Yes, predictably she could. and all those things exist. What is your point?
Nothing.
As for LP. What they are doing is asserting a playing field for LP. The term exists, only includes empirically verifiable thing, by definition.
No supporter of this method is at all worried by your question.
So back to the point - please tell us, EXACTLY what it is that I am supposed to disprove the existence of? Because you seem totally incapable of saying what it is.
Until you manage to do that, and show some evidence that it actually means anything, I do not see what you are so queer about.
Yes, predictably she could. and all those things exist. What is your point?
Nothing.
As for LP. What they are doing is asserting a playing field for LP. The term exists, only includes empirically verifiable thing, by definition.
No supporter of this method is at all worried by your question.
So back to the point - please tell us, EXACTLY what it is that I am supposed to disprove the existence of? Because you seem totally incapable of saying what it is.
Until you manage to do that, and show some evidence that it actually means anything, I do not see what you are so queer about.
This thought is the clinching of the deal. It is in exactly this way that all ‘ghosts’, and deities exist; as thoughts.
Clearly a more rigorous set of standards come into play to establish the external (to the mind) material existence of such things. It is to those things, verified by agreement of such standards that we attribute material existence.
Such cannot be given to ghosts of the mind such as Zeus, and the Great Turtle upon which we all st.
This thought is the clinching of the deal. It is in exactly this way that all ‘ghosts’, and deities exist; as thoughts.
Clearly a more rigorous set of standards come into play to establish the external (to the mind) material existence of such things. It is to those things, verified by agreement of such standards that we attribute material existence.
Such cannot be given to ghosts of the mind such as Zeus, and the Great Turtle upon which we all sit.
No. They aren’t. And that is what you seem to be missing.
Definitions are not objective things to be discovered laying around. They are created, invented for the purpose of thought. They are the foundation of thought chosen to be a foundation for an inherent ontology. They are then compared to experienced apparent reality merely to discover if they are useful. If they are found to be of no good use, they are discarded and new concepts and definitions are chosen. Definitions are never objectively right nor wrong.
Within my own thesis, I declare the concepts and definitions for the thesis (or ontology). In your thesis, you are free to choose otherwise. Neither is wrong because they are subjective to the thesis at hand. In the population there is a “common thesis” using “common concepts and definitions”. Those are neither right or wrong either, merely useful (rational) or not.
Concepts and their definitions are never objectively right or wrong. They either fit into the thesis being considered (the ontology) or they don’t. Choosing a different ontology brings new concepts and their definitions, again not capable of being right or wrong. Mixing various ontologies bring serious errors because the concepts of one do not belong in the other. That would be the same as mixing languages and then declaring that one, if not both, of the languages is objectively wrong. It is a matter of choice of the structure of the truth-map one wishes to build upon.
I don’t agree with your theory of affect in principle, but I’m a monist, so in practice I do. I think your theory works better as a theory of substance rather than materialism. Things cut from the same substance ought to have the potential to affect each other (this goes back to Spinoza I believe). But to keep us from talking about almost anything, I think the term “material” ought to be limited: it should denote matter, or if you want a more liberal scope, it should denote occupation in space. Therefore, the immaterial is that which does not occupy a position or volume in space–but it may be on a continuum with the same substance of which matter is an instance.
This is where we get my brand of monism: I’ll just come out and say that I’m an idealist who believes in the existence of matter. Matter is an instance–a real instance–of mind. But you might understand why I say the term “material” ought to be limited: if mind is cut from the same cloth as matter, then so are thoughts, emotions, visualizations, memories, etc., and moreover, if you understand my theory of projection, so are truths, moral right and wrong, essences, time itself, etc. for these are all projections of mental experiences. You see, when I talk about projection, I mean something very specific. What I mean is, what I think, is that “realness”, if we could for the sake of argument consider it a “something” that resides in all existent things as that which makes them so, is what’s at the heart of consciousness, and is what makes consciousness the reality-experiencing thing that it is. It’s sole function seems to be to experience, or know, reality primarily because it contains reality within it. What this means is that a quale like color, or coldness, or loudness, is never actually experienced as “mental”, but as the real things they seem to be–properties of objects or events. They feel real precisely because the experience of them contains their realness. Their feeling real in this way–in contrast to “mental”–is what I mean by the “projection” of mind–it is mind becoming its own reality.
This is why I call myself an idealist who believes in the real existence of matter–matter is just the projection of sensory perception. But if I’m granted that, then I must also be granted the reality of what thought and emotion project as: truth and value, or fact and right and wrong (there are a number of different spins one can put on this, but I like these). Of course, these are “real” in their own way–sometimes the description “seeming independence” is more apt–certainly not as an object occupying some position or volume in space–and therein lies my reluctance to call them material. Is truth “matter”? Is morality? Is beauty? Yet they are cut from the same mental cloth according to my theory of projection. What are the Platonic forms but the essences of things projecting from our concepts of them?
This is my immaterialism–not a separate substance from that underlying matter but definitely more comprehensive than what the term “matter” usually denotes.
All that notwithstand, the challenge of this thread would not be overcome merely by disproving my theory, for I’ve only given you one example of what might count as immaterial. You’d have to disprove every possible theory of immaterialism before you get the trophy.
You’d predict my 6 year old daughter could find, get access to, and run a particle accelerator so as to smash a proton into its two up quarks and one down quark, know where to find the results, and interpret them properly? Glad you’re not a weather man.
My point is that of course your right in principle, but that’s such a vacuous claim when it’s so obviously not true in practice.
Then you must not be a logical positivist.
Well, you can pick any of the examples I gave to James, or the definition I suggested to Ucci. I’d recommend focusing on the latter as that would be more encompassing of what I mean by “immaterial”.
Constructs and concepts manifestly do NOT exist only as mechanical operations in the brain. If the concept ‘four’ was a mechanical operation in the brain, then the inevitable conclusion would be that there are as many different ‘four’ concepts are there are brains. While this may be appealing to a certain kind of post-modernist, it would render all mathematical statements meaningless. “4+4 =8” is not a statement about brain cells; indeed, we were perfectly capable of understanding the meaning of such statements before we knew there were any such things as brain cells. If there were a myriad number (lol) of ‘four’ concepts, in the sense that there are a myriad number of brains, then a statement like 4+4=6 could not be said to be incorrect; your concept of ‘four’ is such that 4 doubled is 8, my concept is 4 is such that four doubled is 6, and that’s the end of it. You might say “Ah, well in that case, when you say 4 and I say 4 we are not talking about the same thing”, and that is precisely correct- but the issue is that if number concepts are brain activity and nothing more, there is no possible ‘same thing’ for us to be talking about even if we wanted to be.
You and I are able to talk about the same dog precisely because the dog exists over there, outside of both of our brains- there is one dog and we perceive it. In order for ‘four’ to have a common referent between us, it must be that it exists independently of us…and it is not material.
It seems to me that physical laws demonstrate a bond between matter and numbers strong enough that one is as real as the other.
----It seems that physical laws demonstrate a bond strong enough that one is as real as the other—
It seems, meaning the representation, the symbol exists the same way as what is being symbolized. The object and it’s re presentation are conflated and is perceived as one. The object cannot exist without it’s re presentation…But it’s more like, the object can not be thought of, without it’s re-presentation. The thought of the object and the object , is differnt from the objdt and it’s preception, hence the paradox consists of mixing precption with thought of. Although thought is conditional upon preception, thought can not contain it. Threfore the existential becomes conditional upon the existent, which is the phenomenological precedent. The use of the term ‘exist’ creates the paradox.
To give an example, if we include the symbol ‘exist’ within existence it’s self, we de-differentiate one from the other. Existence become the desribed + the desription + the objets being desribed. This is the classic reduction into the existential predicate, and what exists can only be answered by : what exists. And at this point the only certainty there is what esists is what is perceived. Nothing else can be said.
esse est percipii. Immaterial things at this point cannot be differentiated from material things, there is no difference, they are both manifestations of the existential conditional. It is not just the way ‘existence’ is used , but also, the way the use is derived. Connotation and derivation have the same relative reltionship . This is the bond You are talking about, i think, but i may be wrong.
I chose numbers for a reason. The object is different from it's representation. In the case of numbers, the representation is the thing in the mind, the thing you connect to the brain. The object itself is the number concept, which is immaterial and not located in a brain or brains.
If you want to say that in the case of numbers there is both a representation and a thing represented, [i]then one or the other of them[/i] is immaterial, and thusly materialism is refuted, unless you want to show me the material thing that is the number six, and the other material things that are the representations of it. Otherwise, numbers are representations without a thing being represented, or discrete things in themselves that are not represented, and either way math is nonsense.
Numbers are different from other alleged immaterial things because their interrelations are taken to be absolute laws. You just can’t credibly say “Oh, four is whatever you perceive it to be” like a person might with color or justice or what have you.
If you approach things as a phenomenonologist, of course the material and immaterial are no different. But I can make no sense of a phenomenologist who at the same time says that concepts and sensations are first and foremost mechanical processes; this is the thing you said that I disagree with, and now I find you saying that existence is perception. I think you have to make up your mind; if you want to say everything is an impression, and all impressions are mechanical processes in the brain, then sooner or later somebody is going to ask you 'what about our impressions of mechanical processes in the brain' and you'll be faced with the prospect that you aren't actually saying anything at all.
LPs would not disagree that ideas exist, though they have no empirical existence as such. The poster has not recognised this subtlety, nor has he supported his view with any evidence.
Ideas have no empirical existence. I’m not going to bother to go down that road. It’s pointless.
If you want to get serious about this topic, you will have to define what you mean by “EXIST”.
If some LPs restrict their DEFINITION of exist to empirically verifiable things, then we are having a semantic argument, and not the one you seem to want.
Moreover, given that definition; they are correct. This is a perfect circular argument.
I don’t want it. As I said already, I’m not a logical positivist.
Yeah, but they seem to want more than just to customize their own definition of existence and thereby explain out of existence unverifiable things. They want to say their definition is the only valid one–either that or they’re equivocating.
Either a logical positivist thinks ideas are physical processes in the brain in which case they do have empirical existence/verification, or else they think an idea is something else and they aren't materialists.
In reality, positivists admit to the existence of both things demonstrated by empiricism AND things demonstrated through analytic truth relations- i.e. what can be concluded with deductive certainty. That second part of what LP's believe is so non-controversial (that is, everybody everywhere believes in the truth of what can be demonstrated through analytic certainty), that empirical verification being required for existential claims is what everybody focuses on- it's what makes a positivist a positivist.
No, they are not. They are defining what existence is, and supporting that with a methodology. agree with it or not that is the beauty of LP. It’s called rigour.
Sadly this is the sort of rigour that is absent from your OP. You need to do more that off this “have objective reality or being.” as a definition. How do you see “objectivity”?
