Look at it this way, Other-wise. We’ve been talking about essence. If you were to remove the things you allegedly see, they could always be replaced by other things. So long as there are retinal cells and photons, your capacity for sight remains. But reverse that — take away either the photons or the retinal cells — and no matter how densely packed your environment is with things, you will never see any color, shape, or motion. The photons and cells are the essential noumenals at work. You perceptions is shaping them into phenomenals for you.
A very interesting article, Antiochus. Thanks. Among the gems it contains is probably the simplest explanation of special relativity that I’ve ever seen.
You’re more than welcome, Liberal!
The explanation of Special Relativity was quite good, but how about the bit the author tantalizes us with, but never reveals — the Constitutional loophole that Gödel discovered? 
Nitpick: photons and cells are phenomenals. We hold thoughts that hold them in some noumenal capacity. Like everything else, that may change.
Yeah, I wondered about that too. I actually looked at the Constitution, and the closest thing I could find was this, from Article II, Section 3: “He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.”
It seems conceivable that, with enough capable allies to assist him, he could suspend Congress indefinitely.
I really don’t think that’s a nitpick at all, but rather a very imporant clarification. Thanks, Gyan.
I think you’re right. The text you cited is a way in which a doctatorship could arise.
Oh, merde. dictatorship, dammit!
I cant believe I read this thread in its entirety. However, Liberal you wrote:
And your challenge is to prove, that the universe is real in either of the above mentioned sense.
Well the first answer you got was the one of knocking against your desk to prove it’s real. You objected this request, because it uses subjetivity. Well this is OK for defintion 2) of real. But then you have to explain, what is a fact for you? Because for me, that knocking my desk does prove it to be real is a fact.
Somewhere later in the thread you even say, that mathematics is not real, because it comes from order and quantities, which are subjective concepts. Well then, logic is also part of mathematics, but you say mathematics is not real, therefore you say logic is not real. Proofing something requires logic, because a proof is nothing more than a logical transformation following valid rules. However, if you deny the reality of mathematics, then you deny then reality of logic and with it you deny the reality of proof. Therefore there cannot be anything, that will convince you otherwise. Discussion ends.
My challenge for you is easier:
You believe God exists and is essential and necessary. I believe pink zebras don’t exist, and their non-existence is essential and necessary.
You believe the universe does not exist. (or is not real, to use your wording) I believe the universe does exist.
I can’t prove that God does not exist, but if I could, I would have proven that the only thing you accept to be real is indeed not real.
You can’t prove that pink zebras (not pink painted ones) exist, but if you could, my universe would vanish into inexistence.
Now my challenge: Prove to me that pink zebras exist, with the same rules you want us to apply, and after that I will agree with you, that the universe indeed is not real.
There is a Zen koan, that goes about this: You know the noise of two hands clapping against each other, but what is the noise of only one hand.
You might think this koan if offtopic, but it’s not. You defy the existence of things like trees, because on the subatomic level there is no tree. Well if this is true, why do we hear clapping hands, and to which hand do we contribute the noise? The left or the right? And why? We cannot name a single hand, the sound exists only if we have two hands, therefore there are things, that are more than their parts. Either that, or nothing exists at all.
I can’t win your challenge, and you can’t win mine. However, I think my life, as bad as it is, makes more sense if the universe exists, than it would if it does not. It is comforting to accept its existence, and that’s is good enough for me.
cu
Lib, ** II Gyan II** beat me to it. That’s what I was clumsily trying to say (only I take it one step further and submit that photons are not phenomena, they’re models of phenomena).
I guess my question to you would be: what is essence or love? If they’re phenomenal, why are they any more “real” than a photon? If they’re noumenal, how can we know them (-in-themselves) at all?
I’m on the “reply every 3 days” program, so you will have to bear with me.
It seems to me that “existence” does not violate the 1st definition you allowed “being or occurring in fact or actuality”.
Major issue: Is existence not a form of occurring in fact?
Minor issue: Nothing in my proof relies on subjective perception (or any types of perception whatsoever) or the conventions of language (other than the fact that any proof does require some form of communication, even the ones we construct in our own minds for our own consumption)
From Wikipedia (ontology, metaphysics and philosophy):
“Reality=everything that exists”
“a fact is something that exists”
“unicorns do not exist, so they are not real”
“in philosophy reality is contrasted with non-existence and mere possibility”
As I think most would agree, by the definitions in Wikipedia, the only thing preventing the acceptance of my proof is if one does not believe the OA is valid.
It seems we are left with a few options:
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You do not feel the OA is valid, in which case, I will go back to the drawing board.
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You do feel the OA is valid, but, while you do not disagree with Wikipedia (and other philosophy sources on the internet), the debate you wanted to have is not exactly the debate I am currently engaged in. In which case, despite having read your other definitions, I would ask for more clarification so I know where to focus my efforts.
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The Universe is indeed real and Domokun will not have to feel cheated on his/her non-real graphics card.
You say, “I cant believe I read this thread in its entirety”, and frankly, I can’t either. Because if you had, you’d have known that definition (2) is now the only operative definition, that there is no onus whatsoever to satisfy definition (1), and that I am willing to accept analytical proof (logic) that the universe is real because if logical analysis can prove its reality, then logic is real as well.
You base your challenge on an unsound premise, and multiple amphibolies. You seek by modus tollens — “I believe pink zebras don’t exist” — to show that if pink zebras do not exist, then neither does your particular universe — “my universe would vanish”. You are equivocating between existence and reality as though they are synonyms.
No, I’m afraid that somehow you’ve gotten all mixed up. I believe that trees exist, that numbers exist, and that the universe exists. I just don’t believe that they are real, in accordance with the operative definition. They exists as illusions.
Essence is that quality that a thing possesses irrespective of whether it exists. (Because of the sheer ubiquity of existentialist thought, it is easy to forget that not all philosophies hold that existence precedes essence.) Love is the facilitation of the aesthetic called “goodness”. Goodness is that aesthetic which edifies.
Back on page 1, I believe, Priceguy discovered that definition (1) is circular because it uses lexemes in its definition that are synonymous with the term being defined. We therefore discarded it.
I specifically addressed the problems with your ontological argument previously. Please refer to that post.
Focus your efforts on proving analytically that the universe is eternal, essential, and necessary. I’ve written enough commentary about that that, by reviewing, you can get all the requisite details.
After being away for a weekend, there I was about to barge in here again, clumsily swinging my blunt know-it-all physicalist broadsword, only to be instantly and expertly disarmed by Lib’s kind words. Indeed, I feel completely undeserving of such praise: I’m no different to any of us here - just some guy shoving his model worldview into the arena just to see how it fares in each exciting edition of Weltanschauung Wars.
That said, erl has asked me some specific questions and there’s a couple of other points which I’d like to address.
This, I feel, rather neatly illustrates how human thought and language has evolved so far that it can no longer see the wood for the trees. These are perfectly simple sentences appended by a “?” symbol, turning them into questions. Any australopithecine hunter-gatherer would have no trouble whatsoever parsing the meaning of “Past tense statement. Agree?” - they could perhaps even understand the particular subject matter here if you showed them several reconstructed dinosaur skeletons.
It is only because our language and cognition is so advanced that we can feign (or, a least, express) utter incomprehensibility of “Past tense statement. Agree?” based on which precise definition of the word “real” we have come to accept after years of studying the works of the greatest grunting, squealing chimps called “philosophers” (and erl is far more erudite than myself in that regard). When that first ancestral primate onomatopaeically made a sound of rushing water and pointed over there, was some new “reality” born from memories referenced by sounds, ie. “language”? Surely not. This is, and was, just a continuation of whatever was the case for those previous 13 billion or so years.
Of course senses, memory and cognition cannot “know”, “understand” or “completely categorise” the environment into which a cognitive device is immersed. Of course all it make is its “best guess” (the one which maximises its replicative fitness in that environment, perhaps). “Abstraction” is what sensed memories and their cognitive permutations are. But it can also clearly be said that memories can be of things, abstractions can be about things, outside of the volume of space in the skull in which that cognition takes place.
It is a philosophical position, a worldview, a Weltanschauung. It cannot be proven like a mathematical treatise. It cannot even strictly be tested, since any result could be interpreted in some non-physical way, and so it is arguably not even a hypothesis. But I do consider that it is a powerful explanatory basis. We can ask ourselves “If the universe comprised only particles, fundamental forces, energy and spacetime,” (or comparable entities describable by physics) “could every phenomenon, including the mechanism by which phenomena are ‘observed’, be satisfactorily explained?”.
Now, what happens when those particles and forces comprise ‘something’ which our chimpy cognitive modules sort into a ‘category’? It has only been in recent decades that us chimps have even realised that ‘things’ are built up of particles and the like. Before that, all we had was “water” (and its associated shushing noise or other linguistic referent), and yet we got along just fine, thank you very much. This is because, as I explained to Lib in post 66 our cognitive modules are evolutionarily designed to categorise and understand at a macroscopic level. If we were 10[sup]-12[/sup] tall, we presumably would ‘think’ in terms of particles and quantum weirdness.
Yes to all three. Taking one specific ‘type’ of love, say, eros, the physical process to which I would appeal would be that, upon access to the sense or memory of another person, hormones and pheromones from the pituitary gland affect the hypothalamus and hence the rest of the limbic system in a complex feedback process. Over a certain threshold (like your mother said, “when you’re in love, you’ll know”) this response is much greater for senses/memories of one person than any other. That is love.
As for your unicorn example, the thought of a unicorn, ie. the mental construction of a [memory of] HORSE + [memory of] HORN + [category of] MAGICAL, exists and is every bit as real as Sonic the Hedgehog when he appears on my monitor, or the Straight Dope Message Board for that matter. But, like I said, memories and thoughts are of things, and a memory of a thing can exist even when the thing itself does no longer. Hence I say that the thought/abstraction of a unicorn is real, but the unicorn itself (ie. HORSE+HORN+MAGICAL AND GRAVITATIONALLY BOUND) is not.
Largely true, but this realisation itself came from experimentation of a sort, wherein that “personal experience” which I had associated solely with God could actually come from other sources, even some physical molecules which I could hold in my very hand. I considered that I was making a God Of The Gaps argument, with the Gap I stuffed God into being “personal experience of God”. My saying “there can be no other explanation for that experience” was clearly just unsubstantiated opinion: difficult though it was, I felt I had to let it go.
I’d agree that it is complicated. As your own previous quote said, if human cognition was simple, so would we be. But “simplicity”, as we both know, is rather a misreading of Ockham’s principle. He said merely that a plurality ought not be proposed without necessity. Explaining human cognition in terms of senses, memory, emotion and the physical basis thereof does not introduce further entities - it seeks to explain cognition in terms we already have in medicine and neuroscience, and is therefore genuinely, Ockhamly parsimonious.
I’ve toyed with opening a thread entitled “A Memory is a Physical Thing” which I think will be a little more useful than “Ask the Physicalist”. Again, I can’t claim to be an expert on how the mind arises from non-mind over billions of years - I’m just some fellow on a message board who often dives in overly recklessly just to see how it goes - I am blessed in that I have good and kind friends here who indulge me. If I have time before I go on holiday next week, I’ll do so.
Thanks for your answer. Now, finally, I understand your point of view, and it is actually a very familiar point of view to me, though I was distracted by your terminology. However, I can’t prove the existence of universe to you.
Your quest is essentially the same, that buddhists have when they try to achieve enlightenment. Enlightenment - put very simple - is to look behind the curtain of the illusions that we perceive as “reality” and to get a fundamental understanding of what really is. I am far from enlightenment, so I can’t help you. But when I do - a few thousand lifetimes later - I will return as Buddha to this thread and give you your answer. I will be able to do this, because as Buddha I am beyond the restrictions of space and time, because I will understand the universe. However, the crux is, that I then will also understand, why it would be wrong to give you the answer as straight dope.
If buddhists read in this thread, don’t bother to correct me, I know this is all put very simple.
cu
Lib, bear with me. We’re discussing the ultimate nature of ultimate reality and things get a little slippery out here. I fear I’ve been expressing myself badly, so let me take this one step at a time:
Is love the essence of a thing (if so, what thing?), or is love a thing?
(or none of the above?)
Sentient, I think an argument can be made that what you’re referring to as a “thing” is actually just a different type of abstraction.
As you know, we never get clean data from our senses. Sensory data is filtered, folded, discarded, spindled and mutilated long before it reaches conscious awareness.
What we become aware of is already an abstraction; an abstraction that was not formed through processes of conscious cognition or language, but an abstraction nonetheless.
So you are correct that when that first ancestral primate onomatopoeically made a sound of rushing water and pointed over there, no new “reality” was born. But then, the sound he/she made wasn’t representing reality; it was representing an abstraction of reality.
Love is the essence of God. If love did not exist, it would still have the same quality — facilitating edification (goodness). In other words, if nothing at all existed, then love, by its very essence, would cause it to.
There is a “thing” and an abstraction of it (which is also a “thing” itself). They are both subsets of reality. There can be abstractions (themselves real things) having no associated real thing, like the unicorn. There can also be real things having no abstractions of them, like everything in the universe for billions of years.
The reality, and the representation of the reality, and the representation of the abstraction of reality, are all elements in the set of the real, IMO.