Absoluteness, Objectiveness & Noumena

[Jaded Sage]

Could someone please give a brief (I realize how silly it might be to ask that it might be brief) explanation of the relationship between these things?

Isn't objectivity the search for what is absolute, and isn't that the noumena?

[uwot]

The way you're using absolute seems to be in a Hegelian sense. Hegel picked up the baton from Kant who had pointed out that our understanding of the world is based on what we perceive, phenomena. He argued that something must be responsible for the phenomena, but the 'ding-an-sich', the thing in itself is not the same as the phemomena. Since we can't see it directly, we have to invent a cause for the phenomenon in our mind, any such invention Kant called noumenal. The assumption is that there really is something that will cause similar experiences for everyone, under similar circumstances, it is therefore objective, even if we disagree about it's true nature. Hegel's masterpiece was The Phenomenology of Mind (or Spirit depending on the translation). Whereas Schopenhauer called his opus The World as Will and Representation. They were both idealists, the absolute was mental, as far as they were concerned, make up your own punchline.

[Obvious Leo]

JS. You should be able to get this if you think of the mind as an information processing entity without a programme instructing it how to operate. The Noumenon can then be thought of as the raw informational data which our senses receive from the environment but this data in itself is formless. In computer jargon we can think of such data as simply "bits" of information which in and of of themselves form no coherent structure which would be uniformly apparent to all observers. It is the role of the observer to construct these "bits" into a coherent narrative of reality and there is no preferred way or "right" way of doing this. This means that our personal narrative of the world is entirely subjective and it is this subjective narrative which constitutes our observed phenomena. However this is further complicated by the notion of inter-subjectivity, where through the use of language we build a common narrative together and then we manage to delude ourselves that this common narrative actually represents some sort of objective truth. This is a logical fallacy.

[uwot]

JS. You should be able to get this if you think of the mind as an information processing entity without a programme instructing it how to operate. The Noumenon can then be thought of as the raw informational data which our senses receive from the environment but this data in itself is formless.

That's not what Kant meant by noumena, as I understand him. It's a bit of a loop:
1. There is an objective world.
2. It is the source of phenomena.
3. We explain the phenomena by positing an objective world.
The noumenon is the thing responsible for the data; how we process the data is the phenomenon.

[Obvious Leo]

I agree that this is not precisely what Kant meant but we mustn't forget that Manny has been dead these two long centuries. Nowadays we live in an information age and every science except physics now prefers to model phenomena as entities which are encoding information. I think we can at least agree that the decoding of such information is exclusively a procedure of thought so in the end we arrive at the same place. In fact, now that I look at your post again, I'm not actually convinced that we're not saying exactly the same thing but using different forms of language

[Bill Wiltrack]

.



Here ya go -



....................................................................





The chicken is the noumenon.

The dog is the objectiveness.


The boy is the absolute.







...have you ever heard of Wikipedia?





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[Obvious Leo]

uwot. You must understand that we all interpret philosophy slightly differently but I rather like this informational way of interpreting Kant because it resonates so closely with Wheeler's "it from bit" universe which he was convinced would ultimately reveal itself to be an entity of the the most "sublime austerity".

[uwot]

I entirely agree, Leo, but I think it is useful to understand concepts in their original context, which I think JS is trying to do, before developing our own interpretation.

[Jaded Sage]

The assumption is that there really is something that will cause similar experiences for everyone, under similar circumstances, it is therefore objective...

Can I do this to your sentence and still have it be true?

The assumption is that there really is something that will cause similar phenomena for everyone, under similar circumstances, it is therefore noumena.

[Jaded Sage]

JS. You should be able to get this if you think of the mind as an information processing entity without a programme instructing it how to operate. The Noumenon can then be thought of as the raw informational data which our senses receive from the environment but this data in itself is formless. In computer jargon we can think of such data as simply "bits" of information which in and of of themselves form no coherent structure which would be uniformly apparent to all observers. It is the role of the observer to construct these "bits" into a coherent narrative of reality and there is no preferred way or "right" way of doing this. This means that our personal narrative of the world is entirely subjective and it is this subjective narrative which constitutes our observed phenomena. However this is further complicated by the notion of inter-subjectivity, where through the use of language we build a common narrative together and then we manage to delude ourselves that this common narrative actually represents some sort of objective truth. This is a logical fallacy.

Good show. Informative as always. Can we call this "constructing a coherent narrative" the act of "interpreting the world" or is it something else? Is this contructing of a narrative something we can stop doing?

[Jaded Sage]

.



Here ya go -



....................................................................





The chicken is the noumenon.

The dog is the objectiveness.


The boy is the absolute.







...have you ever heard of Wikipedia?





.

Bill, you are the coolest one on this site. Wiki isn't interactive.

[Jaded Sage]

What I mean is: are they all synonymous?

Also, can't we just call it nomenon and phenomenon? And where does epiphenomenon fall into this?

[Impenitent]

"assumption is the mother of all f-ups"

-Imp

[Obvious Leo]

Can we call this "constructing a coherent narrative" the act of "interpreting the world" or is it something else?

That's all it is and this process is very precisely defined in cognitive neuroscience. The neuroscientists speak of every mind as having a personal cognitive map which is completely and utterly unique and in a continuous process of being updated. This is where the whole notion of qualia becomes problematic, and endlessly lucrative for the academic navel-gazers, because by even referring to such a concept they reveal their ignorance of neural network computing. They manage to keep their snouts in the public trough by asking a questions which is entirely meaningless and then unsurprisingly discovering that they're completely unable to answer it. The gullible taxpayer is the goose laying an ever-growing clutch of golden eggs when we see this: Do you see the same colour red as I see when we both observe the same red object? The question is meaningless because we don't even see the same colour red when we subsequently observe the same red object ourselves. Every time we make an observation we perform a uniquely new act of cognition and it is utterly physically impossible to perform this cognitive act in the same way twice. We continuously remake our own personal reality according to a vast suite of sensory inputs which will never be repeated in the same combination so to assign any ontological status to the way we codify these inputs is plainly fucking ridiculous. We're all mapping the same territory but we're all doing it differently every moment of our lives.

Is this contructing of a narrative something we can stop doing?

No it isn't and neither should it be. However it's important for science to understand that this is what it's doing. The physicists in particular have fallen for the fatal logical fallacy of assuming that the models which they've created are models of a physically real universe, even though these models actually contradict each other and are mutually exclusive. What they've completely failed to understand is that physics can only model observations and an observation is an act of cognition. They are mistaking the cognitive map of the observer with the physical world which he's observing even though this world is a world which no longer exists. This is why our current models of physics define a universe which makes no sense. They no not model reality as it IS but rather they model it as it WAS. The way it IS is the ding an sich, the unknowable Noumenon which exists only in the moment NOW, but by the time this moment NOW impinges on our consciousness it has already become the moment THEN, gone forever into the wake of our own past. It is this holographic representation of a dead past which spacetime physics is modelling.

[Jaded Sage]

My understanding of "absolute" is that is opposed to "relative." Isn't it correct to assume then that what each person experiences subjectively is dictated by the circumstances relative to the observer?