Correct. An observation is a construct of consciousness which is informed by reality but cannot define it.
cladking wrote:
Reality is the the cause and effect that acts through nature and upon everything in it. It is unknowable and unpredictable.
Correct again. You define reality as a dynamic PROCESS, which to any philosopher should be transparently bloody obvious. However somebody should tell the physicists because this is not the way that physics sees the world. This so-called "science" continues to flounder around aimlessly in its Newtonian confusion trying to model a law-derived reality predicated on the principle of Intelligent Design despite the fact that all the available evidence indicates the opposite. "Shit happens" is the way of a process universe and the only law needed to insure that shit keeps happening is the meta-law of universal causality.
Correct. An observation is a construct of consciousness which is informed by reality but cannot define it.
cladking wrote:
Reality is the the cause and effect that acts through nature and upon everything in it. It is unknowable and unpredictable.
Correct again. You define reality as a dynamic PROCESS, which to any philosopher should be transparently bloody obvious. However somebody should tell the physicists because this is not the way that physics sees the world. This so-called "science" continues to flounder around aimlessly in its Newtonian confusion trying to model a law-derived reality predicated on the principle of Intelligent Design despite the fact that all the available evidence indicates the opposite. "Shit happens" is the way of a process universe and the only law needed to insure that shit keeps happening is the meta-law of universal causality.
Leo, can you explain this bit please "...law-derived reality predicted on the principle of Intelligent Design..."
cladking wrote:Reality isn't what we observe. It is not the effect on experiment that allows us to learn about nature and it is not the elephant in the room that modern language speakers must shout around and over.
Reality is the the cause and effect that acts through nature and upon everything in it. It is unknowable and unpredictable. It proceeds with or without our attention or beliefs. It is the law that says unseen cats are dead or alive. It has the first, final, and only say in how things transpire.
It transcends time and space itself and if we accepted its existence and built a science on it then that science would probably appear to be a religion to most people. This science, founded on reality as being axiomatic, is the foundation of all science that ever existed on the face of the earth and was used to invent everything from beaver dams to pyramids until the invention of modern science. It has its own language which is nearly invisible to modern humans.
Plz shut up!
Thank you for your interest.
Only people who speak modern languages could possibly argue over the nature of reality. I generally agree with most of what everyone has said but I believe most of it is skirting the real issue and that is "reality" is defined by language and modern language doesn't hold anything as being axiomatic other than perception (which is not to be trusted). We build models of reality in our minds and these models are constructed of theory and belief; they are constructed of our understanding of our enviroment and beliefs and we tend to take these models as reality itself.
Our usage of language defines our perception because our knowledge and beliefs are acquired through language. "I think therefore I am" is a truism in our mode of thought but is a false statement in reality. Any discussion of reality necessarily includes definitions and the mode of communication and this is nowhere more true than in describing or naming reality.
Ginkgo wrote:Leo, can you explain this bit please "...law-derived reality predicted on the principle of Intelligent Design..."
Despite the embellishments of the early 20th century physics still remains essentially a Newtonian doctrine which requires that reality is determined according to a suite of laws which are commonly referred to as the "laws of physics". No explanation for the origin of these so-called "laws" is possible, even in principle, because Newton adopted this position as an a priori assumption in the way he formulated the methodology of physics. Newton believed he was modelling the mind of god. This is Plato 101 where the laws which govern the universe are assumed to have their origin external to it. Clearly such a universe is insufficient to its own existence and physics has been bogged down in this conceptual cul-de-sac for a century. Physics is attempting to model a planned reality.
A process universe is sufficient to its own existence because reality is self-determining according to no external laws beyond the universal doctrine of causality. All effects must be preceded by a cause. Such self-organising systems are ubiquitous in nature and all share a common feature. They evolve increasingly more complex substructures within themselves over time for the simple reason that they cannot do otherwise. It is these patterns of self-organisation which we as observers interpret as law-derived but this interpretation is false. We are both mistaking the map for the territory and putting des Cartes before des Horse. It is not the laws that make reality, it is reality that makes the laws.
What I'm describing here is simply the correct definition of determinism in naturally occurring systems. Newtonian determinism is linear and non -Newtonian determinism is non-linear.
Correct. An observation is a construct of consciousness which is informed by reality but cannot define it.
cladking wrote:
Reality is the the cause and effect that acts through nature and upon everything in it. It is unknowable and unpredictable.
Correct again. You define reality as a dynamic PROCESS, which to any philosopher should be transparently bloody obvious. However somebody should tell the physicists because this is not the way that physics sees the world. This so-called "science" continues to flounder around aimlessly in its Newtonian confusion trying to model a law-derived reality predicated on the principle of Intelligent Design despite the fact that all the available evidence indicates the opposite. "Shit happens" is the way of a process universe and the only law needed to insure that shit keeps happening is the meta-law of universal causality.
You are as insightful as always.
Science can't seem to come to grips with the fact that it is always and necessarily wrong. Sure, you can isolate variables in experiment to understand forces or processes of nature and these are real enough but any application of this knowledge is necessarily wrong and any extrapolations or models built of it are at best highly incomplete. Unfortunately we see what we know and what we uinderstand quite clearly and the vast bulk of reality which we miss altogether is masked from us by the way we think. We end up with ludicrous ideas like an infinite number of ramps to build an infinte number of pyramids and miss the obvious driver of species change (I can't bring myself to say "evolution").
Causality, reality, and the like were once the bedrock axioms of human science and the metaphysical human language reflected these axioms. Today we argue over cats neither alive nor dead and count the angels which dance on the head of a pin. Needless to say we are missing the big picture and science is becoming bogged down in the very process by which it is supposed to operate. I believe we must reinvent science to run in tandem with another science based in reality and work on the language a might. The world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place as technology catches up with theory and applied science is stuck in the 19th century.
cladking wrote:
Only people who speak modern languages could possibly argue over the nature of reality. I generally agree with most of what everyone has said but I believe most of it is skirting the real issue and that is "reality" is defined by language and modern language doesn't hold anything as being axiomatic other than perception (which is not to be trusted). We build models of reality in our minds and these models are constructed of theory and belief; they are constructed of our understanding of our enviroment and beliefs and we tend to take these models as reality itself.
Our usage of language defines our perception because our knowledge and beliefs are acquired through language. "I think therefore I am" is a truism in our mode of thought but is a false statement in reality. Any discussion of reality necessarily includes definitions and the mode of communication and this is nowhere more true than in describing or naming reality.
It is actually the other way around. The modern paradigm has been that language fits the world directly. In other words, there is an objective view of the world and language describes this objective reality very well. We now know this is incorrect.
cladking wrote:"I think therefore I am" is a truism in our mode of thought but is a false statement in reality.
Yes Yes Yes. Descartes got his pithy aphorism arse-about. "I am therefore I think" is the only correct way to understand the world.
Yes, indeed.
I believe it is language that allows us to have such strange ideas. We only have great knowledge because of language and the ability to pass knowledge from generation to generation through complex language. But modern language gives rise to beliefs because there is nothing solid. We can say anything at all and so long as the syntax and grammar are correct it might look profound. If it doesn't obviously conflict with our estimation of reality it will be seen as being correct.
It is only natural to experience an awe of nature and our knowledge tells us that nature is a reflection of our intelligence, a reflection of understanding. We see only what we know so no two individuals see quite the same thing. We express this awe in a multitude of ways and then actually come to believe that we thought ourselves into existence. Of course the reality is we must learn language to express ourrselves at all and then language colors and distorts the perception.
Curiously ancient people used a different language that distorted the percieved reality a little differently. They believed human progress had no feminine progenitor. They knew that observation was the father of human progress but couldn't see that language was its mother. This was because the logic which supported observation to make human progress was the natural logic of ancient language. The language employed the same natural logic which makes mathematics work.
I believe there probably is some future for science and philosophy in our modern "confused" languages and I doubt they are going to go away. However your observation of modern physics has a lot of validity as does the observation that physics has become divorced from reality and nearly synonymous with math. But it seems obvious to me that we need to reinvent language and to train generalists. We are adrift with no sails and no anchor while storm clouds gather on the horizon.
cladking wrote: (I can't bring myself to say "evolution").
Don't be shy. Evolution towards informational complexity is the fundamental self-organising principle of the universe and the fact that almost nobody in science understands the metaphysical implications of this is regrettable because it means Newton was wrong and our universe is not a created entity. However its deeper metaphysical implications go to the very nature of determinism. It means that our universe is both entirely deterministic at every scale and utterly unpredictable on any scale.
cladking wrote:The world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place as technology catches up with theory and applied science is stuck in the 19th century.
You are too generous. I've been a philosopher of physics all my life and in my opinion the metaphysical underpinning of western science was first shattered by Aquinas and his Platonist bullshit. Descartes, Newton and Bacon then went on to develop this bullshit into a high art form but because it was so successful at modelling observations the bullshit was able to masquerade as truth. Planck, Einstein, Bohr et.al. then tried to do the impossible by putting lipstick on a pig, which was a futile exercise since the entire conceptual paradigm was bogus from the outset. Physics hasn't made a lick of sense ever since and it never bloody well will for as long as it attempts to model reality as a collection of objects moving in space. Reality is no such thing.
Reality is a sequence of events occurring in time which the observer MODELS AS a collection of objects moving in space. The distinction is not a trivial one.
Ginkgo wrote:
It is actually the other way around. The modern paradigm has been that language fits the world directly. In other words, there is an objective view of the world and language describes this objective reality very well. We now know this is incorrect.
I'm not sure of your meaning here.
Obviously I agree that language can't adequately describe objective reality but I believe this applies ONLY to modern human languages which are a mess. Words take their meaning from context so each listener hears a different message. Modern language only fits objective reality to the degree the observer actually understands both the words ands the reality itself. Since most of reality is hidden from us, only broad and general understandings are likely to be reflective of reality. Then when this understanding is communicated to others it will become less cohesive and less accurate.
Ancient language fit the world directly but was difficult to use. It would also seem to have little utility to most people today because of the severe limitations on what could be stated. Most "statements" were actually implications and phraseology was complex. It reflected reality and only what was "known".
The whole point of asking the question (any question in fact) " what is reality" is because you do not know what reality is. This equally appies to the question "what is gjhia" since to you both "reality" and "gjhia" are unknowns you do not know how to differentiate them.
Since, by hypothesis, you do not know the question , what hope have you for comprehending the answer.
This is another way that the axiom of identity gets violated. Dog = cat = cupcake.....
Because they can all be said of them "what is a dog/cat/this" . The "this" being pressuposed an unknown litteraly becomes a variable in the sense that all "this's" are equivalent (all unknowns) and a variable in the sense i am using the term morphs atemporaly between all possible this's that can be placed in the question "what is this".
Without the axiom of identity there cannot be causality .
Re: Moyo from earlier and to whether ideas (or forms) are real:
Formal definitions from logic demonstrate not simply a non-differentiating form. It uses both a genus and species description. This is where you define a concept by what class in belongs to with an additional clause that explains how each defined thing is different from the rest. You assumed non-logically formed definitions for concepts in philosophy.
You assumed that all definitions are simply tautologies. While they are meant to act 'tautological', they are not in error unless the description of the symbol, word, or phrasal used to summarize the idea, thing, or event lacks any new information content.
Thus,
A = B
is just a circular definition (circular). In computer science, this is used to assign to A what the present B stands for. So this tautology is functional. For the "formal" definition used in philosophy, precision requires specifying a symbol, word, or phrase like this:
[Symbol/Word/Phrase/Icon] is a(n) [thing/idea/event belonging to a Genus] that [differentiates by Y between each member].
Example: [A car] is a [transportation tool or device] that [is created by humans to transfer people, places, or things from one location to another efficiently].
So definitions like this is used to reduce the necessity to always speak the whole sentence to the right but ALSO to demonstrate what something is in relation to what is the same of each member [genus] and what is different [species]. There's more to it than this but this is the fundamental way to assure clarity in what one means. It is the semantic meaning of the definition (not the symbol) that is intended to point you to the real meaning. It is the meaning that is real, not the words used to convey them. Nor do all meanings refer to actual reality apart from the mind. But for those, they are still real, but just not appropriately mapped to an external referent (outside your mind).
