Posted on 11/01/2005 6:27:26 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
And thank you, cornelis, for the precious poem! What a vision!
Thank you for your response..
Maybe there is such a thing as two dimensional intellect (not recognizing the painter) and three dimensional intellect (recognizing the painter).. i.e. born again vs not born again.. or some other metaphorical instrument..
At any rate if this Universe is a three dimensional "drama", "painting", "creation", "work of the Godly art".. the earth mystery drama might be the first act with the audience trying to deduce the plot... i.e. science, religion, philosophy.. Basically an awareness test.. of some sort..
Reading some of the famous philosophers its amazing the clap trap that a human can come up with.. All proven with great swelling words of course.. Joseph Campbells search for sentience through myth comes to mind.. Anyway this term the Universal Canvas resonated within me today reading one of Boops posts.. Not being "shy" I stood up.. it is still echoing through my gourd.. LoL..
"[L]osing [those] parts of reality" is an entirely good thing, IMHO.
It's no a deficiency of the "immanent" (real) that if fails to conform to the "transcendent" (ideal). Indeed the opposite is the case. It's entirely a deficiency of the ideal when and to the extent that it fails to capture the full reality of what actually exists.
This understanding should be second nature to conservatives, cognizant as we are of the vast and deadly nihilism that invariably manifests when the "transcendent" is given priority over the "immanent" in the realm of political and social theory. (E.g. real social justice that has been achieved at great historic cost is deemed as hopelessly flawed in comparison to the ideal and therefore must be swept away and replaced by a more ideal form.)
The proper priority wrt to natural science should be more, not less, clear than wrt to social and political theory.
Civilization and Its Enemies : The Next Stage of History by Lee Harris
Good morning, Stultis! It seems to me there are many transcendent things that are also quite real: Any universal would qualify as such. Unless you think the laws of physics are not real.
Very curious indeed, and hasty, I think. Anybody who knows the history of platonism knows that the price paid was extremely high: the Plato we all know who finds intelligibility at all cost, and can find it only at the price of losing such parts of reality as do not fit the pattern of ideal thought. Just blame it on Socrates.
But we need not pit the one against the other if we can recognize the distinctions that arise from their writing. Without making them a mush, we might agree that one can't be a good empiricist at all without the other.
betty boop: It seems to me there are many transcendent things that are also quite real: Any universal would qualify as such. Unless you think the laws of physics are not real.
IMHO, the tautology that cornelis raised is the risk of Stultis' worldview for it demands that A is real, non-A is ideal and provisional at that.
Conversely, the Plato view declares non-A as real and also A as real.
Notwithstanding the history of the Aristotle v Plato paradigm (and Socrates as raised by cornelis) - physics would suggest that the view of reality as "matter in all its motion" is in peril (the nature of mass, non-locality, superposition, etc.)
This brings me back to a comment about Derbyshire up above. He mixes means and ends in the list of foolish politics: peace is a good end, and generosity is a virtue. Perhaps he should distinguish the end from the means. Immanentizing the eschaton is a bad means. Rejecting the eschaton is losing parts.
In American politics, the end is left to the people. Sadly, this is no guarantee that in making the foundation of law an popular ideal against bad means.
And so it seems to many realists as well. For instance Karl Popper argued for the reality (the real existence) of ideas.
The problem is where we assert, construct or discover a correspondence between an abstract idea and a real object, and then give the former precedence over the latter. The real must always be the test of the ideal, not the other way around. Furthermore, even if both object and idea are real, the correspondence between idea and object is not real (as Plato argues) but only incidental and instrumental. The correspondence is a kind of "theory" subject to testing and to refutation.
Sadly, this is no guarantee that in making the popular ideal the foundation of law that we are free of bad means.
We can't follow this advice until we distinguish between the conceptual and the actual ideal.
Back in post 493, Cornelis wrote: "... it is a dangerous game to assume that the scope of our knowledge is identical with the object of our knowledge." This is well put, but the meaning is a bit sticky to me. So: it is dangerous to assume that what we know (scope) is identical with what we want to know (object)? Since the word "danger" was brought in, I will play devil's advocate and ask, "Dangerous how?" A danger that we will find ourselves in error? Or is the danger that our little logical error will lead to greater and even real life error? Is the danger that, as Weaver put it, "ideas have consequences?" And what if we put this in theological terms: is it dangerous to assume that our knowledge of God (insofar as we may assume we have such knowledge - from the bible or other holy books, from religious experiences, etc.) is identical with God? And is there a way of knowing God without having experience of God? I'm not necessarily interested in answers to these questions, but I would contend that all knowledge is limited - even the knowledge of direct experience. For me there is no intellectually satisfying escape from knowing, simply, what I know.
knowledge of an event that we obtain through sense perception is and is not the same thing. Otherwise that tree you see is growing in your head. And then everything is in everything and the game is over. There is nothing more to say.
How do we obtain knowledge of an event except through "sense perception"? The tree you "see" may also be felt, smelled, tasted, and - if the wind is right - heard. Insofar as one's senses exist only in one's head, then perhaps the tree only exists there, too, but this has always seemed to me rather beside the point. Since elsewhere Plato's cave has been dragged in: why should the one who recognizes the shadows on the wall for what they are not also question the reality of the light that casts them? Recognizing one appearance as mere appearance, why not all appearances? It may simply be something we as human beings must resign ourselves to: that our experience of life does not exceed our experience of life, and that the logic of our consciousness may not always manage to access the logic of reality (if we are still determined to separate the two).
But back now to the tautology and the "riddle" of unity.
If we are to speak of knowledge, and let's say in particular scientific knowledge, then we must distinguish between what we are able to know and how we are able to know it. This was the point, I think, that inspired cornelis' post 493. If I am able to know, for example, that the mathematical sentence 2 + 2 = 4 is true, I am able to know this only by having prior knowledge (perhaps only assumed knowledge) of the grammar of that sentence: I know what "2" and "4" mean, I know what operation is defined by the "+" symbol, and I know what conclusion the "=" sign denotes. Now the question arises, how can I distinguish between what I know (the relationships described by the equation) and what I want to know (whether the equation is true)? It seems simple enough when the equation is 2 + 2 = 4, but quickly becomes more complicated with 2 + 2 = 8 - 4 or 2 + 2 = (3(2 + 1) - 1) + (2(1-3)), where we see that the equation is itself a tautology: 4 = 4. And yet, in order to know one thing that I know (that 4 = 4), I may need some other knowledge to be able to recognize it when I see it (the mathematical operations and their order of calculation). Here it seems to me that the scope of my knowledge is indeed intimately bound to its object. It does not follow, however, that acquisition of knowledge is tautological. It is, rather, syllogistic: I know what "2" means, I know what "+" means, therefore I know what "2 + 2" means. The natural sciences work in the same way, depending on prior knowledge to extrapolate further knowledge. In Newton's famous words: "If I have seen further... it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." In that sense, our ability to know depends very much upon what we already know.
As to the question of whether "what is outside of (the tautology)" exists or not, I'm not sure there is really a problem here. Clearly, as A-G has noted, mathematics does not deny the existence of biology, nor does biology deny the existence of mathematics. But let's be careful with terms here: biology is not life, it is the study of life; mathematics, for its part, is a language of numerical and operational relationships: neither exist corporeally, in the sense that a rock or a dog or a flower or you or I exist. I understand some are concerned that the natural sciences, in limiting themselves to the material, are somehow denying the existence of what is non-material, but this, to me, is a misunderstanding. Natural science does not deny the existence of the non-material; it simply is not equipped to deal with what is non-material (except in cases where the "non" is itself in question - e.g. the problem of human consciousness). Perhaps part of the fear comes from the (relatively) recent, science-driven expansion of the so-called material world to include phenomena previously considered strictly non-material. The fear, I would argue, is unfounded. Either what is material is material, or it is not material; the "discovery" of new material (of what, that is, was previously unknown to be or was unrecognizable as material) can in no way diminish the existence of the non-material. An increase in "A" by no means demands a decrease in "non-A".
As for Niels Bohr, I haven't read much of the man's work, but along with Alamo-Girl I endorse his "cut." I would only add that the cut, cuts both ways.
Now it looks like I have some reading to do, to catch up with recent developments...
Yes, but real as ideas. Their status of reality as ideas makes no demands whatsoever on either if, or how, corresponding objects are instantiated.
What distinction? What are "actual" ideals? How do they exist and why are they privileged over ideas that are (and as they are) actually conceived? Shouldn't those ideas that are (or where) actually conceived be deemed the "actual" ideals?
Properties of objects that are immaterial, extra-mental, and in some way causally related to material existence (e.g. Plato's intelligible ideas, Aristotelian intelligible form, the Stoic World Soul, the Christian God, etc.).
Since our intelligence is limited by the possibility of error, what we conceive may not actually exist and is illusory, although admittedly it does exist as an illusory thought.
you: Yes, but real as ideas. Their status of reality as ideas makes no demands whatsoever on either if, or how, corresponding objects are instantiated.
Moreover, your "real" may be an illusion, albeit a very persistent one (to quote Einstein).
For instance, the fact that we can measure mass does not mean that we "know" and have evidenced what mass "is". In fact we have not. It may very well be a shadow of something else. It may even be multiply imaged.
Yet your "real" requires that mass exists in space/time, doesn't it?
This is why I aver that the Platonist view (in physics and math) is more substantive than the Aristotlean view. It recognizes both the A and the non-A as "real".
I'll need to swallow a cow before I can believe that Aristotle doesn't.
Thus when they speak of the Aristotle v Plato paradigm in cosmology, for instance, the frog (Aristotle) does not see the bird (Plato) - but the bird sees the frog.
To the frog a particle is moving at fixed trajectory, to the bird it is a strand of uncooked spaghetti. The frog sees two orbiting particles, the bird sees two cooked strands of spaghetti in a double helix. The bird looks at the frog and sees a thick bundle of pasta.
The frog not only does not see spaghetti but he denies the bird exists.
It’s when they do deny the existence of non-A that they are at risk of living in a “second reality”.
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