Philosophy Now Forum

[quote=Kuznetzova post_id=117636 time=1346568224 user_id=8093]
The world is an undifferentiated collection of substances. There are no boundaries or "objects" out there. Only by means of human language and "[i]what causes pain[/i]" and "[i]what is important to me as homo sapien[/i]" does this substance of the world get broken into objects.

That's the root of ontology. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... y_X2Kbneo/

>The lower parts of the human brain deliver to our consciousness not a world of patches of color (what an AI robot would see), but instead performs enormous computing on the retinal scene (which is really only patches of color), and delivers to our consciousness a 3D scene of meaningful objects. Because the human brain does this effortlessly and automatically, many classical thinkers assumed that the world must come prepackaged in meaningful objects, de novo.

Platonic forms make no sense, no matter what you call them. Patterns aren't out there, they're in here <taps head>. Things don't exist in actuality, where there is only undifferentiated stuff. Every thing is a pattern with a purpose and the resolution of the purpose determines the resolution of the pattern. There is no such thing as a priori knowledge. Knowledge is justified belief. The transcendent ultimate truth is forever beyond us.

>It does not. Epistemologists then get into lengthy, heated debates with each other about deer standing behind cardboard cutouts, and people accidentally passing a stopped clock just when it happens to be the time of day that the stopped clock is showing. ([size=85]A person walks past a large tower with a clock face. The clock is stuck at 9:37. But the person walked by at 9:37 AM, and the clock accidentally showed them the right time. Their belief is a true belief, but is it justified? et cetera et cetera[/size] )

All those Gettier problems are non-problems if you understand the simple and undeniable fact that justified true belief is impossible. Using that understanding would mean you cannot ever know whether something is knowledge or not. Knowledge is a pointer toward truth, it cannot contain truth as a necessary attribute. Besides which, justified belief is (besides necessary) sufficient for all epistemological questions. It's hard for me to understand how people can't understand that.

>These epistemologists are having these debates precisely because they believe (falsely believe) that the outside world is made up of human-laden objects that beam their essence into human brains. This is utterly backwards, and wronger than wrong. The world is made of chemical substances which emit and reflect light, period. It is only inside the brain that the "objectness" of these substances is created. The brain is the one and only source of these object-categories. A realization of this truth destroys all of the above "problems" at their core; centuries of classical epistemology are thrown out the window.

#bandname Essence Beam

Chemical substances at one layer of understanding. There are many others, including experience itself. Many if not most problems in philosophy can be solved by understanding the nature of transcendence and different layers of metaphor, as you apparently do. The biological layer is brain, the psychological layer is mind. The quantum layer is physics, the consciousness layer is experience.

Does anyone know who this ex-Kuznetzova still is? A google search isn't helpful but i want to follow up with him.

[quote="The Voice of Time" post_id=117655 time=1346591311 user_id=7289]
Objects obviously exist because we can reason with them. [i]In what form they exist[/i], is another matter.

Things may or may not be prepackaged before or after the conscious processing units, BUT, you couldn't prove it! Because we experience the world exactly AS a sum of objects, a sum of wholes with which we can focus on or ignore. If these wholes didn't exist, we would be completely indifferent to the world as we would be void of relationships with the world.

All physics contains objects, whether we or nature made them doesn't matter as we can't see things we ourselves haven't "made" in our brain and therefore cannot prove the existence of a non-object nature.

Another thought here is that nature seems to focus on things in that certain changes happens to the world and certain changes do not, and so obviously the world treats itself as containing objects as well.
[/quote]

Things are collections of attributes and boundary conditions. They're the same thing so long as the attributes necessary for a given purpose match up. For example, an apple to you or i is a low-resolution thing, but to an apple vendor the same exact physical stuff in space/time is a much more complex thing. For apple selling purposes, it's the same thing to us all. For developing new apple strains, you and i can't access that apple-thing at all, "for all intents and purposes". The resolution of the purpose determines the resolution of the pattern. That's basically the solution to everything in metaphysics.

[quote=apaosha post_id=120359 time=1348508619 user_id=7926]
I would describe it like this:

Interaction is a fundamental prerequisite to existence. To affect and be affected allows an observer to ascertain whether a phenomenon can be considered "real". But to be under such a condition of constant interactivity necessitates constant mutability; a phenomenons condition is never static or fixed, rather it is the ongoing (present time as it is always moving) manifestation of past interaction.
The human mind however must freeze perception of this changing phenomenon and consider that frozen perception (already inaccurate because it describes the past condition of what has already changed) as a Thing, a platonic ideal. This Thing is then used in comparison to perception of the phenomenon at later or earlier dates and the assumption is made that these differing perceptions are of wholly different Things which are switched out when a change occurs.... rather than themselves being manifestations in the same ongoing process but at differing times.
This leads to the assumption of a dichotomy between cause-effect, which I have gone into in another thread.
For example: apple->seed->tree
These are stages within the growth process of an apple tree, which an observer has picked out as being distinct and has labeled as wholly different phenomena, such that one can be the cause of the other, the effect.
This is a simplification of reality in order to make it more readily conceivable to the one attempting to understand it. The mistake is to take this simplification as accurate.
[/quote]

You're absolutely right, except for the bit you got wrong. The mutability of a thing doesn't matter in most cases because it hasn't/won't changed enough to make a difference in the temporally limited space of time in which it's being interacted with. Every thing is a collection of attributes and boundary conditions and that includes location in space-time for all physical (external) things.

Kuznetzova wrote: ↑Sun Sep 02, 2012 7:43 am The world is an undifferentiated collection of substances.

There is no basis for this assumption, and, as it stands, it is self-contradictory.

If there were, "substances," they would necessarily have to be differentiated, which means they would have to have different properties, attributes, characteristics or qualities, else they would all be the same substance. But a, "substance," is only an attribute of entities. The world (or universe, or ontological existense) is all the entities that exist, their substantialness determined by their attributes.

[quote=RCSaunders post_id=474969 time=1602290064 user_id=16196]
[quote=Kuznetzova post_id=117636 time=1346568224 user_id=8093]
The world is an undifferentiated collection of substances.[/quote]
There is no basis for this assumption, and, as it stands, it is self-contradictory.

If there were, "substances," they would necessarily have to be differentiated, which means they would have to have different properties, attributes, characteristics or qualities, else they would all be the same substance. But a, "substance," is only an attribute of entities. The world (or universe, or ontological existense) is all the entities that exist, their substantialness determined by their attributes.
[/quote]

Change is the universal substrate of the universe. The way things change is energy. Slow, entangled energy is matter. Things are collections of attributes and boundary conditions, in a mind.

Kuznetzova wrote: ↑Sun Sep 02, 2012 7:43 am The world is an undifferentiated collection of substances. There are no boundaries or "objects" out there. Only by means of human language and "what causes pain" and "what is important to me as homo sapien" does this substance of the world get broken into objects.

The lower parts of the human brain deliver to our consciousness not a world of patches of color (what an AI robot would see), but instead performs enormous computing on the retinal scene (which is really only patches of color), and delivers to our consciousness a 3D scene of meaningful objects. Because the human brain does this effortlessly and automatically, many classical thinkers assumed that the world must come prepackaged in meaningful objects, de novo.

It does not. Epistemologists then get into lengthy, heated debates with each other about deer standing behind cardboard cutouts, and people accidentally passing a stopped clock just when it happens to be the time of day that the stopped clock is showing. (A person walks past a large tower with a clock face. The clock is stuck at 9:37. But the person walked by at 9:37 AM, and the clock accidentally showed them the right time. Their belief is a true belief, but is it justified? et cetera et cetera )

These epistemologists are having these debates precisely because they believe (falsely believe) that the outside world is made up of human-laden objects that beam their essence into human brains. This is utterly backwards, and wronger than wrong. The world is made of chemical substances which emit and reflect light, period. It is only inside the brain that the "objectness" of these substances is created. The brain is the one and only source of these object-categories. A realization of this truth destroys all of the above "problems" at their core; centuries of classical epistemology are thrown out the window.


Electromagnetic radiation has a smooth transition among its spectrum of frequencies. The human eye-brain system segregates it into a rainbow of categories.

Human brains are also parts of the outside world , and so are chemicals and all scientific categories of entities.

The existentialist who claims all the interpreted world is transient, and existence precedes essence, does not further enlighten us to the monist idealist stance of Kusnetsova.

There is no need to lurch to the alternative monist physicalist stance. We can easily manage both; depending on which perspective we choose, as the perspectives don't exclude each other.

Kuznetzova wrote: ↑Sun Sep 02, 2012 7:43 am The world is an undifferentiated collection of substances.

What is a, "subtance?"

An, "undifferentiated collection," is a contradiction. If there are, "substances," (plural) something must make them different.

Your beginning with a self-contradiction makes all the rest doubtful.