you must
accept the principles of logic", etc. And in addition to pointing out
problems with existing theories we can also see how to create new ones. I do
not say that this way of thinking solves the problems, only that it puts
them in a new light.
Let me now take an example. Suppose I am investigating the properties of
certain mathematical groups. Perhaps I say something like "This group has
several non-trivial subgroups." What if someone asks: "Do groups exist?" To
this I may reply that I do not understand the question. I may explain what a
group is, tell about the history of group theory, show how to classify
groups, tell about the problems of realism and anti-realism in philospohy
etc., all in the hope that something of this might be what the questioner
had in mind. But I do not see that I have any obligation to answer the
question with a simple yes or no.
Note that the question puts me outside the context of group theory. If I had
instead been asked a group theoretical question, the answer would have
stayed inside group theory. Asking for something seemingly basic (e. g.
"does this thing exist") can often move us far out of the original context.
There is an inherent danger here. I have repeatedly talked about "contexts".
What is that? Does it exist? Is there a context of all contexts? To answer
theese questions, one has to carefully go through things again. I think it
is clear that I do not want the question "What is there?" to be answered
"Contexts!" Rather I may say that my talk about contexts was intended to
point out certain things, not to be an ontological claim.
One may wonder whether there are not, after all, some ontological claims
related to this idea, even though the idea itself is just an idea. I think
there probably are, though I do not know what they are. Whenever the idea is
applied to a situation, it leads to the separation of things that do not
necessarily go together (e. g. when I tell a story, that story becomes a
context separated from me), but this does not say how we are to put the
pieces together to form an ontology, if we are to do this at all. The
general pattern can be seen in the following example: "Does there exist one
universal logic or a plurality of logics?" If we apply the principle we find
several contexts (logics) that are linked to each other in various ways, but
the ontological claim itself, if meaningful at all, must lie outside theese
contexts.
As for "concrete physical objects", I think it is one of the strangest
things ever invented. They certainly do not belong in any fundamental way to
theories of physics. At least, "objects of mathematics" have a much more
fundamental place here. Actually, the distinction between "concrete physical
objects like chairs and tables" and "abstract macthematical objects like
circles and groups" is a confused one. We can see this if we ask whether a
chair that appears in a Virtual Reality world is a physical or a
mathematical object. Since it has nothing to do with "the physical world" it
is not a physical object in the same sence as a standard chair, but as a
mathematical object it is much more complicated than circles, groups and
similar things.
One way also wonder whether the idea has any application outside philosophy.
I do not know in general, but I believe it is useful in computer software,
from the elements of a programming language to the things that appear on my
computers desktop.
Sir Frederick
>
> Any comments on the following idea are appreciated.
>
is reality" is genetically based. If so, then no discourse will have
any effect. Built in stupidity is not going to change.
That "stupidity" was "smarts" eons ago. The times have changed.
The people haven't.
--
Best,
Frederick Martin McNeill
Poway, California, United States of America
mmcn...@fuzzysys.com
http://www.fuzzysys.com
*************************
Phrase of the week :
"The mind is a pattern making machine."--S. J. Gould (1996)
:-))))Snort!)
*************************
Sects, sects, sects...is that all you monks ever think about?
mike
news:ad013r$lmr$1...@green.tninet.se:
i don't think it has an application inside philosophy. it's a rhetorical
problem, where you'd only be concerned to rephrase your statement so that
your listener was able to follow you.
your "theory of physics" doesn't need proof of "concrete objects", only
proof that something "happens". physics isn't theology.
Ed Cryer
"Mattias Wikström" <mattias...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ad013r$lmr$1...@green.tninet.se...
all concentric. The greatest sinners are held in the centre, the lesser ones
at the furthest out circle.
Now, imagine that people in each respective circle only know of and can talk
about the circles inner to themselves. This would mean that the outer ones
can talk about all 7, while the central ones can only talk about their own
area.
In this real layout you have a pattern for metalanguage and the problems
you've outlined above.
Ed
mike
news:ad0h00$h9i$1...@news7.svr.pol.co.uk:
not a "metalanguage", a "schema". the abstraction allows you to use any
perception as a symbol. the abstraction isn't a metalanguage, it's a
manipulation of the tokens in a language just the way that talk manipulates
these same tokens. all objects are abstractions: to say that objects of
mathematics have a more fundamental place" for instance, is just to say
that you are interested in math.
Ed Cryer
"mike" <orang...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:Xns921C5FAF863B6...@66.75.162.196...
Consider this.
1. The cat sat on the mat.
2. The above sentence consists of the definite article, a noun, the past
tense of a verb, a preposition, the definite article again, and finally
another noun.
How do you define "metalanguage"? Is 2 not a metalanguage in relation to 1?
Now consider this.
1. SnowWhite lived with seven dwarfs.
2. This is a fairy story of which there are many.
3. Stories are told all over the world.
4. Stories come in prose or in verse, in many different languages.
5. Language has many uses. To convey information, give orders, express
feelings etc.
Now what this consists of is a hierarchy, each level spreading the
generalisation further. Is this merely a schema or can we use the term
"metalanguage"?
Ed
mike
not at all. there is nothing which i can think of which fits the concept
"metalanguage". 1 and 2 are separate sentences. they've nothing in common.
2 is a display of a certain kind of teaching tool. a "metalanguage" would
be about overloading the noun with the verb... and it would just be a
pointer to an activity... there'd be nothing in the overload which would
extend beyond our sense of normal langauge.
>
> Now consider this.
> 1. SnowWhite lived with seven dwarfs.
> 2. This is a fairy story of which there are many.
> 3. Stories are told all over the world.
> 4. Stories come in prose or in verse, in many different languages.
> 5. Language has many uses. To convey information, give orders, express
> feelings etc.
>
> Now what this consists of is a hierarchy, each level spreading the
> generalisation further. Is this merely a schema or can we use the term
> "metalanguage"?
it is a hierarchy if you wish it to be. i'd call it a list... a set of non-
dedicated tokens waiting to be used in a pattern.
if it actually is a hierarchy for you, then i'd call it a "schema", not a
"metalanguage", since you can say that the pieces can join together into a
sentence within the realm of the first sentence. you'd just have to make it
rhetorically smoother for conversation.
>
> Ed
>
BuddhaThu
Interesting read.
First, as a philosopher, if I were asked "what is there?" I would not
say that we are surrounded by physical objects. I would say that we
are surrounded by the *sense contents* of supposedly physical objects,
but as to physical objects themselves, I do not know. I take it on
faith. To me, it is a mere positing.
In this, if one is to be a good and consistent empiricist, our
knowledge is not of physical objects, it is of the mere sense contents
of them. And whether they constitute something psychological or
physical, I do not know. But if it is psychological, I cannot make the
assumption that it is not real. In this, I cannot prove that just
because it is psychological it is not real.
There is no way I can reach out beyond my sense contents to the
physical objects to be sure of much of anything. For what I can see, I
can see. All I can be sure of are my sense contents. Here, I am being
conservative in my skepticism.
For behind the sense contents are my spoken words and concepts. They
condition me to see the sense contents of my physical objects. So what
I have are words of sense contents of physical objects. But let us not
stop here, for we can move beyond mere spoken words to written words
which also condition us to how we take the world. So what we have is
like Dante's hell, except here, we have four layers and not seven.
(Thank God.) Or at least until some philosopher comes up with more.
We have written words, of spoken words, of our sense contents of the
physical world. All conditioned, all mediated, all the way down. Quite
a bit of a pickle, is it not?
Ever saw the that painting by Rene Magritte? It is a depiction of a
pipe and underneath it, you see strange words stating that it was not
a pipe. Some people think that it is a sexual thing, but it is not. It
is about objects and their representation. The object pipe is not the
picture pipe, is not the word "pipe." They are all distinct and
conditioned at every layer of seeing the world. And through those
layers, can you honestly say the these physical objects exists?
"Mattias Wikstr?" <mattias...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<ad013r$lmr$1...@green.tninet.se>...
BuddhaThu
By stating that there was something magical, are you alluding to
something non-conceptual? If you are speaking of something to which
science cannot explain due to its lack of concepts, then you are
probably right.
But the distinction is epistemological and not ontological. The bare
nothingness of a concept would certainly render it as magical on an
epistemological basis, for we have no way of ***knowing*** as it
pertains to cause. And science works on commonly agreed concepts in
order to conduct its experiments. For without concepts how then can
science prove anything that is true or false?
Second, just because it is magical on epistemological grounds, that is
on how we conceptually know things, it does not necessarily deny
causation on ontological grounds, that is on how things exists as they
really are.
But then, this would make the concept of "magic" as a mere placeholder
for concepts, which is in itself ***exists*** as a concept.
Hmm... Weird.
"Mattias Wikstr?" <mattias...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<ad013r$lmr$1...@green.tninet.se>...
mike
news:dc4fc79e.02052...@posting.google.com:
> Hi,
>
> Interesting read.
>
> First, as a philosopher, if I were asked "what is there?" I would not
> say that we are surrounded by physical objects. I would say that we
> are surrounded by the *sense contents* of supposedly physical objects,
> but as to physical objects themselves, I do not know. I take it on
> faith. To me, it is a mere positing.
wouldn't you ask where "we" was first? like, the guys who say "is there an
external reality apart from you" have this idea that there is a "you" which
is separate from external reality. that makes no sense. where is this
"you"? in my brain or in my dik?
>
> In this, if one is to be a good and consistent empiricist, our
> knowledge is not of physical objects, it is of the mere sense contents
> of them. And whether they constitute something psychological or
> physical, I do not know. But if it is psychological, I cannot make the
> assumption that it is not real. In this, I cannot prove that just
> because it is psychological it is not real.
our knowledge is only of what we know. i know that i feel the earth under
my feet, but i don't Really know what an "earth" is.
mike
> Oh, one more thing that I would like to add.
>
> By stating that there was something magical, are you alluding to
> something non-conceptual? If you are speaking of something to which
> science cannot explain due to its lack of concepts, then you are
> probably right.
naw, if it was my post you are referring to. i was stating that the anti-
idealists, who scrape the mud from their toes and show you reality, are
right when they say that they have muddy hands but wrong when they call
upon this fantasy of a concrete world... that they're using a magic leap of
faith to extrapolate all that isn't cool mud into all else which isn't mud.
>
> But the distinction is epistemological and not ontological. The bare
> nothingness of a concept would certainly render it as magical on an
> epistemological basis, for we have no way of ***knowing*** as it
> pertains to cause. And science works on commonly agreed concepts in
> order to conduct its experiments. For without concepts how then can
> science prove anything that is true or false?
>
> Second, just because it is magical on epistemological grounds, that is
> on how we conceptually know things, it does not necessarily deny
> causation on ontological grounds, that is on how things exists as they
> really are.
>
> But then, this would make the concept of "magic" as a mere placeholder
> for concepts, which is in itself ***exists*** as a concept.
nij, these are rhetorical problems which are worked out by the authors
before the play opens. it has nothing to do with "logic".
Mattias Wikström
Feel free to ask if there were some particular things you were unable to
follow.
>
> your "theory of physics" doesn't need proof of "concrete objects", only
> proof that something "happens". physics isn't theology.
Physics must not be thought of as one uniform thing. You can investigate one
part of physics without knowing or caring about others. Sometimes one part
of physics depends on another. That other part then appears as an inner
context. This is precisely the idea of a context as it appeared in what I
wrote.
You can learn many pieces of physics without knowing whether they really
apply to the real world. To put it in the language of contexts: the testing
(or proving, if you prefer) will tend to appear as an outer context relative
to the contexts of theoretical physics.
It is thus doubtful whether you can say physics needs any proofs at all.
Physics as a whole might need them, but a lot of physics is possible without
them.
If what you mean when you say "physics isn't theology" is that physics can
be done independently of ontology, then I think you are right. At least, the
vast majority of all physics can be done independently of the wider
ontological context where it appears.
Mattias
mike
it's very clear, it just sums as a brochure for a time share condo. "you
can think this for awhile".
>
>>
>> your "theory of physics" doesn't need proof of "concrete objects",
>> only proof that something "happens". physics isn't theology.
>
> Physics must not be thought of as one uniform thing.
it doesn't need to be thought of as anything but a method: it's a
"science" in the modern way. it's only trying to explain how the thing that
it can understand as "working" actually work.
> You can
> investigate one part of physics without knowing or caring about others.
> Sometimes one part of physics depends on another. That other part then
> appears as an inner context. This is precisely the idea of a context as
> it appeared in what I wrote.
>
> You can learn many pieces of physics without knowing whether they
> really apply to the real world. To put it in the language of contexts:
> the testing (or proving, if you prefer) will tend to appear as an outer
> context relative to the contexts of theoretical physics.
>
> It is thus doubtful whether you can say physics needs any proofs at
> all. Physics as a whole might need them, but a lot of physics is
> possible without them.
that's maybe because the theories have become dogma. dogma is fine, but it
doesn't prove anything about the theology behind it.
>
> If what you mean when you say "physics isn't theology" is that physics
> can be done independently of ontology, then I think you are right. At
> least, the vast majority of all physics can be done independently of
> the wider ontological context where it appears.
nah, it means that physics needn't be thought of as relevent to "reality".
that's the best way to do physics. (imagine doing math where every point
had to be first correllated with a real-object as point? but, that's
applied physics, yes?)
>
> Mattias
>
>
>
Resijinth
>
> Suppose I tell you a tale and that in the midst of the story you interupt
> and ask why the hero did not die. I tell you it was because "magical powers
> were present". Then you ask me whether magical powers really exist, and in
> reply I say "Of course not, this is just a tale."
>
> First I said magical powers existed and then that they did not. Have I not
> contradicted myself? Since this is how we normally talk, any semantical
> theory must be false that renders what I said as a contradiction.
How so?
>
> When asked "What is there?", I think many philosophers would start as
> follows: "We exist, and we are surrounded by physical objects. We have
> thoughts, and we express them in our language." If it is asked whether
> things in fairy tales exist, then (at least) two sorts of replies are
> possible:
> Realist: "They exist as social and cultural objects."
> Anti-Realist: "We talk about them in our language, but we must not compare
> them to concrete physical objects."
You mean, story-realism. That stories really exist. Well, they are
immaterial. Of course, it depends on your definition of existence.
>
> My idea on how to resolve the conflict is to take seriously the way of
> talking I used when telling the fairy tale: only when a question moves the
> context outside the tale do I give an answer that is applicable outside the
> tale. When I said that "Magical powers were present" I meant just that.
> Seeing my statement as an abbreviation for something like "In this tale
> magical powers were present" is wrong. This notwithstanding, if after I have
> said that "magical powers do not exist" you go on to ask me what I meant
> when I said they did, then I say I meant that "In the tale they do," again
> without contradiction.
It depends upon your whole outlook on what existence means.
>
> In this one can see a method of resolving problems in philosophy. It is
> applicable to questions explicitly about "what there is", to the apparent
> contradiction between things like Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, to
> claims such as "all of mathematics is set theory", to the claim "you must
> accept the principles of logic", etc. And in addition to pointing out
> problems with existing theories we can also see how to create new ones. I do
> not say that this way of thinking solves the problems, only that it puts
> them in a new light.
Yes, it does.
>
> Let me now take an example. Suppose I am investigating the properties of
> certain mathematical groups. Perhaps I say something like "This group has
> several non-trivial subgroups." What if someone asks: "Do groups exist?" To
> this I may reply that I do not understand the question. I may explain what a
> group is, tell about the history of group theory, show how to classify
> groups, tell about the problems of realism and anti-realism in philospohy
> etc., all in the hope that something of this might be what the questioner
> had in mind. But I do not see that I have any obligation to answer the
> question with a simple yes or no.
Well, say they exist as concepts. That would clear things up. And you
can deal with concepts like you deal with objects, albeit you can't
test except by debating with others or comparing them to other
theories and such, which is pretty much what we do with science
anyhow.
>
> Note that the question puts me outside the context of group theory. If I had
> instead been asked a group theoretical question, the answer would have
> stayed inside group theory. Asking for something seemingly basic (e. g.
> "does this thing exist") can often move us far out of the original context.
Existence is tricky. An inability to decide what existence is, and in
fact, what ANYTHING is, necessarily divides us into groups. If only we
had a clear cut definition, then maybe there'd be less arguing... but
a lot more debating, which is healthy.
>
> There is an inherent danger here. I have repeatedly talked about "contexts".
> What is that? Does it exist? Is there a context of all contexts? To answer
> theese questions, one has to carefully go through things again. I think it
> is clear that I do not want the question "What is there?" to be answered
> "Contexts!" Rather I may say that my talk about contexts was intended to
> point out certain things, not to be an ontological claim.
Concepts are formulated, but necessarily based off of things in
existence. Saying they exist contextually isn't wrong. Also, you'll
have to move into group theory. I myself beleive in conceptual
heiarchy, which helps get around Russel's Paradox.
>
> One may wonder whether there are not, after all, some ontological claims
> related to this idea, even though the idea itself is just an idea. I think
> there probably are, though I do not know what they are. Whenever the idea is
> applied to a situation, it leads to the separation of things that do not
> necessarily go together (e. g. when I tell a story, that story becomes a
> context separated from me), but this does not say how we are to put the
> pieces together to form an ontology, if we are to do this at all. The
> general pattern can be seen in the following example: "Does there exist one
> universal logic or a plurality of logics?" If we apply the principle we find
> several contexts (logics) that are linked to each other in various ways, but
> the ontological claim itself, if meaningful at all, must lie outside theese
> contexts.
Everything must have a starting point.
>
> As for "concrete physical objects", I think it is one of the strangest
> things ever invented. They certainly do not belong in any fundamental way to
> theories of physics. At least, "objects of mathematics" have a much more
> fundamental place here. Actually, the distinction between "concrete physical
> objects like chairs and tables" and "abstract macthematical objects like
> circles and groups" is a confused one. We can see this if we ask whether a
> chair that appears in a Virtual Reality world is a physical or a
> mathematical object. Since it has nothing to do with "the physical world" it
> is not a physical object in the same sence as a standard chair, but as a
> mathematical object it is much more complicated than circles, groups and
> similar things.
The abstract and concrete are two different things. The chair in
virtual reality is abstract. In fact, 'chair' itself is abstract, but
A chair, in real life, is concrete, just as the electrons and
structure, or hardware, is the concrete that leads to the software and
programming, and the virtual chair, which are abstract.
>
> One way also wonder whether the idea has any application outside philosophy.
> I do not know in general, but I believe it is useful in computer software,
> from the elements of a programming language to the things that appear on my
> computers desktop.
Well, I've formulated a theory. The concrete is the material, the
abstract is the ideal. However, the concrete and abstract are
inter-related.
Mattias Wikström
> Hi,
>
> Interesting read.
>
> First, as a philosopher, if I were asked "what is there?" I would not
> say that we are surrounded by physical objects. I would say that we
> are surrounded by the *sense contents* of supposedly physical objects,
> but as to physical objects themselves, I do not know. I take it on
> faith. To me, it is a mere positing.
Hi,
When you say that we are surrounded by *sence contents*, does this imply a
first-person perspective? If so, then I think you should change it into a
third-person one. It makes little sence to me to speak to others and at the
same time say there is a theoretical possibility that the others do not
exist.
I think that the theoretical possibility ought to be not that others do not
exist, but rather that the system of communication breaks down. I mean an
earthquake could destroy my computer, I could go crazy, someone could write
posts in my name, or something like that. Instead of doubting whether others
exist, one may want to doubt whether they exist in the same sence as
oneself, e. g. whether they are humans or just AI programs immitating
humans. Similarly, instead of doubting whether the outside world exists one
may doubt whether it exists in the sence in which it is commonly thought to
exist.
>
> In this, if one is to be a good and consistent empiricist, our
> knowledge is not of physical objects, it is of the mere sense contents
> of them. And whether they constitute something psychological or
> physical, I do not know. But if it is psychological, I cannot make the
> assumption that it is not real. In this, I cannot prove that just
> because it is psychological it is not real.
I do not think there is such a thing as a "good and consistent empirist".
;-)
Empirism presupposes something I believe to be false: that the knowledge
powers of humans are well-suited for empirism. I think any division into a
priori and a posteriori must be arbitrary, and I think philosophy should be
done independently of any such a division. This is not to say that we cannot
know what the world is like, only that we cannot make any sharp division of
that knowledge into a priori and a posteriori.
And if we want not only to divide knowledge into a priori and a posteriori,
but also according to various degrees of certainity, then I think the human
knowledge powers are even more ill-suited.
One may think that this means we must make some assumptions we cannot check,
or at least cannot check until we have already made them (the empirist's
nightmare). I respond by not ever entering the empirist game. Again my talk
about contexts applies. The things that an empirist might say (e. g. "our
knowledge can be divided into a priori and a posteriori, into certain and
not completely certain", "either the world exists or it does not", "we must
not make any unjustified assumptions about the outer world") can be seen as
a context (perhaps with many sub-contexts). If I do not say that sort of
things I have not entered that context. The empirist and realist contexts
actually seem similar in this regard.
Does this mean I can somehow escape all philosophical problems by not ever
entering any context whatsoever? Well, I do not have to do philosophy, and I
could play idiot instead, and then noone would acuse me of having made
unjustifiable philosophical statements, but that would not be very
impressive to philosophers. Philosophers would reply that they are
interested in figuring out how things actually are. And if I now say that I
am so too, then we have something of a common context.
>
> There is no way I can reach out beyond my sense contents to the
> physical objects to be sure of much of anything. For what I can see, I
> can see. All I can be sure of are my sense contents. Here, I am being
> conservative in my skepticism.
>
> For behind the sense contents are my spoken words and concepts. They
> condition me to see the sense contents of my physical objects. So what
> I have are words of sense contents of physical objects. But let us not
> stop here, for we can move beyond mere spoken words to written words
> which also condition us to how we take the world. So what we have is
> like Dante's hell, except here, we have four layers and not seven.
> (Thank God.) Or at least until some philosopher comes up with more.
>
> We have written words, of spoken words, of our sense contents of the
> physical world. All conditioned, all mediated, all the way down. Quite
> a bit of a pickle, is it not?
I do not accept the expressions "reach out", "conditioned", and "mediated"
as descriptions of how we get knowledge if by theese is indicated any form
of uncertainity. To see why, we must look at what I think is the reason we
adopt that picture in the first place. The situation might be the following
when described in uncontroversial everyday language:
"Someone studies the human body, discovers that nerves exist, that
information enters the brain through the nerves, and that stimulating
someones nerves in various ways makes that person experience things
corresponding to the stimulations."
Note that this description speaks about human bodies, nerves, and brains
without in any way indicating that their existence might be uncertain. Now
we have to be careful. If we think that the outer world might be an
illusion, then the description might have to be rephrased. If we think it
presupposes something we have not assumed, then we cannot draw any
conclusions from it as it stands.
Here is a conclusion one is tempted to draw:
The thought experiment shows that a person could exist, whose experiences
are solely the result of artificial stimulations rather than what actually
happens around him.
This is true if by a person we mean someone we could observe, but not if we
mean someone that could be one of us. This gets less puzzling if we note
that neither the observers of that person, nor that person himself would
describe what they experience in that situation as having proved that what
they *themselves* experience is just the result of artificial stimulations.
The other side of the coin is that if we modify the experiment so that the
experimenters at some point replace the artifical stimulations with real
ones, then we discover what might be an a priori possibility: at some point
it might turn out that what we experience has been an illusion all along. We
might find ourselves among experimenters thanking us for having participated
in the "earth experiment". If we accept this as an empirical possibility,
then I think we should be skeptical of all talk of certainity. And if we do
not, then we will have trouble arguing with a philosopher who has been
raised "artificially", and for whom the non-existence of what he thought was
the outer world is not just a possibility, but actuality. If the simulated
world where that person was raised was identical to ours, we would not have
any arguments, but if it was "unrealistic" (perhaps like present-day
computer games) when compared to ours we could argue that the unrealistic
nature of his outer world was the reason that such a great surprise was
possible.
So where does this leave us? Well, I think this casts doubt on the
assumption that there is an uncertainity "between the layers".
For my own part, I am skeptical to talking about layers at all. I think that
from an ontological point of view we probably do not have, say, one context
of physical objects, one of mental objects, and then a third that links
theese two together. Instead I think we have one thing rather than several,
and the mental and physical vocabularies then simply speak about this thing
in different ways, about different parts of it, at different levels, etc. If
we move outside the context of ontology, then things might be different, but
I am still a little skeptical of talk of layers. Is there a technical
meaning of 'layer'?
>
> Ever saw the that painting by Rene Magritte? It is a depiction of a
> pipe and underneath it, you see strange words stating that it was not
> a pipe. Some people think that it is a sexual thing, but it is not. It
> is about objects and their representation. The object pipe is not the
> picture pipe, is not the word "pipe." They are all distinct and
> conditioned at every layer of seeing the world. And through those
> layers, can you honestly say the these physical objects exists?
I think the objects we talk about in our everyday language exist in the
everyday sence.
The problem when you ask about the existence of physical objects is that I
do not know what you mean by a physical object. If I want to go beyond the
everyday perspective on the things around me, I turn to the theories of
physics, and I try to imagine how this all ultimately fits into reality. I
see no objection to my saying that I am surrounded by physical objects. Of
course, when I say "that sound is annoying" I am saying something both about
the sound as a physical object and about my way of perceiving sounds, and
the context is not the same as when I speak about it as a purely physical
object.
Thinking about Magritte's painting leads me to the following thoughts. I can
look at a painting of a pipe and correctly say "this is a pipe", but I could
also correctly say "this is not a pipe", though saying both at once would be
very confusing. I would describe this by saying that we have here two
different contexts. When I say "this is a pipe" I do not mean it as an
abbreviation of "this is a painting of a pipe", for that statement belongs
to a different context. The word "layer", finally, puts us in yet another
context.
Mattias
Mattias Wikström
BuddhaThu <runnin...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Oh, one more thing that I would like to add.
>
> By stating that there was something magical, are you alluding to
> something non-conceptual? If you are speaking of something to which
> science cannot explain due to its lack of concepts, then you are
> probably right.
No, I think the same points could be made with a completely realistic story.
All I need is that something is true in the story that is false in reality.
The word 'magical' was not in any way required for what I wrote.
I find what you write here interesting, but I do not see that it is in any
direct way related to what I wrote.
Mentioning science makes the context less general than it has to be. Not
even a realistic story can be identified with a possible world. When we read
the story we can ask whether it could somehow be true of our world, but the
story itself need not be written with this interpretation in mind.
>
> But the distinction is epistemological and not ontological. The bare
> nothingness of a concept would certainly render it as magical on an
> epistemological basis, for we have no way of ***knowing*** as it
> pertains to cause. And science works on commonly agreed concepts in
> order to conduct its experiments. For without concepts how then can
> science prove anything that is true or false?
>
> Second, just because it is magical on epistemological grounds, that is
> on how we conceptually know things, it does not necessarily deny
> causation on ontological grounds, that is on how things exists as they
> really are.
I am not sure about what you mean (I am not a philosopher, and I do not know
this topic very well), but here is what I think you mean:
* The concepts we use when we describe the world are determined by their
behaviour as causes and effects.
* A concept is definied by its place in the network of causes and effects.
* It is always an empirical possibility that our beliefs about what the
causal network looks like are completely mistaken (any observations we can
make will be consistent with many such networks).
* Saying that magic is the cause of something, and that an empty concept (by
which I think you mean a concept whose denotation we know nothing about) is
the cause amounts to the same thing.
* In this case we can say absolutely nothing about the concept, but the
concept might still have a role to play despite our not knowing anything
about it.
>
> But then, this would make the concept of "magic" as a mere placeholder
> for concepts, which is in itself ***exists*** as a concept.
In mathematics we could adopt a convention that when we write _ in place of
variables in an expression, we mean the same as when theese are replaced by
variables different from each other and from any variables we have used. For
example, R(_, _, v, v, u, _) could be translated into R(w, x, v, v, u, y).
Perhaps this is what you mean by a placeholder, and then the question is in
what sence _ exists. I would say that it does not exist in any interesting
sence. An expression where it appears can be translated into one where it
does not appear, and one where it does not appear can be translated into one
where it appears as often as possible (the expresion above would be R(_, _,
v, v, _, _)). We can change context so that the two expressions correspond
to the same thing in the new context, and therefore my conclusion is that _
does not play an important role here (you probably do not want to say that
it exists as a concept).
Ed Cryer
information here is the Oxford definition:-
1. A form of language used to discuss a language.
2. A system of propositions about propositions.
I could give you a whole lecture on learning theory, how facts are chained
into concepts, concepts into principles etc. Then I could go into
comparative linguistics and explain the family-trees. Added to that I could
explain to you the propositional notion of Truth; this being the set of all
those propositions with a truth-value of yes.
And what would you do here? Write it all off as some meaningless schema?
Ed
mike
i am ruling it out because it's being used as a mysticism. "form of
language" shouldn't be confused with "special vocabulary". OED doesn't
validate a word, it just notes that someone is using a word in a certain
way.
>
> I could give you a whole lecture on learning theory, how facts are
> chained into concepts, concepts into principles etc. Then I could go
> into comparative linguistics and explain the family-trees. Added to
> that I could explain to you the propositional notion of Truth; this
> being the set of all those propositions with a truth-value of yes.
>
> And what would you do here? Write it all off as some meaningless
> schema?
it would be meaningful for you, but i'd be expecting you to make the theory
coherent for me. this is philosophy, where all schemas are scrambled into
omelettes.
all of these activities you mention are used in certain trades. the people
who practice these trades have very real experience with the subject: if i
need a noun fixed, i'll look you up. if i need to do philosophical analysis
with you, then i'll have to ask you to start from scratch. if all we're
going to do is quote at each other, then that's "debate" or something, and
is a waste of time.
>
> Ed
>
>
>
>
Mattias Wikström
mike <orang...@aol.com> wrote:
> "Mattias Wikström" <mattias...@hotmail.com> wrote in
> news:ad1liv$1es$1...@green.tninet.se:
> > mike <orang...@aol.com> wrote:
> >> "Mattias Wikström" <mattias...@hotmail.com> wrote in
> >> news:ad013r$lmr$1...@green.tninet.se:
> >>
> >> only proof that something "happens". physics isn't theology.
> >
> > Physics must not be thought of as one uniform thing.
>
> it doesn't need to be thought of as anything but a method: it's a
> "science" in the modern way. it's only trying to explain how the thing
that
> it can understand as "working" actually work.
You could say that this is the basic idea behind physics, but if you look
into physics books you can find passages that are more accurately described
as mathematics or ontology.
>
> > You can
> > investigate one part of physics without knowing or caring about others.
> > Sometimes one part of physics depends on another. That other part then
> > appears as an inner context. This is precisely the idea of a context as
> > it appeared in what I wrote.
> >
> > You can learn many pieces of physics without knowing whether they
> > really apply to the real world. To put it in the language of contexts:
> > the testing (or proving, if you prefer) will tend to appear as an outer
> > context relative to the contexts of theoretical physics.
> >
> > It is thus doubtful whether you can say physics needs any proofs at
> > all. Physics as a whole might need them, but a lot of physics is
> > possible without them.
>
> that's maybe because the theories have become dogma. dogma is fine, but it
> doesn't prove anything about the theology behind it.
Dogma is bad IMO. But the result of not performing any experiments need not
be dogma. It could instead be understanding. It is sometimes said that what
science gives us are not facts but understanding. Performing experiments can
improve our understanding. It can help us see on what areas theoretical
research should be performed. It can give us the practical know-how we need
to apply our theories. In nothing of this are proofs necessary.
>
> >
> > If what you mean when you say "physics isn't theology" is that physics
> > can be done independently of ontology, then I think you are right. At
> > least, the vast majority of all physics can be done independently of
> > the wider ontological context where it appears.
>
> nah, it means that physics needn't be thought of as relevent to "reality".
> that's the best way to do physics. (imagine doing math where every point
> had to be first correllated with a real-object as point? but, that's
> applied physics, yes?)
I agree that physics need not be thought of as relevant to "reality". If
this is the best way of doing physics I do not know. I have the impression
that quantum physicists are in disagreement here.
>
>
> >
> > Mattias
> >
> >
> >
>
Ed Cryer
common with the Philistines; or maybe the Vandals and Visigoths who rampaged
across the civilised world in the latter days of the Roman Empire.
Take a piece of advice from me. Where you want to go, the odds are that
others have been before; and written about it. Humility in the presence of
the greats will aid your learning attempts.
Ed
Mattias Wikström
Resijinth <Resi...@Yahoo.com> wrote:
> "Mattias Wikstr?" <mattias...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:<ad013r$lmr$1...@green.tninet.se>...
> > Any comments on the following idea are appreciated.
> >
> > Suppose I tell you a tale and that in the midst of the story you
interupt
> > and ask why the hero did not die. I tell you it was because "magical
powers
> > were present". Then you ask me whether magical powers really exist, and
in
> > reply I say "Of course not, this is just a tale."
> >
> > First I said magical powers existed and then that they did not. Have I
not
> > contradicted myself? Since this is how we normally talk, any semantical
> > theory must be false that renders what I said as a contradiction.
>
> How so?
If the speakers say it is not a contradiction while the semantical theory
says it is, then we must ask what the speakers intend. But in this case the
speakers say precisely what they mean, and therefore the theory is false.
>
> >
> > When asked "What is there?", I think many philosophers would start as
> > follows: "We exist, and we are surrounded by physical objects. We have
> > thoughts, and we express them in our language." If it is asked whether
> > things in fairy tales exist, then (at least) two sorts of replies are
> > possible:
> > Realist: "They exist as social and cultural objects."
> > Anti-Realist: "We talk about them in our language, but we must not
compare
> > them to concrete physical objects."
>
> You mean, story-realism. That stories really exist. Well, they are
> immaterial. Of course, it depends on your definition of existence.
To me the distinction between material and immaterial sounds like a
superficial one. Views on nature range from the atomism of Democritos to the
idea that all objects are filled with spiritual energy. I see no reason why
objects here can not be handled just like objects in fairy tales. In cases
like Democritos it makes sence to speak about material objects because that
was the terminology he himself used, but in contexts where it is not used we
cannot (in general) say of objects that they are material or immaterial.
Perhaps we want to define material with reference to theories of physics.
But then we should not talk about material/immaterial for objects in
general. In particular, we should not say that stories are immaterial.
Or maybe there is a third alternative: we can invent a theory of objects. In
that theory we classify objects in different ways. Material/immaterial might
be one of the distinctions. Then, when reading a tale, we can stop in the
middle and apply our theory of objects to the tale, and say, e. g. "The tale
is immaterial, and so is the hero that appears in this tale." I doubt such
theories are useful, though.
I think we can use sentences of the form "... exists/does not exist" without
having any theory of existence, and I think the sentences of this type that
appear in the following paragraph illustrate a non-controversial use of such
sentences.
>
> >
> > My idea on how to resolve the conflict is to take seriously the way of
> > talking I used when telling the fairy tale: only when a question moves
the
> > context outside the tale do I give an answer that is applicable outside
the
> > tale. When I said that "Magical powers were present" I meant just that.
> > Seeing my statement as an abbreviation for something like "In this tale
> > magical powers were present" is wrong. This notwithstanding, if after I
have
> > said that "magical powers do not exist" you go on to ask me what I meant
> > when I said they did, then I say I meant that "In the tale they do,"
again
> > without contradiction.
>
> It depends upon your whole outlook on what existence means.
Again I do not think so.
I do not see that switching from objects to concepts in any way changes the
problem. I will say more about concepts below once I have outlined my idea
of what existence means.
>
> >
> > Note that the question puts me outside the context of group theory. If I
had
> > instead been asked a group theoretical question, the answer would have
> > stayed inside group theory. Asking for something seemingly basic (e. g.
> > "does this thing exist") can often move us far out of the original
context.
>
> Existence is tricky. An inability to decide what existence is, and in
> fact, what ANYTHING is, necessarily divides us into groups. If only we
> had a clear cut definition, then maybe there'd be less arguing... but
> a lot more debating, which is healthy.
Here is a proposal:
All the time we use existence in the implicit sence I illustrated for fairy
tales. This has little to do with the cases where existence appears more or
less explicitly in the context. Saying "there exist infinitely many prime
numbers" is an example of existence in the latter sence. If we say "the
number 1 exists" we have extended the context, and existence is still more
explicit. Saying that "mathematical objects are neither physical nor mental,
but exist as abstract objects" is an example of another type of context,
namely philosophical theories of objects and their existence. If we place
ourselves in a context where we can ask fundamental questions about reality,
then it appears that there is a fundamental concept of existence. If we say
"reality exists" we are using existence in this sence. Here we may prefer to
stop talking about contexts (i. e. move out of the context of all contexts),
because we have something that is in some sence *the* context.
Of what use is talk about concepts? I think they have a use in some cases
when we have an inner and an outer context. 'Object' may then refer to the
inner context while 'concept' moves focus to the outer context (and here the
outer context need not in any way be clearly delimited (no more than a fairy
tale is) -- we could think about the inner context as surrounded by outer
contexts (in plural)). They are also very useful when a context we are
dealing with has its own notion of existence. 'Object' then refers to
whatever that theory says exist, so we must use 'concept' where we would
normally use 'object'.
>
> >
> > There is an inherent danger here. I have repeatedly talked about
"contexts".
> > What is that? Does it exist? Is there a context of all contexts? To
answer
> > theese questions, one has to carefully go through things again. I think
it
> > is clear that I do not want the question "What is there?" to be answered
> > "Contexts!" Rather I may say that my talk about contexts was intended to
> > point out certain things, not to be an ontological claim.
>
> Concepts are formulated, but necessarily based off of things in
> existence. Saying they exist contextually isn't wrong. Also, you'll
> have to move into group theory. I myself beleive in conceptual
> heiarchy, which helps get around Russel's Paradox.
In mathematics I believe in a hierarchy of contexts.
>
> >
> > One may wonder whether there are not, after all, some ontological claims
> > related to this idea, even though the idea itself is just an idea. I
think
> > there probably are, though I do not know what they are. Whenever the
idea is
> > applied to a situation, it leads to the separation of things that do not
> > necessarily go together (e. g. when I tell a story, that story becomes a
> > context separated from me), but this does not say how we are to put the
> > pieces together to form an ontology, if we are to do this at all. The
> > general pattern can be seen in the following example: "Does there exist
one
> > universal logic or a plurality of logics?" If we apply the principle we
find
> > several contexts (logics) that are linked to each other in various ways,
but
> > the ontological claim itself, if meaningful at all, must lie outside
theese
> > contexts.
>
> Everything must have a starting point.
In the case of fairy tales there is one sence in which they are independent
of us and another in which they depend on us for their existence. In the
latter sence you could say everything has a starting point.
>
> >
> > As for "concrete physical objects", I think it is one of the strangest
> > things ever invented. They certainly do not belong in any fundamental
way to
> > theories of physics. At least, "objects of mathematics" have a much more
> > fundamental place here. Actually, the distinction between "concrete
physical
> > objects like chairs and tables" and "abstract macthematical objects like
> > circles and groups" is a confused one. We can see this if we ask whether
a
> > chair that appears in a Virtual Reality world is a physical or a
> > mathematical object. Since it has nothing to do with "the physical
world" it
> > is not a physical object in the same sence as a standard chair, but as a
> > mathematical object it is much more complicated than circles, groups and
> > similar things.
>
> The abstract and concrete are two different things. The chair in
> virtual reality is abstract. In fact, 'chair' itself is abstract, but
> A chair, in real life, is concrete, just as the electrons and
> structure, or hardware, is the concrete that leads to the software and
> programming, and the virtual chair, which are abstract.
Except for some cases in quantum physics and cosmology I think it is clear
what concrete refers to. What is to count as an object seems trickier. Is a
beam of light a concrete object? Defining abstract things as everything that
is not concrete will place us in a theory of all things, which is perhaps
not what we want. Therefore there is a need to somehow restrict the domain
where we refer to concrete and abstract.
I think the distinction between concrete and abstract can be useful. An
example is that environmental problems are serious only when they appear
outside virtual realities.
>
> >
> > One way also wonder whether the idea has any application outside
philosophy.
> > I do not know in general, but I believe it is useful in computer
software,
> > from the elements of a programming language to the things that appear on
my
> > computers desktop.
>
> Well, I've formulated a theory. The concrete is the material, the
> abstract is the ideal. However, the concrete and abstract are
> inter-related.
Now I have also formulated a theory. I am looking forward to your comments.
Mattias
mike
>
> mike <orang...@aol.com> wrote:
>> "Mattias Wikström" <mattias...@hotmail.com> wrote in
>> news:ad1liv$1es$1...@green.tninet.se:
>> > mike <orang...@aol.com> wrote:
>> >> "Mattias Wikström" <mattias...@hotmail.com> wrote in
>> >> news:ad013r$lmr$1...@green.tninet.se:
>> >>
>> >> your "theory of physics" doesn't need proof of "concrete objects",
>> >> only proof that something "happens". physics isn't theology.
>> >
>> > Physics must not be thought of as one uniform thing.
>>
>> it doesn't need to be thought of as anything but a method: it's a
>> "science" in the modern way. it's only trying to explain how the thing
>> that it can understand as "working" actually work.
>
> You could say that this is the basic idea behind physics, but if you
> look into physics books you can find passages that are more accurately
> described as mathematics or ontology.
this is a subject you should look into, because, from my readings, any
materials in these textbooks must be very conservative: the author isn't a
philosopher, and won't want to venture into any controversy. typically, the
math notions and the philosophy notions are just cribbed from some
philosophy textbook, and, "everyone knows what math is" doesn't need a
second thought.
>
>>
>> > You can
>> > investigate one part of physics without knowing or caring about
>> > others. Sometimes one part of physics depends on another. That other
>> > part then appears as an inner context. This is precisely the idea of
>> > a context as it appeared in what I wrote.
>> >
>> > You can learn many pieces of physics without knowing whether they
>> > really apply to the real world. To put it in the language of
>> > contexts: the testing (or proving, if you prefer) will tend to
>> > appear as an outer context relative to the contexts of theoretical
>> > physics.
>> >
>> > It is thus doubtful whether you can say physics needs any proofs at
>> > all. Physics as a whole might need them, but a lot of physics is
>> > possible without them.
>>
>> that's maybe because the theories have become dogma. dogma is fine,
>> but it doesn't prove anything about the theology behind it.
>
> Dogma is bad IMO. But the result of not performing any experiments need
> not be dogma.
"dogma" is just the representation of opinion for others. there's nothing
good or bad about it, unless it's being used in place of actually thinking
the problem through for yourself.
> It could instead be understanding. It is sometimes said
> that what science gives us are not facts but understanding.
yes, the science body is based on facts, but then, so is "nature". it has
to be the representation of these facts for society which is the meaning of
science.
> Performing
> experiments can improve our understanding. It can help us see on what
> areas theoretical research should be performed. It can give us the
> practical know-how we need to apply our theories. In nothing of this
> are proofs necessary.
>
>>
>> >
>> > If what you mean when you say "physics isn't theology" is that
>> > physics can be done independently of ontology, then I think you are
>> > right. At least, the vast majority of all physics can be done
>> > independently of the wider ontological context where it appears.
>>
>> nah, it means that physics needn't be thought of as relevent to
>> "reality". that's the best way to do physics. (imagine doing math
>> where every point had to be first correllated with a real-object as
>> point? but, that's applied physics, yes?)
>
> I agree that physics need not be thought of as relevant to "reality".
> If this is the best way of doing physics I do not know. I have the
> impression that quantum physicists are in disagreement here.
i was working on the thought that it was better to think that there is no
essence in reality which we are looking for, but, rather that there is a
set of connections which are universals.
>
>>
>>
>> >
>> > Mattias
>> >
>> >
>> >
>>
>
>
>
mike
you really think that either of us could develop an epistemology without
referring to our readings and knowledge? are you really willing to say
this?
> You'd have had something in
> common with the Philistines; or maybe the Vandals and Visigoths who
> rampaged across the civilised world in the latter days of the Roman
> Empire.
i think you know even less about history than you do about philosophy.
"pirit" were just the bad guys in someone's books. they were fine on their
own. "vandals" brought modernity into europe by allowing the indiginous
slaves of rome to speak their own languages. "wise-goths" were certainly
the moral equals of the romans.
personally, i'm really pissed at the non-goth who burnt the library of
Alexandria.
>
> Take a piece of advice from me. Where you want to go, the odds are that
> others have been before; and written about it. Humility in the presence
> of the greats will aid your learning attempts.
you are a great big fluffy piece of cake, and i'll have two pieces; but,
your advice is the advice of a philistine.
>
> Ed
>
>
>
>
>
Richard F Hall
<mattias...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Any comments on the following idea are appreciated.
>
>Suppose I tell you a tale and that in the midst of the story you interupt
>and ask why the hero did not die. I tell you it was because "magical powers
>were present". Then you ask me whether magical powers really exist, and in
>reply I say "Of course not, this is just a tale."
>
>First I said magical powers existed and then that they did not. Have I not
>contradicted myself? Since this is how we normally talk, any semantical
>theory must be false that renders what I said as a contradiction.
>
Magic contradicts the laws of nature. Everything can be explained by
magic, if nothing else. Magic is everything we don't know. Magic
dispels the things we find depressing. Magic is a lottery. Everyone
awaits the showering of wonderful gifts from a magical somewhere
unknown. We are never sure when the next partial payment is coming,
but we continue to wish. Magic frees us from the limitations of our
own space and time. There is good magic, and there is bad magic. Magic
astounds us when we see it! Yet, sometimes we expect it. Surely, isn't
television magic? Moving pictures magically appear from thin air. And
the automobile? Is there a person alive who knows enough or has all
the tools to actually make an automobile? How about the child who
boards a jetliner and exclaims, "This won't fly, Its too big!" Magic
has always existed. Television, automobiles, and modern technology are
new; yet, we have looked to fortune tellers, witch doctors,
leprechauns, and gods for magic as far back as people can remember.
What do you mean, magic doesn't exist? Hence, the subject of your
essay.
But, for a moment, consider the talented and charismatic people who
hang signs outside their shops reading: "Psychic, Tarot Cards Read
Here, Astrological Charts." It is no wonder they smile as they see
someone walk through their door. Just the act of walking through that
door greatly diminishes the chances of all but a few mindsets to stand
before them. In the mind of the psychic, the only question is, "how
much money do you have!" We should not make sweeping generalizations
though, because this is a rule, and there are exceptions. It is not
the fact that these individuals have made fortunes telling fortunes,
but that there exists the mindset to make this possible.
There is an evolution to human mentality.
Richard F Hall
http://www.seanet.com/~realistic/idealism.hmtl
Realistic idealism
For the evolved mind.
Richard F Hall
<mattias...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>BuddhaThu <runnin...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Oh, one more thing that I would like to add.
>>
>> By stating that there was something magical, are you alluding to
>> something non-conceptual? If you are speaking of something to which
>> science cannot explain due to its lack of concepts, then you are
>> probably right.
>
>No, I think the same points could be made with a completely realistic story.
>All I need is that something is true in the story that is false in reality.
>The word 'magical' was not in any way required for what I wrote.
>
>I find what you write here interesting, but I do not see that it is in any
>direct way related to what I wrote.
Dear Matt:
I thought Buddha Thu was responding to your statement:
When asked "What is there?", I think many philosophers would start as
follows: "We exist, and we are surrounded by physical objects. We have
thoughts, and we express them in our language."
Buddha Thu's essay showed a considerable understanding of the classic
philosopher's viewpoint. And you did ask for *any* reaction to your
essay.
Richard F Hall
http://www.seanet.com/~realistic/idealism.html
Realistic Idealism
The philosophy of reaction.
Mattias Wikström
Richard F Hall <real...@seanet.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 29 May 2002 16:58:54 +0200, "Mattias Wikström"
> <mattias...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >BuddhaThu <runnin...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> Oh, one more thing that I would like to add.
> >>
> >> By stating that there was something magical, are you alluding to
> >> something non-conceptual? If you are speaking of something to which
> >> science cannot explain due to its lack of concepts, then you are
> >> probably right.
> >
> >I find what you write here interesting, but I do not see that it is in
any
> >direct way related to what I wrote.
>
> Dear Matt:
>
> I thought Buddha Thu was responding to your statement:
>
> When asked "What is there?", I think many philosophers would start as
> follows: "We exist, and we are surrounded by physical objects. We have
> thoughts, and we express them in our language."
In the other post by Buddha Thu this was clearly the case, but I am still
unable to see any connection here.
>
> Buddha Thu's essay showed a considerable understanding of the classic
> philosopher's viewpoint. And you did ask for *any* reaction to your
> essay.
Yes. I appreciated that essay very much, and I much regret not having said
this in my reply to it. My reactions were almost exclusively directed
against classical philosophy and empirism in general, not to the way it was
presented by Buddha Thu. Any comments on my reply are welcome.
Regards,
Mattias
PF
"Mattias Wikström" <mattias...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ad013r$lmr$1...@green.tninet.se...
>
> When asked "What is there?", I think many philosophers would start as
> follows: "We exist, and we are surrounded by physical objects. We have
> thoughts, and we express them in our language."
A simple (but not necessarily 'worse') philosopher may say:- Presuming that
the word "anywhere" is what was meant by "there", the question, "what is
there?" can be answered most ultimately (and encompassingly) by, "What Is".
I.e., the ultimately "not thingy" absolute existence of every realized as
well as every merely potential "pattern" - including a "thing" such as a
photon and its features, or a pattern as complex as the structure of some
living brains and what they do (including doing things such as generating
motivations, feelings and thoughts - NOT all of which (including motor
actions for that matter) might in all cases be appropriate (or adaptive) in
context of the individual's concurrent environment (or mileu). E.g., the
fact that thoughts or ideas that might be described as "symptoms of a
neurotic - or (when 'worse') psychotic - and thus correspondingly
neuropsychophysiologically disconnected or damaged personality (i.e., an
individual who has become psychologically "unreal" or IOW "out of touch with
reality".
[By the way, such "unreality" is usually the result of prior experiences of
what may be described as "selective Hibernation imploring type situations"
come (~ that correspondingly as if "conditioned in") unconsciously
reverberating such stressors ("SHITS" for short), effecting symptoms"].
"SHITS" ~= any traumatic (whether slowly or rapidly so) experiences; and
CURSES (approximately abbreviated) ~= the memory states left behind in
brains (or in "actention selection" systems) by SHITS.
P
--
This post of mine was, as my posts almost always are, stingily sponsored by
EAIMC Internetional Ptd. Lty., and *not just* jotted in justifiable though
author-image jeopardizing jester, but - by jove! - also with equally well
justified serious intent.
Mattias Wikström
I will take this opportunity to illustrate how one can speak about contexts
and metacontexts.
Here is a restatement of the situation:
We have seven circles.
Given two circles one must be inner with respect to the other.
In the circles there are people, and everyone belongs to one of the circles.
People in a circle can know about and observe that circle itself along with
the inner circles, but not the outer circles.
This is not merely a restatement, though. I ignored the facts that this was
a description of hell and that the people were sinners. I also ignored the
fact that people in the inner circles cannot talk about people in outer
cirles, for I did not see how to make sence of this. I also changed to a
more formal style, though it is still not formal logic. Changing to a more
formal style makes us feel (at least if we are trained in logic) that we can
restate things in many different ways without in any way changing what is
meant. We might see what I have done as a slight change of context.
I will now analyse the situation in the version I have given.
To each circle there corresponds a knowledge context. We thus have seven
knowledge contexts. The description does not say whether people in the
innermost circle have any clue that outer circles might exist. We therefore
have two different versions of the situation depending on what choice we
make here. If the people in the innermost circle have no clue about the
existence of outer circles, then the idea that outer circles could exist
must look very far-fetched. The people in the other circles know very well
that there exist more than one circle, and therefore the idea that they need
not be in the outermost circle is natural.
The description does not say whether people in the seventh circle know that
they are outermost, so again several versions of the situation are possible.
And there are still more versions when we ask whether there is any way for
the people to know that the number of circles is finite. Finally, the fact
that there are seven circles and not some other number begs the question
whether we should not add some principles of numerology into the context
(and the idea of numerology is not a single thing, but rather there are many
contexts associated with it). It is interesting to note that we have here a
context where the idea of numerology might actually play a role.
Mattias
>
> Ed
>
>
>
Mattias Wikström
What you say might be true for physics textbooks, but not for physics in
general. A good (though, perhaps, unrepresentive) example is Gödel's work on
solutions of the equations of general relativity where observers can travel
into their own past. It clearly belongs to physics, but at the same time it
belongs to philosophy and mathematics. Gödel himself did not work in
physics, and his driving force certainly was not just to figure out how
something works. By the time Gödel published his results he did not know to
what extent they might be relevant to reality, and as far as I know, it is
fully possible that future physics will rule them out as relevant to how the
universe actually works.
That is fine. I have no opinions about it.
>
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> >
> >> > Mattias
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >>
> >
> >
> >
>
mike
very well.
that's why i'm philosopher and you are commenting on putative realities! =)
>
>>
>> >
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> >
>> >> > Mattias
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>> >
>>
>
>
>
Ed Cryer
"mike" <orang...@aol.com> wrote in message >
> i think you know even less about history than you do about philosophy.
> "pirit" were just the bad guys in someone's books. they were fine on their
> own. "vandals" brought modernity into europe by allowing the indiginous
> slaves of rome to speak their own languages. "wise-goths" were certainly
> the moral equals of the romans.
>
> personally, i'm really pissed at the non-goth who burnt the library of
> Alexandria.
>
> you are a great big fluffy piece of cake, and i'll have two pieces; but,
> your advice is the advice of a philistine.
>
You are a bird-brain posing as an idiot.
Ed
Ed Cryer
Thanks for the explanation.
I'm wondering what you'd say about more conventional metaphors; eg this
one - "Knowledge is a big onion; you peel off one skin and there's another
underneath".
Or the Thomas Kuhn view of scientific revolutions, whereby science realigns
itself every now and then around a new paradigm after reaching a crisis
point with the previous one.
Ed
mike
you really don't understand, do you? that if you suggest that i use ritual,
instead of letting me discover the meanings of concepts on my own, then
that is what we call "being a philistine": you're restricting the
intellectual process. perhaps you don't know the difference between
memorizing a passage in a book and analysing a passage in a book?
the sense i have is that you are dissed that i was able to respond to your
banalities, and, not having really thought about what you were saying in
the first place, you are reduced to sounding like a goose. i think that is
how you got the intuition "bird-brain" for your retort.
miken
name-dropping is soooo sexy.
Leonardo Dasso
> Any comments on the following idea are appreciated.
>
> Suppose I tell you a tale and that in the midst of the story you
interupt
> and ask why the hero did not die. I tell you it was because "magical
powers
> were present". Then you ask me whether magical powers really exist,
and in
> reply I say "Of course not, this is just a tale."
>
> First I said magical powers existed and then that they did not. Have I
not
> contradicted myself? Since this is how we normally talk, any
semantical
> theory must be false that renders what I said as a contradiction.
>
> When asked "What is there?", I think many philosophers would start as
> follows: "We exist, and we are surrounded by physical objects. We have
> thoughts, and we express them in our language." If it is asked whether
> things in fairy tales exist, then (at least) two sorts of replies are
> possible:
> Realist: "They exist as social and cultural objects."
> Anti-Realist: "We talk about them in our language, but we must not
compare
> them to concrete physical objects."
so they the realist and the anti-realist agree on this one. There is no
conflict. End of story.
regards
leo
Mattias Wikström
'Realism and Anti-Realism' was an erroneous title for my post. 'Platonism
and Nominalism' would have been more to the point. 'Is Story-Realism True?'
would also be appropriate. You are right in that the way I stated it above
there is not even a conflict. But the important thing is this: philosophers
disagree about what existence means, what things exist, and in what sence
they exist. The question whether things in fairy tales exist is a particular
example.
I apologize for the confusion.
Regards,
Mattias
> regards
> leo
>
>
>
>
Mattias Wikström
The intended subject of my post was not magic. Rather it was about existence
and truth in situations where more than one context is involved. In my
example, "magical powers exist" was true in the tale but false in reality.
Magic is a very nice subject too, and I can use it to illustrate some points
about contexts.
Magic can be many things. In some cases it is about the real world, or how
the real world is thought to be. In other cases magic is merely something
that appears in the imagination of humans. Sometimes it is a mix between the
two.
If we do not understand something we say that it is puzzling, but the words
mystical and magical typically both indicate something more, though what
that is might be hard to put into words. In some cases they may carry an
indication that the thing described has aestetical beauty. Even something
completely understood can have an aestetical appeal, though.
I will now talk about magic as something that appears in our imaginations.
Sometimes imagination can be killed by asking the wrong question. If it is
asked how a physical experiment could distinguish a magical sword from an
ordinary one, much of the imagination is killed. In other words, we are
moved to a context where the designation 'magical' does not make the sword
any more remarkable than an ordinary sword.
It can be asked whether the original context was really a well-defined one.
My answer is that the idea of the context's being well-defined appears
remote in that context. If we want to talk about contexts here we must give
up the idea that contexts are either well-defined or can be made
well-defined. If we are in this type of context and ask for definitions, the
result will be a context where definitions are possible, but that will not
be the same as the original context.
This is an important point about contexts: what we mean by a context depends
on the context. Sometimes the notion of a context is an exact one (in
category theory categories are appropriately viewed as contexts of this
type), sometimes it is not.
The contents of imaginations are sometimes anything but well-defined. When
we look closer at our thoughts we may even find them contradictory. If we
want to understand such thoughts it would seem that we must look at them at
a level where the contradiction does not appear, even though this might mean
the thoughts themselves might have largely disappered. I will now describe
my ideas about this.
When we form mental images, the images depend to a large extent on our ways
of thinking. If a particular line of thought is not suggested by the subject
(examples: asking what it means that a sword is magical, asking for the
exact size in centimeters of the chess board when playing chess), it
probably will not occur to us, and this is reflected in our mental images of
the subject. If one stops oneself when thinking about a chess problem
without having a chess board in front of oneself and asks what mental image
one has, one will find that it is, to the extent that it is at all
well-defined, something much more abstract than the concrete board. It seems
appropriate to describe the thoughts by introducing lots of contexts that
could be relevant. Two examples are easy to give: the visual chess board,
and the game of chess as a mathematical object. To describe the thoughts
other less obvious and sometimes less well-defined contexts would have to be
used. Some of theese might refer to neurons, and some might be associated
with the introspectional act of asking "What does my mental object look
like?"
>
> But, for a moment, consider the talented and charismatic people who
> hang signs outside their shops reading: "Psychic, Tarot Cards Read
> Here, Astrological Charts." It is no wonder they smile as they see
> someone walk through their door. Just the act of walking through that
> door greatly diminishes the chances of all but a few mindsets to stand
> before them. In the mind of the psychic, the only question is, "how
> much money do you have!" We should not make sweeping generalizations
> though, because this is a rule, and there are exceptions. It is not
> the fact that these individuals have made fortunes telling fortunes,
> but that there exists the mindset to make this possible.
>
Well, that magic or beliefs about it can be used to earn money does not make
it wrong.
Regards,
Mattias
Ed Cryer
Well, that's a bit better. Not too many childish insults in that one. But
still, where are the capital letters?
Not that I want to limit you and hold you to some outmoded stereotype. Maybe
you can fly above all those. You sure seem to want to do. But remember that
a man cannot be at peace with the world until he first makes peace with
himself; nor can he love until he is at ease with himself.
Ever read any Dostoevsky? I recommend "The Possessed". Here are the
back-leaf notes of my copy of R. MacAndrew's translation.
'The Possessed' is regarded the world over as the most shattering vision of
nihilism in action to come out of Russia. Despite their different
interpretations of radical politics, the young men, Stavrogin and
Verkhovensky, combine fanaticism, treachery and self-contradiction to incite
an entire town to pillage, arson and slaughter. In this story of misfits who
believe in nothing and wish only to destroy, Dostoevsky is everywhere
concerned with the passion man demonstrates for the lie in order to create a
chaos that mirrors his tortured soul. "Dostoevsky wrote of the unconscious
as if it were conscious; that is in reality why his characters seem
'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other
figures in imaginative literature.... He was in the rank in which we set
Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe." - Edwin Muir
Ed
Ed Cryer
"miken" <orang...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:Xns921E7733F6524...@66.75.162.198...
Some day I'll tell you about my meeting with Vikram Seth. We discussed his
novel 'An Equal Music' which took us into Beethoven, Mozart, Bach's 'Art of
Fugue', Vivaldi's church in Venice, the Musikverein in Vienna, and lots
more.
Ed
mike
where they were in the eleventh century.
>
> Not that I want to limit you and hold you to some outmoded stereotype.
> Maybe you can fly above all those. You sure seem to want to do. But
> remember that a man cannot be at peace with the world until he first
> makes peace with himself;
plenty of time for peace when i'm in my grave. too much to do right now,
and i don't really care if i look silly to you for doing them.
> nor can he love until he is at ease with
> himself.
>
> Ever read any Dostoevsky? I recommend "The Possessed". Here are the
> back-leaf notes of my copy of R. MacAndrew's translation.
>
> 'The Possessed' is regarded the world over as the most shattering
> vision of nihilism in action to come out of Russia. Despite their
> different interpretations of radical politics, the young men, Stavrogin
> and Verkhovensky, combine fanaticism, treachery and self-contradiction
> to incite an entire town to pillage, arson and slaughter. In this story
> of misfits who believe in nothing and wish only to destroy, Dostoevsky
> is everywhere concerned with the passion man demonstrates for the lie
> in order to create a chaos that mirrors his tortured soul. "Dostoevsky
> wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality
> why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized
> more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature.... He
> was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe." -
> Edwin Muir
>
> Ed
dostoiyovskii was reacting to Hegel. there's no great truth in his
writings, but reading his writing gives one the sense that there are
"truths". that's what writing is about.
>
>
>
>
mike
that's not really to the point. this is great book discussion stuff, unless
you were able to come out of the discussion able to write your own music
and literature. you know that. look at that stupid "bach, escher, Godel"...
how circular and self-serving that book was ("umm... the brain is because
it IS"). look at Carl Haas, fur cripes sake.
Ed Cryer
"mike" <orang...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:Xns921F605DEDC0A...@66.75.162.198...
you admire?
mike
why do you think you are a person? =)
all that's gone down here is a specific discussion on specific issues.
we'er not talking about religion and mother teresa. the people i like, i
like. i like you, for instance, but we don't have a common level to talk on
yet.
Mattias Wikström
Your questions have been very useful, though it is only one of them I have
actually answered, and you will find answers to many questions you did not
ask. The explanation is that writing this post gave me reason to think
through some things, and at the same time I could give more examples of the
use of contexts in philosophy.
Let us first consider an actual onion. We may think that the fact that an
onion has several skins means that there are somehow several contexts. But
contexts (in the sence I have used the word anyway) has to do with things we
think and speak about independently of each other; the mere fact that one
thing appears inside another does not mean the things are contexts or that
each of them is associated with its own context. Any example I could invent
with onions would be extremely contrived.
Let us now consider knowledge. I will restrict myself to knowledge about the
universe we inhabit.
An important feature of the universe is that it has structure at many
different levels, and that the levels are largely independent of each other.
If we start with our everyday experience we can zoom out until we reach the
cosmological level, and we can zoom in until we reach the quantum physical
level. The onion metaphor therefore seems to appropriate here.
So how does this apply to contexts? Well, in describing the universe we
quite often use a mathematical theory. Using Euclidean geometry to describe
space is an example. If we are trained in mathematics we understand what
such a theory is (we know what is meant by things that are formulated in the
theory, though knowing what a question asks for is not the same as knowing
what the answer is). The mathematical theory is a context, so here we have
contexts.
Before I go on to discuss how a mathematical theory can be useful for
describing the universe, let us look a little closer at one such theory, the
theory of a collection of point masses that move in three-dimensional
Euclidean space according to Newton's laws of gravitation. Here we appear to
have two contexts. The Euclidean space appears as inner context, and to this
context is added a time dimension along with the one-dimensional curves that
are traced out by the particles. The resulting context looks nice in many
ways. When I talked about Dante's circles I all the time had to worry about
possible interpretations of the situation. Here I do not have to do this.
Rather the context speaks for itself. You may wonder whether there are
several possible interpretations here too, only that I am able to single out
the intended one, and the answer is yes. Mathematicians sometimes define a
line as a set of points, but if we take this literally we move way out of
the intended context. That definition would take us to set theory, and that
it is arbitrary can be seen from the fact that one could equally well define
a point as a set of lines, but not do both at once. But pitfalls of this
kind can easily be avoided. A consequence of this is that we have to look at
what happens when we abstract away things (=move to an inner context). For
example, in place of the uncurved space we could have a curved one. Here is
an analogous situation: if our context is "a circle of radius 4", then that
context could also be described by starting with "a circle of radius x" and
adding "x=4". If we do not understand this as an alternative way of
describing the context, then what we have is not a nice thing but something
arbitrary.
Now comes something tricky. What could the thing outside models be? What is
the relation between a model and what it models? What is a model? Since
philosophers have doubted we can know anything for sure about reality, it
seems that we have some extremely difficult problems in front of us that
must be solved before we can leave mathematics.
To start simple, let us stay in mathematics for a while and see whether we
can have a mathematical model inside another mathematical model. The fact
that the earth can be modelled both as a sphere and as an ellipsoid suggests
that spheres and ellipsoids can be models of each other. Indeed, we can
define a mapping between the two, and distances will only approximately be
conserved. The fact that an approximation appeared here suggests that we
could have perfect models. But then we do not really have two things, but
one, though it is possible for one thing to appear in different surrounding
contexts, and though things can sometimes be mapped upon themselves in other
ways than by the identity map (e. g. a sphere can be turned around an axis).
But let us try to find something inside mathematics that is more like the
modelling as it appears in e. g. biology. In our theory of point masses we
could fill a sphere with point masses, imagine that it is a planet, and then
place point masses in the shape of something (say the shape of some statue)
on the sphere. But this will not be what it was intended to be, for as the
system evolves in time this would all just collapse into one point, and so
this attempt to create a mathematical object that could compare to real-life
objects failed. Still I believe it must be possible to create (I think
'create' is more appropriate than 'find' in this case) such objects and to
use them for examining non-trivial kinds of modelling. It is just my
mathematical imagination that limits me here.
Now it is finally time to consider things outside mathematics. And what I
now want to stress is that this does not mean we have to talk about the
universe, reality, or something similar, and it does it mean we have to
prove an outer world exists. Theese are usually way too large contexts.
Consider a simple example. Suppose I drop an object so that it falls and
that I ask myself what the motion looks like. Here Galileo's description of
falling objects immediately springs to mind, and I can use it to calculate
what the object's motion looked like. Here I applied a mathematical
description to something that I did not think of as a mathematical, but in
what context? When I thought about myself and the object I did not think
about any particular context. It was everyday language, simply. But the fact
that I myself did not think in terms of contexts does not mean contexts were
not involved. The minimum context is perhaps "falling object". Here we can
use a very realistic context: "concrete material object of some shape
somewhere someplace in our actual universe that falls". Something more
abstract is entirely sufficient, though. Here I might have given the
impression that we must be concerned with all the different kinds of mental
representations we can have of the same thing, but of course we can abstract
away from this.
So far I have described two sorts of contexts useful in our understanding of
the universe. First it was mathematics and then it was some abstract context
common to thought experiments and actual experiments. I said that
mathematics is well-understood, but how about thought experiments? In some
sence there can be no surprises in our thought experiments. I mean the
results can of course be surprising, but it is we who design the experiment
and decide what the rules are. What it seems we cannot do is to classify
thought experiments, or give formal descriptions of them. One can imagine
curved surfaces long before one can describe curved surfaces mathematically,
and imaginations are flexible in a way I have no idea of how to capture in
mathematics.
Above I have analyzed how mathematics enter the picture when I drop an
object and ask about the motion. The pattern could be described briefly as
follows: from experience or from what we have been told we know how to think
about a situation, and we then add mathematics to aid our thoughts about the
situation.
Here we see the possibility of thinking about observations of the universe
as an extension of our everyday experience. This is an important context,
one I wish I understood better. And as usual we have not just one context.
The reason is that this context was defined as an extension of everyday
experience, and everyday experience contains in addition to the starting
point for knowledge also the starting point for a theory of reality. When we
deal with knowledge we probably want to abstract away the latter. Everyday
experience also contains many other things (such as fairy tales) that we
want to abstract away.
Besides this context we have the context(s) where knowledge arrives from the
outer world to the mind of an individual. We have the context(s) where
knowledge is based on what is registered in expriments. We have the
context(s) of skepticism.
All this was just preparatory work. ;-) I still have not said whether
knowledge is like an onion. We can however easily imagine a scenario where
it is, and in that case describing the ways we think about a skin leads to
one or several contexts.
>
> Or the Thomas Kuhn view of scientific revolutions, whereby science
realigns
> itself every now and then around a new paradigm after reaching a crisis
> point with the previous one.
I have not read Kuhn, but I can say something about contexts and the history
of science.
When we read the texts by a historical person the texts as they stand form a
context. If there is uncertainity as to what the person actually wrote this
adds more contexts. Sometimes we have oral sources, biographical data, what
others said about the person, etc. and this of course adds contexts. We
probably want to make minor adjustments to what the person wrote, such as
correcting typos, and doing this gives us a new context. We can next read
the text and make interpretations of it. Corresponding to theese
interpretations different contexts arise. We can also do things that merely
amount to restating and examining the direct consequences of what is already
written. There is a point in never leaving the context of the text itself.
Alternatively we may focus on the context of the author rather than the
context of the text. Here it is interesting to see how the author looked
upon herself and her work, though this is not the only thing of interest and
we may prefer to ignore it. Of course this means more contexts.
Sometimes we can only say something we want to say at the risk of losing
objectivity, i. e. we want to describe something, but for some reason we
cannot do this in a context that belongs to the thing itself. This could be
because there is no such context, because we do not know what it is like, or
because we do not understand it. The problem can also be that saying
something about the thing changes it (so with introspection). It is also
natural to say in theese cases that the thing itself does not really exist.
From this one could conclude that objectivity never exists, but this is
blatantly false. It is easy to find contexts where everything is
well-defined. One could also think that humans have one objectivity whereas
extraterrestial beings, if they exist, could have their own. But the way I
talk about reality makes this impossible: it is part of the meaning of
reality that anything that is subjective does not belong to it. Note,
however, that this meaning of objectivity, that is about reality, is not the
same as the sence in which, say, the truths of Euclidean geometry are
objective. Euclidean geometry could be among the many contexts that
disappear when we move from the context of all contexts to the context of
reality. This also explains that a Platonistic heaven need not exist as a
part of reality. Instead it could be that when we look at things from the
context of reality, mathematics, physics and reality are almost the same
thing. We should also not be lead to think that we can say something that is
undisputably true about reality and then stare at the sentence as it appears
in language and think that it must be an extremely remarkable thing that
when looked upon in the right way in some sence gives us the right to feel
objective. There appears to be a context here that could be described as
"how we relate to reality", one such that leaving it is the solution to the
problem it deals with.
With an understanding of objectivity we have a measure that we can use when
we examine the history of science. I think many of the advances in
mathematics have consisted in dropping things that did not belong to the
context, and the same might be true to science in general.
Mattias
>
> Ed
>
>
>
Ed Cryer
Hey man, you're one of the most rejecting people I've ever met on the
Internet, apart from a small dabble in alt.flamewars and one or two other
sites where strung-up types vent their frustration. But I'm not like that. I
regard myself as the heir to a rich fortune; the inheritance of human
culture across the eras. I love it. It's my Aladdin's Cave. I'm not
hell-bent on making a name for myself as an original creative type. I could
never match up to Michaelangelo, Shakespeare or Handel.
In this context I'm reminded of two of my favourite philosophers. One is
Nietzsche; and what a rejecting type he was. Nothing but genuine originality
in my friends, thank you! He slated everyone who followed any type of
other-defined systems; the Christian priests, the herd of humanity,
beer-sodden German contemporaries, women. Up to a point I'm with him. But he
appears to have confounded what I'd call 'personal integrity' with
'originality'. Slate all but the geniuses of mankind. That leaves you with
very, very few on your side.
And then there's David Hume. When he was about 20 he was a very disturbed
character. He wrote a letter to a doctor full of trauma and trouble, but he
kept it among his papers and it was found after his death. In it he has a
phrase like this; "I see new ideas dawning on my horizon". And wow! He sure
finally gave birth to those new ideas incubating in him.
Perhaps he kept it to remind him how far he'd come.
Ed
mike
and i don't think you'd have much fun matching up Handel and Michelangelo,
but that's the sort of thing i do.
>
> In this context I'm reminded of two of my favourite philosophers. One
> is Nietzsche; and what a rejecting type he was. Nothing but genuine
> originality in my friends, thank you! He slated everyone who followed
> any type of other-defined systems; the Christian priests, the herd of
> humanity, beer-sodden German contemporaries, women. Up to a point I'm
> with him. But he appears to have confounded what I'd call 'personal
> integrity' with 'originality'. Slate all but the geniuses of mankind.
> That leaves you with very, very few on your side.
>
> And then there's David Hume. When he was about 20 he was a very
> disturbed character. He wrote a letter to a doctor full of trauma and
> trouble, but he kept it among his papers and it was found after his
> death. In it he has a phrase like this; "I see new ideas dawning on my
> horizon". And wow! He sure finally gave birth to those new ideas
> incubating in him. Perhaps he kept it to remind him how far he'd come.
>
> Ed
>
>
i read these guys as though they were talking about the most important
thing in the world. that's why i don't read them as "philosophers".
Ed Cryer
Mike, here's a piece of historical information. For more than 1800 years
Aristotle was known as "the philosopher". If you just threw in casually the
word "philosopher" it was taken as referring to A. A's physics reigned
paramount. He was the authority. He was the one that people like Galileo and
Kepler had to dislodge to get their views recognised. Maybe a sad reflection
on humanity and the approach to truth, but still that's how it was. Even
Dante's Circles of Hell was modelled on A's physics. The Christian Church
had patterned the universe on him, through Thomas Aquinas.
Ed
Ed Cryer
You're banging your head against the brick wall of the a priori. This is not
a context but rather a tautological system of truths that are not allowed to
be otherwise. God's building bricks? No.
There's a whole world of difference between Pythagoras' theorem and the
statement that the sun will rise tomorrow. Not a contextual difference but a
difference of certainty.
All experiential truths are at the best probabilities, never certainties.
This includes all of science. Anybody who tries to apply the certainties of
logico-mathematical truths to life generally will soon acquire the label of
bigotted and prejudiced.
Ed
mike
well, you know, that's just peachy. but, what's most apparent to me is that
you have no interest in doing the same sort of things you think aristotle
did. just quoting some generalizations for modern readers out of an
encyclopedia or off the net is not doing philosophy. it's not even
thinking, as far as i can tell. it seems like you're just reacting to
something you think i'm saying. anyone can do that. you have described
Aristotle the Novelist.
Ed Cryer
Dig deep, Mike; dig very deep. And what are you going to find? Something
within you not socially conditioned? Some form of knowledge that stems from
outside the human situation?
If knowledge was transmitted genetically, there'd be no need to send kids to
school for so long. But it's not. We have some instinctive behavioural
patterns, but no kid I ever met came out of the womb knowing much.
Ed
mike
you want to do politics and social studies, then ideas are tools for you.
you want to do philosophy, then you make your own tools. the phil tools
aren't good for anthing but phil... they're like tools to make tools.
you're using a drill press as a pair of pliers. metaphors only work when
both parties are in the mood.
mike
this reread in alt.phil. i don't know what happened to you. you seem to be
caught in a loop. you somehow think that i'm looking for true beliefs, and
that you've caught the fact that "beliefs" are the beliefs of the believer.
i think you must be right, because you seem to be reading my posts with
some sort of true believer's need to shut me up. i'm trying to get you to
talk about more than your need for bulk in your diet.
yu'v gotten stoned on your smartness. i think this is because "dig deep",
for you, is: "why did that happen to me?". that's not the same thing at all
as asking "why do i think something is happening to me?". philosophy isn't
about saying smart things about how we learn or how we see things. it's
about analysing tools like "instinctive".
Ed Cryer
Being smart sure pulls the birds here in the UK.
Don't be too put off by my "smartness". It's the result of a classical
British education. You sound a bit like the colonial Yank in the face of
"culture". BTW, I've heard that British gentleman types with good UK accents
go down really well in the States.
Far from trying to shut you up, you fascinate me. I wouldn't recognise you
from Adam on the street, but I've conducted a dialogue with you far longer
than I usually do here. I think what it is that holds me is your impatience
with the norms and how you try to step into some new-fangled language-game.
I suspect that you feel in you the stirrings of something new that you can't
quite get your mouth round, and what I'm trying to do is help you with the
birth-pangs; kind of like Socrates playing the midwife.
Maybe we'd better call that it. I'm not sure that we've moved anywhere
forward.
Regards Ed
mike
that must be U, cause you sound like you only learnt the pronunciation:
you're not using your education to respond to the clues i'm dropping. what
did you study?
> BTW, I've heard that British gentleman types with good UK
> accents go down really well in the States.
yes, but their trousers get dirty and they have bad breath.
>
> Far from trying to shut you up, you fascinate me. I wouldn't recognise
> you from Adam on the street, but I've conducted a dialogue with you far
> longer than I usually do here. I think what it is that holds me is your
> impatience with the norms and how you try to step into some new-fangled
> language-game. I suspect that you feel in you the stirrings of
> something new that you can't quite get your mouth round,
this is great so far. and, if you freed up your hand, you might be able to
write complete thoughts.
> and what I'm
> trying to do is help you with the birth-pangs; kind of like Socrates
> playing the midwife.
i was thinking your were the little slave guy socrates used to demonstrate
eternal forms.
> Maybe we'd better call that it. I'm not sure that
> we've moved anywhere forward.
i'd doing fine, but, if you want to call it a night, i'm sure there's
somebody here to take up where you left off. where was that, by the way?
when you said i ought to do something, or when you said i should do
something?
>
> Regards Ed
>
>
>
>
>
Ed Cryer
<snipped a whole host of in depth analysis>
> that must be U, cause you sound like you only learnt the pronunciation:
> you're not using your education to respond to the clues i'm dropping. what
> did you study?
>
My first degree was in Classics, my Masters in philosophy. Apart from
English, Latin and Greek, I can read fluently in French, German and Spanish.
By profession I'm a computer analyst/programmer.
Three weeks ago I fell off my pedal bike and damaged my left elbow, arm and
hand. I had to have an operation, and maybe another one soon. Fortunately
there's the World Cup to keep me amused at present, but I do miss the
swimming and cycling in mid summer. I'm managing to keep the garden in
decent shape.
British girls are the best in the world.
Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
Ed (who loves to ramble)
mike
where the cow sleeps,
there sleep we; under
the spreading chestnut tree.
calm'a'ly snore, and sigh and coo,
sinewed amongst rich cow doo-doo.
-- hey, fertilize!, ferrrtilize, feed
the flow-ers! blythly we doze
in nature's bower.
sorry aboot yur hand.
Richard F Hall
I can appreciate your comment concerning the ethics of fortune
telling, however, in nearly your own words: "The intended subject of
my post was not ethics". It was merely an observation of a point in
the evolution of human thinking.
Now, I have read your essays closely and it seems "context" is your
subject of concern. To use an original example, so that you may know
I have captured the concept.. when my 24 year old, married daughter
tells me she is pregnant, it is different than when my 14 year old
daughter, who lives at home with me, tells me she is pregnant. Should
I could be happy in the second case if the father were able to support
the woman and child? Should I be upset if the 14 year old had stopped
taking the birth-control pills supplied by the free clinic without my
knowledge, and expected me to love her and pay for her support while
she had the child and continued to live at home? Who is in reality
and who is in anti-reality?
What do you think, Mat, is this a real life problem that applies to
your philosophy of context? and what does your philosophy suggest in
this situation?
Richard F Hall
http://www.seanet.com/~realistic/idealism.html
Realistic Idealism
Philosophy about humanity
Ben Hoff
It was because we are telling a story and pretending that "magical powers"
were present.
Mattias Wikström
Ed Cryer <e...@ecryer.freeserve.co.ukNOSPAM> wrote:
> You're banging your head against the brick wall of the a priori. This is
not
> a context but rather a tautological system of truths that are not allowed
to
> be otherwise. God's building bricks? No.
Mathematics can seem very puzzling. Its statements seem to say something,
and therefore, it seems, there should be some reason why they are the way
they are, but at the same time it seems that nothing, not even God, could
have any control over mathematics.
At first one may think that mathematical statements are somehow just a
feature of our language, but thinking in terms of contexts rules out this
possibility at once, for in the contexts of mathematics we have abstracted
away from e. g. our language. We could say that mathematical statements are
void of content, but whether this is true depends on what we mean by it, and
it is simply wrong to equate the contexts of mathematics with the algebra
that deals with the constants True and False and operations on them (e. g.
negation and disjunction).
The whole thing seems a little less puzzling if we note that there are lots
of statements that are neither mathematical nor about what we observe. E. g.
it is a fact that a pegasus has four legs. But the puzzle reappears when we
note that mathematical statements seem fundamental.
But let us first ask what the context is where we can ask for the reason why
a context looks the way it does. In general it is not the same as the
context itself. We could, of course, use talk about ourselves, the laws of
physics, our language, etc. to get a large-enough context, but some smaller
context surely suffices in most cases. Unfortunately, I have not figured out
what it is.
Take the example of two-dimensional Euclidean geometry. We can shed some
light on the question why it looks the way it does if we note that a
computer program can be written that answers any question we can ask in the
context. This way we are led to a context that in some way abstracts from
real-life computer programs. A smaller context than this could also suffice.
I do not know what the contexts look like, though I have some ideas about
it.
Sometimes a mathematical context is such that a computer program can answer
all its questions, sometimes we have a more complicated theory, but computer
programs never stop having a role to play. The causes for mathematics's
being the way it is now seem more explicable, for computation is
about...causes! In a computation the result is determined by what we have
just before the result, and that in turn is determined by what we had just
before, and so on. Part of the reason causes in mathematics seem so
inexplicable is perhaps that at first a context such as two-dimensional
Euclidean geometry seems completely unrelated to computation and causation.
One can study the first context without knowing about the second.
The relation between mathematics and physics now seems to be another than
that of a part of a Platonic heaven becoming instantiated. In fact, we must
first of all ask whether theese subjects really consist of one context each.
To see that there might be more than one context of mathematics, let me
suggest that you take a look at http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week68.html.
The following passage, in particular, seems relevant here:
For example, there are "intuitionistic" topoi in which Brouwer reigns
supreme --- that is, you can't do proof by contradiction, you can't use the
axiom of choice, etc.. There is also the "effective topos" of Hyland in
which Turing reigns supreme --- for example, the only functions are the
effectively computable ones. There is also a "finitary" topos in which all
sets are finite. So there are topoi to satisfy various sorts of ascetic
mathematicians who want a stripped-down, minimal form of mathematics.
In the case of physics, I think there are two sorts of contexts:
epistemological and ontological. In the first case we start with everyday
experience and then imagine possible scenarios. Since it is not clear what
exactly everyday experience is, or what exactly could be counted as a
possible scenario, we get lots of contexts here. In the second case we start
from what we find in the first case. I believe that in neither case do we
have any right to see physics as "instantiated mathematics." Instead I think
that in the second case we can identify the contexts of physics with
mathematical contexts and in the first we can almost do so (the reason for
the reservation is that objects of thought experiments are not exactly
mathematical objects). Here it could be thought that such an identification
is absurd since "mathematics is a priori and physics is not," but note the
difference between identifying physics with a mathematical context that
could be said to represent all of mathematics and identifying it with a
particular mathematical context.
One can also object that a mathematical object itself says nothing about how
it is to be applied to our everyday experience: we must enlarge the context
to include such a description. This is certainly true and important. Before
we do this we cannot even discuss whether physics is an instantiation of a
mathematical context. All we could say would be that a particular
mathematical context (which we think of as physics) is surrounded by another
mathematical context (which we think of as mathematics). But counting what I
have written in paratheses as part of the sentence moves us out of
mathematics, and this is where we are now.
So in what context is it that we can say "perform such and such experiments
and you will get such and such results?" Must we introduce talk about minds?
Since we could imagine a mindless robot that was able to interpret the
statement the answer would seem to be no. We must be a little careful here,
though. The fact that the user of a statement can be mindless has nothing to
do with whether the statement itself presupposes that it is used by someone
who has a mind. I think many of the contexts of our language are absurd if
the speaker is not conscious, and that the mindless robot therefore cannot
ever share our language. The contrary is seemingly proved in a situation
where the robot as well as we believe that it has a mind and where we speak
with it as if it had one, but I do not think this is really a
counter-example.
I find this interesting. Let me just examine theese things a little before I
return to our real subject. When we speak we enter new contexts all the
time, but through all of this we could say that the availible contexts, or
something like that, remain the same. Maybe when extraterrestials talk to
each other the availible set of contexts is different, and when
communicating with them some common denominator has to be found. Availible
contexts might also vary because someone may simply refuse to talk about e.
g. infinities in mathematics, but we could abstract away from this. The
exact community of speakers can also be of importance. E. g. when someone is
alone, that person can doubt the existence of all others, but when the
person enters a discussion it seems as if the context where only one person
exists is unavailible.
It is time to return to the question of what context a statement like "do
such and such observations and here is what you will find" belongs to. I
think there is a context that could be described as "matter without mind" or
"dead physics," and I think the way to isolate it is to consider what our
own behaviour, including utterings of sentences of the kind we want to
inlude in dead physics, from the point of view of a mathematical object that
describes physics. One will then see, I hope, how a context can be isolated.
There is therefore a sence in which mind=matter must be false. This is
perfectly compatible with saying that mind=matter is true wherever we can
refer to 'mind'. At the same time this arguable shows that the word mind is
a bit strange, for it is as if we were to introduce a number called 1* in
mathematics such that 1* was identical to 1 wherever we can talk about
fractions but undefined when we think about numbers as integers, and
therefore not the same as 1.
My personal belief is that what is found at the fundamental level in physics
is in fact potential mind-stuff, and that the reduction of the state vector
in quantum physics has to do with what Nagel describes as the subject's
objectivating part of itself.
I still have not said what the relation between mathematics and physics is.
My _belief_ now is that as far as dead physics is concerned the situation
could be described by first noting that the mathematical object that
represents the physical world occurs in a wider mathematical context, but
that at the same time this wider context can in some sence be recovered from
within the object describing the physical world (when we humans think about
the wider mathematical context we seem to have a prime example). What we
therefore really have could perhaps be called a circular object. The object
could be said to be mathematics, and physics could be said to lead us from
our everyday experience to a point of this circular object.
I think the picture changes if we extend the context to include all of
reality (I see no danger in using this word). Here it is important to note
that contexts such as those where we say "why is there something rather than
nothing?", and "why is our world one such that mathematics works?"
respectively can be relevant, but can also turn out to have little or
nothing to do with reality itself.
>
> There's a whole world of difference between Pythagoras' theorem and the
> statement that the sun will rise tomorrow. Not a contextual difference but
a
> difference of certainty.
We can either treat each statement in its own context or consider them in a
common context.
If in addition we start speaking about certainty we add something to the
context. I think the meaning of certainty is highly context-dependent. There
is a context where we do not know whether the sun will rise tomorrow, but
that is not the same context as the context where we know the exact minute
when the sun will rise tomorrow.
> All experiential truths are at the best probabilities, never certainties.
This depends on the context.
> This includes all of science. Anybody who tries to apply the certainties
of
> logico-mathematical truths to life generally will soon acquire the label
of
> bigotted and prejudiced.
Yes, life is full of uncertainties. (In the context of an omnipotent being
this would not true, but as I have written my sentence such a context is
excluded.)
Mattias
>
> Ed
>
>
>
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>
>