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Author | Topic: My problem with evolution | |||||||||||||||||||||||
robinrohan Inactive Member |
If you look in the encyclopedia, John, you will notice that Kant's philosophy is called "transcendental idealism." It's just another form of idealism.
[This message has been edited by robinrohan, 11-21-2002]
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
You are right, Obsidian. There is no monitor in the brain. It is purely a receiver and storer. Nonetheless we do have an inner monitor. It's the mind. Which means that there's a difference between the mind and the brain even though the mind can not exist without the brain (presumably.)
Those images we form when we imagine are purely mental. They exist in time but not in space. The pattern of electrical impulses in the cortex produces them, but they are not identical to them--in the same way that digitized photo information is not identical to the picture on the monitor.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
Ok, how about this:
I. Idealism1a. Plato 1b. Kant 1c. Hinduism II Dualism2a. Descartes 2b. Christianity 2c. Islam III Materialism3a. Obsidian 3b. Quextal 3c. Bertrand Russell [This message has been edited by robinrohan, 11-21-2002]
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
Platonic forms are ideas in the mind of God. Mental or spiritual, whatever you prefer. These forms are not constructs but "essences." They are eternal and immutable. That's all I know about it.
I ignored Hume because Hume had no metaphysical philosophy. Hume studied epistemology, not metaphysics. Kantphenomena--mental; noumena--God knows what. You said that the word "atom" has different meanings for Ancient Greeks and moderns. No doubt. But not totally different. That's why we moderns took the name. They are little bitty something-or-others that make up the world of matter. Both Greeks and moderns believe that. I like lumping and you like splitting. Both are necessary. [This message has been edited by robinrohan, 11-21-2002]
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
I know exactly what you are talking about in regard to thinking in images. There's a sort of proto-thought that begins to emerge that is a vague area of possibilities until a name is atteched to it. More like a pregnant feeling than a thought. But we never really know what we think until we see what we say.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
John, "God knows what" is nothing at all. It just means that we don't know what it is. You could hardly call that an "alternative."
I think what this is all about is that you just hate pinning something down and having something to say--you want the possibility of that other no-name reality being out there somewhere possibly. Fine. Maybe there is something out there beyond these possibilites that we don't know anything about. But so what? We have to go on what we know now. And all we know is that the traditional metaphysical philosophies can be boiled down to 3. If you want to add a forth and call that "God knows what," go ahead. Are there differences in detail between the various idealistic philosophers?--of course there are. I wasn't talking about details--I was talking about what they had in common. Here's something that all idealists have in common--they think that the physical world is--in some sense or other--an illusion. Kant calls it "phenomena"; Plato called it an imperfect copy of the ideal; the Hindus call it "maya" (a veil). Surely you can see that all these philosophies have something in common, and that's why they are all idealists. [This message has been edited by robinrohan, 11-22-2002]
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
John, how all this started was that I very innocently (I thought) named the 3 traditional metaphysical beliefs (it's not like I made this up), and you jumped on me like I had committed a sin against the holy ghost of Hume. And then you started telling me that I can't submit a paper to the graduate department of philosophy and that I am ignorant of the detailed arguments of these philosophers and that I am equivocating and so forth. Well, I would agree with the submitting of the paper, and I probably don't know a whole lot about some of these philosophers you mention--it's not like I am expert or anything--but I will stick by my small gun here and claim that your method of argument is much worse than mine and that you have yet to provide evidence of a 4th alternative to mind, matter, or both.
[This message has been edited by robinrohan, 11-22-2002]
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
John:
idealism--the belief that the ultimate reality is mental or spiritual. Platonic Forms---the ultimate, unchangable reality. These forms are mental or spiritual. Physical objects are imperfect copies of these essences. A physical chair, for example, is an imperfect copy of Chair-ness (a Platonic Form). Since these forms are mental or spiritual and are the ultimate reality, Platonism is a form of idealism. Now, John, without engaging in insults about my ignorance, explain to me how I am wrong in the above assertions so I can learn something.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
What did the encyclopedia say the Form was? You just quoted what it was not. Just curious.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
Quetzal, to critique my own idea: I seem to be speaking as though there was this "I" who was inside my "mind" as in a movie theatre looking at a screen where there is a pictorial image. I seem to have added something additional here: "me," "my mind", and the brain. That is clearly a confusion of thought on my part.
But I'm beginning to think that pinning down the physical nature of a "mental" image involves us in an infinite regress. We have an illusion of an illusion of an illusion . . .
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
I think there are degrees of fuzziness, and that "mentality" and "physicality," though problematic, are a lot less fuzzy than Platonic forms. The reason is obvious. We have experience or apparent experience with mentality and physicality, but I have no conscious experience, real or apparent, with the world of Forms.
I still think your objection is a quibble.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
My apologies for the generalization. I was annoyed that it was impossible to "argue" with them and I was annoyed by their notions of a "conspiracy." But that was not on this forum.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
I'm not quite sure that what philosophy talks about and what science talks about is the same thing. Science is limited to the physical. Philosophy is more ambitious and for that reason unsuccessful.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
John,It may seem obvious to you that we have experience of perception alone (whatever that means), but that is an assumption. Don't expect everybody else to have your assumptions.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
Rationalist, that's all very well but I have yet to be convinced that the mental can be reduced to the physical.
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