The next installment of the never-ending argument:
“additionally, if it is true that empirical properties have inherent meaning, then it is not true that metaphysical theories cannot be tested by empirical measurement. The argument runs in circles: You assert that metaphysical theories are not empirical, and then you use this to further assert that the opposite theory is self-refuting, because it cannot be tested empirically, which is due to the first assertion. So your whole argument amounts to just a plain denial of the other guy’s axiom.”
Not so. You are mistaking my conclusion for my axiom here. I take it as an axiom that the word “empirical” means “depending upon experience or observation alone.” Observation involves the five senses and what can be deduced from them. I take it as granted that no observation can support anything other than contingent and conditional truths.
Example: we can say the sun rose yesterday, but to say the sun will rise tomorrow, whatever else it may be, is not an empirically proven truth. It is not an absolute statement, true under all times, conditions, places circumstances. It requires no great imagination to picture a tide locked world of the remote future when rotation has stopped, and the sun will not rise. Such a counter-factual is possible.
Metaphysical statements are those which concern the subject matter of first principles necessary to other disciplines, such as the first principles of physics or epistemology. This is the definition: whether there are any members of the set or no remains to be seen.
The statement “all knowledge whatsoever is empirical; there is no non-empirical knowledge” is a universal statement, an absolute statement.
An absolute statement is (or alleges to be) true under all places, conditions and circumstances.
Certain things follow from this: In this case, if knowledge is empirical and no non-empirical sources of knowledge exist, it is meaningless to say that non-empirical knowledge existed in prehistory, or beyond the moon, or some sphere orbiting Achernar.
If the statement is true, it must be true everywhere and for all rational beings, because it is a statement about the nature of knowledge, not a statement about the biological sense apparatus of humans versus Martians, or the brain structure of men versus elves. Even if Martians were mind-readers the knowledge entering their brains could not be non-empirical knowledge: their mind-reading antennae (or whatever) would merely be another organ of sensation like earthly eyeballs.
If the statement is true, no counter-factual is possible. If no counter-factual is possible, the attempt to describe the nature of knowledge in any non-empirical terms is and must be nonsense, something that exists in words only, but which, upon examination is an incoherent or illogical description. If no counter-factual is possible, then trying to imagine a universe where other forms or other sources of knowledge existed would be as impossible as imagining a universe where twice two was not four, or “A is A” were false.
So, by definition, metaphysical statements are universal and absolute. True everywhere and always, no matter what our senses say. Empirical statements are contingent and conditional. True here and now, and only because our sense do not yet show us any exceptions or variation.
So, then: if the statement “all knowledge whatsoever is empirical” were an empirical conclusion from sense data, a skeptic could be shown the sense data. The skeptic could look through a telescope at “knowledge” or loft it in his hand, and see its visible and or feel its tangible properties. And if one of the properties were “Always empirical” the skeptic could see and feel that as well.
But if the statement “all knowledge whatsoever is empirical” were a metaphysical deduction from first principles, such as, for example, a deduction from the axiom that truth is a correspondence between sense impressions and sense data, then only a metaphysical argument could convince a skeptic of its truth.
At this point, I merely call upon you to observe which sort of argument convinced you, or anyone, of the statement. Since an empirical argument in favor of a metaphysical ergo universal proposition is impossible by definition, the argument must be metaphysical.
There is no circularity in my argument. It consists of two definitions and an invitation that you see which definition fits the subject matter.
The only room for argument is that I have wrongly defined the statement as falling under an empirical definition. In that case, all that need be shown is the empirical proof of the statement, and not an argument from first principles.
I challenge you or anyone to show me empirical proof that no non-empirical source of knowledge exists for Martians of the year Two Billion AD. Produce the telescope that sees the abstract nature of knowledge rather than objects lit with light, and I will bend my eye to the lens and look through it.
Another option is to amend the statement and make it properly empirical, such as by saying you yourself have never seen any non-empirical knowledge so far in your life; that you do not know good from evil or fair from foul or logical from illogical. This statement would be easier to defend, since it is not an absolute statement, but it involves the argument in additional difficulties.
You define a metaphysical statement as “which concerns the subject matter of first principles necessary to other disciplines, such as the first principles of physics or epistemology.”
And you indentify the metaphysical statement to an “absolute” statement such as A=A.
That is, a logical truth.
But are all metaphysical statements logical truths?
Or does the set of metaphysical statements include sub-sets, one for logical or arithmatic statements, one for epistemological first principles and one for first principles of physical sciences etc etc.
Now the logical truths are necessary but does it mean that all other non-logical metaphysical true statements are also necessary?
The metaphysical statement “A thing that is changed is changed by another”, is it necessary?
Some philosophers distinguish narrowly-logical (NL) necessary statements and boradly-logical (BL) necessary statements. An example is given:
A statement “A plane figure can be round and not-round at the same time” is NL-impossible as it violates the law of non-contradiction.
A statement “A plane figure can be round and square at the same time” is BL-impossible since it requires a “supplementary premise, the necessary truth grounded in the meanings of ’round’ and ‘square’ that nothing that is round is square”
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2012/04/logical-versus-metaphysical-modality.html
“It is not excluded from the realm of the possible by logic alone, which is purely formal, but by logic plus a ‘material’ truth, namely the necessary truth just mentioned.”
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There may be something in the distinction but I am not fully convinced as perhaps one can define “round” and “square” by logic alone?
Logic is a separate discipline. Logic rests on metaphysical axioms, such as the persistence of identity, or the validity of symbols, much the same way Physics rests on metaphysical axioms, such as the universality of Natural Laws, or the ability of the five senses to perceive real things.
I am not sure what you mean by ‘sub-sets.’ Metaphysics is the study of axiomatic truths, those things that must be true in order for any other disciplines or areas of thought to be true.
I don’t understand the question, nor the example that follows it. In Metaphysics as well as in any discipline of thought, one must define one’s terms. Argument about whether round things can be square is the type of frivolous word-game which has brought philosophy in the modern age into well deserved disrepute. The distinction between things that are narrowly impossible, impossible in this universe, and broadly impossible, impossible in this or any possible universe, is a useful one. Metaphysics is concerned with the the second category.
“Metaphysics is the study of axiomatic truths, those things that must be true in order for any other disciplines or areas of thought to be true.”
Are axiomatic truths themselves controversial? Or are they sufficiently self-evident as to be universally acceptable?
“I take determinism versus indeterminism to be a metaphysical issue”
Do you mean determinism in the sense of physics?. Then isn’t it the physics that settles whether the universe is determinstic or not?
” Physics rests on metaphysical axioms, such as the universality of Natural Laws”
In what sense do you mean ” universality ” and “Natural Laws”?.
Ancients assumed different laws to apply above the sphere of moon and below it. The concept of Natural Law itself is hardly self-evident and a product of a lot of observations, starting from astronomical observations thousands of years ago.
This is not a serious question. Of course they are controversial.
Nothing is sufficiently self-evident that some philosopher at some point has not argued the opposite. The set of propositions that are universally acceptable is an empty set.
No, I mean ‘determinism’ here to refer to the metaphysical doctrine that because no actions arise without a mechanical cause, no men have free will.
What? I think you have that backward. It is the doctrine that all physical motions of inanimate objects are determined which makes physics possible or imaginable.
With apologies to Bell and Heisenberg, reality is and must be deterministic, or otherwise their is no physics imaginable or possible, for physics is the study of mechanical causes and effects. Being physicists rather than philosophers, and having the misfortune to be raised during a particularly backward and arrogant Dark Age which rejected all philosophy, these learned scientists mistook a fundamentally epistemological limitation on the knowledge we can acquire about the mass and location of small particles, and leapt awkwardly to an unsupportable metaphysical conclusion that cause and effect depend on the observer, and do not exist when not observed. They make the self contradictory assertion that noncausality exists as probability, as if cause could be disconnected from effect in nine trials out of ten, but exist in the tenth of ten. The idea is logically incoherent.
Einstein was right about this one: God does not play at dice, for if He did, then there is no physics whatsoever, not even astronomy, not even ballistics.
I mean it in the exact sense you use the term. The concept of Natural Law is the axioms or assumption that the same laws apply to superlunar as to sublunar motions. You are correct that in no sense is this concept self-evident. You are mistake in calling it the product of observation: it is a metaphysical postulate, an assumption, an axiom, and one which Aristotle and the pre-Newtonian ancients did not share.
I realize that many people use the term “self-evident” to mean “obvious” but that it not the sense in which I am using this term here and above. I mean it technically: a statement that needs no other proof aside from itself as evidence for the proof of its proposition. Metaphysical axioms are “self evident” only in the limited and technical sense that anyone who already accepts the validity and reality of the sciences and disciplines resting on those axioms must accept those axioms, or else reject the science as valid.
In defense of the gentlemen named, their physics has been widely mis-interpreted, but they themselves did not, to my knowledge, make such claims.
I am quibbling partly in jest, but I wonder if that sentence itself may be an exception. In which case, of course, it would be false, meaning that the one thing everyone can agree on is actually a falsehood. There is some sort of commentary on humanity in that, but I’m not sure what it is.
The jest is an amusing one, because if someone disagreed with my statement that nothing is universally agreed, he would, by disagreeing, prove my point.
Most of the arguments I entertain actually are like this: materialists who make not one single reference to any material fact of any specific time and space in their whole body of argument, but who stick to strictly abstract and metaphysical grounds, or determinists trying their hardest to persuade my judgment that neither judgment nor persuasion exists.
At times, I think the whole of modern philosophy is merely pointing out simple self contradictions in amateur metaphysics. This is what happens when a civilization slides into barbarism: metaphysics is the first thing to go.
An even more important precondition is that of locality. You certainly can’t have workable physics in a universe where the causes are unable to communicate with their effects.
So now you have a metaphysical presupposition of local determinism. Locality and determinism… What could possibly go wrong with that?
The error here is that the modern physicists, being good empiricists, wisely refuse to model anything their theory tells them is beyond the reach of the senses. It is only the conclusion that the unseen is non-existent which I doubt, and only because it undercuts the very root of the whole discipline of physics.
Careful would physicists take pains not the reach to this conclusion, even if they must phrase things in lawyerly circumlocutions. You see, a probability cannot “cause” anything: probability is a description of the state of the observers knowledge (he does not know the precise causes, but does know the range of various outcomes). The empiricist, in order to be consistent, attributes this uncertainty to the particles being examined, rather than positing an unknown (and in theory an unknowable) cause.
When and if Quantum Mechanics and Relativity are reconciled, we may have an easier time philosophically of restoring metaphysics to her proper place as the queen of philosophical disciplines.
There certainly are a couple of physicists alive who can make the difference between philosophy and physics.
There is no incompatibility between any science and philosophy because their respective objects and methods do not overlap. Some physicists certainly know and respect that.
Such scientists who know about philosophy are also certainly aware that philosophy has nothing to say about competing theories in physics, except in the very unlikely case where physicists’ conclusions would clash with philosophy axioms or conclusions.
I don’t quite see how your comments relate to mine; perhaps they are a response to some other commentator?
I mention that local causation is a metaphysical assumption and quote both the illustrious Sir Isaac Newton and the esteemed Albert Einstein to that effect and you respond…well, it seems as if you are affirming the existence of “hidden variables” in quantum theory. Which seems a bit off topic, to me.
Up to that point, I was in fairly complete agreement with you, although I am not so philosophically learned as you. Physics is indeed underpinned by the metaphysics of cause and effect. Furthermore, causation is local. If C causes A, but C is distant from A then, there must be some intermediary; C affects B locally and B affects A (again, locally). To deny this is ” so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.” It is to accept ” spooky actions at a distance.”
But what is Cause and Effect? Hume reduces it to a mere succession in time which we expect to continue. But we need more. We need contingency. We need to believe that if C (or some other cause of A) did not happen, then A would not happen. We need to be able to imagine that C might or might not happen. Otherwise, we just have a long succession of events, but no contingency. So the very notion of Cause and Effect requires that the chain of effects begins with some initial cause, which is just given, and not determined by physical laws. The data that specify conditions at the Big Bang, are an example of this. Physics requires us to have what are called boundary condition, conditions which start a chain of causation.
As you have noted, we use probability to handle data of which we are ignorant, i.e. data that contain information. So, when we discuss the remarkably low entropy at the Big Bang, we are using probability concepts. Any chain of physical causation starts with information not previously known. Any discussion of such information, requires probability concepts.
There is just one small loose end. Whether all the information specifying our universe originated at the Big Bang, or whether new causal chains can occur, is not really a metaphysical issue. It is an empirical question which can be answered by considering every Aspect. Experiment!
“It is the doctrine that all physical motions of inanimate objects are determined which makes physics possible or imaginable. ”
“‘determinism’ here to refer to the metaphysical doctrine that because no actions arise without a mechanical cause, no men have free will.”
Questions:
1) By “mechanical cause” do you mean in contrast to a “logical cause”?
2) Couldn’t there be mechanical or physical causes that were not computable?
3) Are the motions of “animate” objects undetermined? Or is it that only the Acts of Rational Thinking that are strictly outside the physical causation?
This is the position that CS Lewis takes in Miracles. For him, the Acts of Reason alone are supernatural as they are physically uncaused. And the Acts of Reason causes physical effects. He claims that the Acts of Reason cause the physical arrangements in the brain to be otherwise.
All other motions, of humans, of animals and plants are physically determined.
IS that your position too?
4) One possible complication here could be the different conception of “Matter” as understood by pre-moderns and as in the Modern Physics. In modern physics, “matter” means anything computable.
The electromagnetic field, the quantum probabilities are invisible but are “matter” since computations can be done with them.
I would say that the Things Have Causes has to be the fundamental metaphysical principle behind physics.
That the sun rises everyday has a cause and if sun fails to rise tomorrow, it will also have a cause.
The existence of causes and not merely correlations, this is what gives rise of ‘natures’.
CS Lewis says in Miracles that
“The assumption that things which have been conjoined in the past will always
been conjoined in the future is the guiding principle not of the rational but of animal behaviour.
I agree. This is not the only axiom of physics, but it is one of them, and a main one.
It exasperates me to hear blockheads of the modern sort, with their modern bigotry against metaphysics, trying dimly to make this an empirical deduction or induction, a theory rather than an axiom which must be assumed before any theories can be entertained. It is as if modern thinkers neither think nor read. The great books of antiquity are more easily available now than ever before in history: anyone with a computer or even a modern pocket-phone can read them. The modern man carries the libraries of the world in his pocked. And yet the modern thinkers make easily-corrected mistakes a sophomore of modest intelligence who read these books could avoid. I am at a loss to explain it.
As I understand it, metaphysics is the study of being as such.
There are three degrees of abstraction, shown schematically here:
http://lh4.ggpht.com/_uGeuv7vYTQE/Su40S8jStDI/AAAAAAAAAYI/AQR_nJ8aNo0/s800/3Abstraction_sm.jpg
o The a axis classifies disciplines by whether their objects can exist without matter.
o The b axis classifies disciplines by whether their objects can be conceived without matter.
In more detail [and with my interpolations]:
So while the Physics is concerned with sensible being, the Meta-Physics is concerned with being as being. On the scale running from metaphysics to the philosophy of nature to empirical science we would say that
a) Empirical science is concerned with sensible being.
b) The philosophy of nature is concerned with sensible being.
c) Metaphysics is concerned with being.
Empirical science must take existence (being) as given, and can no more explain it that Euclidean geometry can explain the postulates of Euclidean geometry, or biology can explain life. This is not easy, since empirical sense impressions and the resultant imagination can overwhelm the abstractions of the intellect with a tsunami of particulars.
A more complex schema is shown here:
http://lh6.ggpht.com/_uGeuv7vYTQE/Su40cOqXwWI/AAAAAAAAAZI/B2fDMgaZqPo/s800/Maritain3Abstraction.jpg
I had thought the study of being as such was called ontology. But even so, I think the definition you give of metaphysics as being highly abstract properties and my definition as an examination of axioms amounts to the same thing, at least in every case I can bring to mind.
I take determinism versus indeterminism to be a metaphysical issue, or whether reality is real versus unreal, whether being and essence and accidents exist, whether words have meaning, whether cause and effect exists, and whether the manipulation of symbols through logic reflects reality.
Since these axiomatic questions deal with fundamentals of existence, I cannot think of a metaphysical argument not concerned with the ultimate foundations of being. In other words, I claim our two definitions are two ways of saying the same thing, because all arguments about “the axioms of reality” are arguments about “being as such”.
As a side note, we humans do have more than five senses. In addition to the Aristotelian list, you can add proprioception (sense of self in space) and equilibrioception (sense of balance), along with others.
If you wish to use the word “senses” in a fashion that is nonstandard, you may do so. But if I were to claim that we had six senses, smell, touch, sight, hearing, tasting salt and tasting other flavors, you might look at me askance. Proprioception and other internal sensations are generally considered to be part of ‘touch’, but the argument could be made that these involve distinct organs of sensation and convey distinction information. Be that as it may, I am not interested in definitional arguments, and I am certainly not going to change unambiguous expressions (“five senses”) for ambiguous ones (“seven senses”) in pursuit of an illusory precision of expression.
That’s the first I’ve ever heard of our sense of balance being considered “touch”. Even when I was in elementary school and learning about them, the teacher indicated the five “classical” senses, and indicated that the sense of balance was a sixth sense. I seem to recall encountering the same thing in various science-oriented books I read through my youth. (Proprioception, possibly because of its long name, was neglected).
You could just say “the senses” or “our senses”, which in addition to having five less characters, also means that you’re not shackled to Aristotelian definitions.
(That was a joke, perhaps a bad attempt at one).
I’ll drop the semantics argument. Though if you were to claim that the five (currently-identified) taste buds were actually four and localized to portions of the tongue, then I’d have something more to say.
(I also have to comment on something, what with all this boring (at least, to me) argument going on about whether or not Platonic ideals exist)
As I say, you are free to use nonstandard phrases and word howsoever you please. I will not debate semantics.
Well, as soon as time permits, I try to write something interesting about the Catwoman in the latest Batman movie, or post pictures from old pulp magazines or something. I admit I am also bored by the Platonic argument, since there seems to be no new argument to be made, and no champions against whose escutcheon it is worthy to break my warlike spear. wrf3 was a bad joke; Dr Andreassen seems not to be able to parry my simplest objections, the very first ones for which a materialist should have a ready answer.
Quite so. Now I ask you to consider, for the sake of argument, the hypothesis that this is not true, and see if we can derive a contradiction. In particular, consider what would happen if atoms had intrinsic meaning. Then we could observe that meaning directly, and might find the atom whose meaning was “atoms have meaning”. I am not asking you to accept this as truth, but merely to acknowledge that it is not self-refuting; it describes a possible world, one without any logical contradiction.
This seems to assume that we have perfect introspective access to our own mental processes. When I move my fingers across the keyboard I am not conscious of ordering them to “go three millimeters left, two up, rotate the knuckle 0.01 radian around such-and-such an axis of rotation”; nevertheless, signals are travelling down my nerves that must have such an interpretation. Likewise, if the atoms of your brain had intrinsic meaning, would you be able to distinguish between the two kinds of argument by pure introspection? In this hypothesis there is no difference between the metaphysical argument, and moving the atoms of your brain into the position that has the intrinsic meaning of that argument. There’s no need for you to perceive the weight or the position of the atoms; you are perceiving their meaning, which by hypothesis is an empirical quality.
Again, I don’t ask that you accept this as truth, but as a coherent account which does not contradict itself.
I don’t understand what you mean by ‘intrinsic meaning’. This would seem to imply a symbol with no symbol-to-object relationship.
I propose that a symbol can be true to the material object it pretends to portray, or false, or unfair, or inaccurate. But a object cannot be unfair or false to an object. Objects are not “about” anything.
The terms ‘true’ and ‘false’ describe some possible relations between object and the symbols allegedly representing them. ‘Valid’ and ‘invalid’ represent some possible relations between one group of symbols (an axiomatic statement) and another (a conclusion). ‘Useful’ and ‘useless’ represent some possible relations between symbols (such as hortatory speech) and intentions of the human will. ‘Fair’ and ‘unfair’ represent possible relations between symbols useful for purposes whose vice or virtue we judge. Hence, certain statements can be unfair or illogical libel, but no stone nor stick nor atom in my brain can be slanderous. Only things that “represent” things can be symbols, and only symbols have symbolic properties such as truth or slander.
Properties of this kind are nonphysical because no physical measurement of a physical magnitude has anything to do with any of them. I suppose that a certain small class of self referential statements such as “this sentence is written on a brick wall” would be true when written on a brick wall, but written here on a computer screen is false. But aside from that, sentences like “twice two is four” and “murder is the unlawful killing of a human being without mitigation, justification, or excuse” and “In chess, bishops move diagonally” are just as true or untrue no matter who thinks them or who speaks them. We can speak about the relation between the sentence and the abstraction to which the sentence refers. We can talk about whether the sentence is true or false. But we cannot talk about whether a four pound brick is true or false. We can only talk about its physical properties, whether it is four pounds or five.
So you are asking me to imagine that some physical object might contain a nonphysical property like “slander”. All I can imagine is that the physical object would have non-physical properties in addition to its physical properties. If you ask me to imagine that nonphysical properties are physical, I simply cannot. It is a contradiction in terms.
If you are asking whether material objects can also have nonmaterial properties like symbolic properties, I would yes, no doubt they can: but they are nonmaterial properties. If you are asking whether nonmaterial properties can be material, I admit I cannot imagine it even in a hypothetical.
If your hypothetical were true, then the statement which I think in my brain “this sentence is true because it weighs four pounds” can be true because of and only because of the physical properties of the sentence, such as, for example, that it weighs four pounds. But if we added another pound to it, such as by thinking it in all caps, it would weigh fives pound and therefore be false. Therefore it would refute itself. Therefore if the truth value of any sentence were a material property, it could not be a true sentence. This includes the sentence that says truth value can be a material property.
As for the rest, I admit to being rather annoyed that if I ask you a simple question “Can you tell the difference between an empirical and a metaphysical proof? Did you look through a telescope to see whether the statement ‘All knowledge is empirical’ is true in the same way that you look with your eye at an apple on your desk to see whether the statement ‘this apple is red’ is true? Or is the statement a conclusion of philosophical reasoning in the abstract?” that your answer is that a superhuman knowledge of the location of every atom of your brain is needed before you answer.
I have been burned by you before. If you are not going to be sober or honest, let us retire the argument now.
Such delicate knowledge of where your brain atoms are is not necessary for you or anyone to be able to tell the difference between looking at apples and deducing abstract universals from the nature of being.
No matter how or where my brain atoms are, my brain can still tell the difference between an absolute statement “All knowledge is empirical” and a conditional statement “The apple I currently see on my desk, unless my eyes are deceiving me, in this light, is red.”
My brain can still tell that all empirical statements are conditional because no sense impression is omniscient.
My brain can still tell that if all empirical statements are conditional because no sense impression is omniscient, that the statement “all knowledge is empirical” being non-conditional, is not an empirical statement, hence, by its own terms, false.
It is true I cannot account for every electron in my calculator, but I do not need to know where every electron in my calculator lives to see that twice two is four.
I mean that a collection of atoms might have a meaning that was not arbitrary. That is, the meaning would not be according to a code agreed upon by humans, but would be inherent in the atoms themselves, and discoverable equally by humans or by energy beings of the five hundred twenty-second galactic year, in the same sense that momentum is discoverable and inherent. Nor could the physical properties of the atoms be changed without changing the meaning; nor could that particular arrangement of atoms refer to any other meaning, except in the sense of an arranged code, which would not be discoverable in the same sense. (That is, if I found a collection of atoms whose meaning was justice, I could arrange with you that, for purposes of keeping our military communications secret, ‘justice’ should be read as ‘brigades’; but the energy beings of the distant future, not privy to our private code, would only be able to read the atoms as meaning justice.) One might think of this as a code built into the fabric of the universe, and unchangeable without changing the laws of physics.
There is much else in your post, but I see that your interest for the discussion is flagging, so I will avoid writing page upon page of point-by-point responses. I’d like to try pursuing one point at a time and see if we can reach some sort of agreement, then tackle another, rather than doing many branches in parallel – especially since some of the later points may automatically be resolved if we can agree on the earlier ones. (This is the opposite of my current project at work, which is to build a tool that parallelises arbitrary likelihood calculations over sets of data; my natural academic long-windedness has thus been assisted by the habit of thinking in parallel.) If you would prefer lengthy point-by-point answers, say so and I will strive to oblige.
This is complete ju-ju-wabawaba mysticism. We may as well be arguing Ron Hubbard’s Engrams.
I am afraid your words don’t meaning anything, at least not that I can understand.
You are using the word “atoms” as a shorthand to mean “the material properties of parts of the universe which have no symbolic nor mental value nor meaning” and you are using “meaning that is not arbitrary” to mean “the non-material parts of the universe which have symbolic and mental meaning, but no necessary material meaning.”
If this is not the things to which these words refer, I cannot imagine to what they refer.
I am willing to grant that certain object in the universe have both a material and a mental meaning: things like books and words and brains, which both have mass, and also have properties like true or false, sane or insane, which is a property describing the relationships between the meaning of thoughts (what the thoughts say) and the objects of thought (the real or imaginary things the thoughts are saying something about).
I take is as granted that the objects of thought do not have the material properties which the material medium of the thought may have, for the same reason a photograph of an elephant does not weigh as much as an elephant. A doctored photograph can be “false” that is, misleading, such as a double exposure showing a man with an elephant’s head. But the “falseness” of the photograph cannot be determined from the material properties of the photograph. The mass of the photograph does not change if the photo is true or false. The falsehood is a mental property, judged by comparing the photo with the intent of the photographer and the accuracy of its representation of the elephant. The falsehood is not judged by weighing the mass of the inks and paper.
Now, you are saying a heap of material things, when regarded in the abstract as having material properties only, and the observer ignores any mental properties which may be present, can somehow have a mental property? But by the terms of the hypo, we are ignoring the mental properties, right?
I don’t understand how you are even imagining what you are imagining when you say your sentence. I don’t get what you are trying to say. A collection of horizontal distances in Flatland cannot add one inch of vertical distance. A gathering a matter contains material properties; a larger gathering contains more matter, but not “meaingfuler” matter. Adding zeroes to zeroes endlessly is still zero. So why would adding pouring five to fifteen more bottles of dead brain matter into the open yet dead skull of a dead corpse suddenly make the original dead brain be the house to a truthful man? There is no man there at all, if there is no thought, no life, no meaning. When there is life, even the simplest life, there is meaning: food is “good” to an amoeba and poison is “bad.”
No, no! You leap far ahead. By ‘atom’ I mean, in this case, a particular subdivision of matter, without interpretation as to the amount of meaning it has. You are imposing on the word ‘atom’ an assumption from your own metaphysics, namely that in speaking of atoms I automatically stop speaking of meaning or purpose. But I intended no such assumption; my word merely reflected the way I think of matter, as being subdivisible to a certain point, but no further. Perhaps I would have been better advised to speak of ‘matter’ or ‘substance’, thus avoiding the connotation of raw physics without reference to meaning.
Fair enough. You make a good point. Let us go more slowly.
Tell me what an atom is, and tell me what meaning it has to itself from its own point of view. Start with, say, an oxygen atom. Now, I confess, to me, this sounds like I am asking a meaningless question, like asking you how many brick-shaped hours and seconds make up the volume of a “High C” raincloud, but I am curious as to your answer.
If you can tell me instead what you mean by the word substance, I think we can move off our two year and running impasse: because if you can tell me what “substance” is, we can begin to discuss what it is we are really talking about. I suspect you cannot answer the question without revealing what you think the ultimate nature of being is, whether being only has one dimension or way of speaking about it, or whether being has at least two dimensions or ways of speaking about it.
What is ‘substance’?
It seems to me that substance must be defined in terms of experience, or observation; up above you complained that materialists “[do not make] one single reference to any material fact of any specific time and space in their whole body of argument”, so I shall attempt to remedy that by referring to events in my office as I write this. When I move my fingers around, I find that there are some volumes into which I cannot move them; to my eyes it appears that these volumes are occupied by a desk, a book, a computer. Whatever this thing is that prevents me from moving my fingers wherever I like, I refer to as ‘substance’.
This of course is only a beginning; if I wave my hands fast enough, I can feel a certain resistance in the apparently empty volumes of my office, and if I push a finger into my own flesh the resistance is not the hard stop of my desk. So I conclude that substance is not an either-or, there or not there, but a question of degree. My desk is very substantial in the sense of blocking my fingers; my flesh less so; the air almost not at all.
Now I stop referring to specific events in my office, and instead point to experiments done by others, showing that this substance can be very finely subdivided, but not infinitely subdivided; and the smallest divisions we are able to make all have the same size and certain other properties. (I note that nobody now asserts that quarks and leptons are really and truly the smallest possible subdivision and there cannot possibly be anything beyond them; that’s because physics learned something from the story of ‘atoms’, which were at one time supposed to be un-divisible, hence the name. These days we content ourselves with saying that, if the particles currently considered fundamental have internal dynamics, we have seen no hint of it; and moreover those internal dynamics must occur at spatial scales less than such-and-such or we would have seen them.) Among those properties is that of repulsing other substance; two electrons do not approach each other closely without great effort, and the more closely, the greater the effort – hence the ability of my desk to stop my fingers.
This is a great deal of verbiage to expend on a definition of ‘substance’, so let me stop there for a moment and ask if the definition seems to you reasonable and sufficient. If so we can continue, if not we can try to repair it.
Again, this is well said. i agree this is only the beginning, but let us not move from this beginning point, because I think that this is where all our disagreement rests.
I notice that there are events you did not mention. When you thought about the volumes into which your hands and fingers cannot move, you performed an act of abstraction. You went from thinking about the spaces occupied by desk, book, computer and fingers, to thinking about space itself, and noticing that some spaces had a property that prevents interpenetration of two objects.
Like you, I will call this ‘substance’.
In that act of thought, you perforce thought about the interior of those volumes into which no material finger could be moved. An imaginary finger can be moved there, as an an imaginary point, line, plane or volume. Indeed, your thought uses the concept of ‘volume’ as a geometrical abstraction in order to make the thought.
Now, I submit that the thoughts must exist, since you are writing words to represent those thoughts, and I am reading words to represent those thoughts.
I am also drawing other thoughts, called deductions, which come from your thoughts in the hopes of persuading your thought that those deductions are truly and objectively valid.
I am (I hope) not indulging in free-association or making an emotional appeal like a magazine advertisement. In order for that deduction to be valid, there are certain places my thoughts can go and certain places it cannot go, not and keep their logical nature.
This is much like your finger and your desk. You finger can go so far and no farther. I suppose if you would strong enough, you could force your finger into the desk surface, but this would change the nature of one or the other: either desk or finger would go from being whole to broken.
Likewise, here. I submit that your thoughts can and must go to certain other thoughts, namely to valid conclusions, and not to others, namely to invalid or unwarranted conclusions. If I jump to an unwarranted conclusion, the chain of thought is broken. The thought can go do far and no farther. I suppose again, I could force my thoughts to a conclusion that is unwarranted, but the nature would be changed. It would be broken and not whole.
I observe that when I think about your desk, which I have never seen, my thoughts do not have the same property of mutually exclusive impenetrability either causes by electron tension or anything else. I am not talking about moving brain electrons to your desk; I am talking about the subject-matter of the thought. It can move into the interior with th ease of imagination. Indeed, that sentence just prior to this speak of the interior of your desk, so I clearly can have a thought, false or true, about it.
Moving the topic of thought to the inside of your desk is not like moving a finger through a desk. This is a distinction all men can experience.
If we use the word ‘substance’ to mean and only to mean the properties relating to things like moving a finger to but not through a desk, what word shall we use to refer the the properties relating to things like reaching but not overstepping proper conclusions of thought?
Because your definition is not at all sufficient if we cannot speak of the substances of thought. I will accept whatever term you wish to use, provided it maintains the distinctions and similarities I here dwell upon above.
I believe this would usually be called ‘logic’ or ‘reasoning’. I prefer the second as being more general.
Now, you have pointed out that as a matter of experience, the use of reasoning to discover valid conclusions feels rather different from the use of fingers to discover the boundaries of a desk. This is true; the question is whether the difference is a surface one belying a deeper unity, or is a real one reflecting a genuine difference of kinds. By analogy, sight, smell, and hearing all feel very different from the tactile sense; yet we believe that these are surface differences, and that the underlying thing that these senses report is material.
I will say, as will nearly everyone but a Buddhist or Neo from the Matrix, that your physical reality is objective. That I could stand in the same chamber with you, and you could put your hand through, let us say, water in a bathtub but not through the wooden floor, while watching me put my foot through the floor but not through the water, is sufficiently unusual that I am willing to say it has never happened. While certain sights and sounds may be invisible or inaudible to me because of my coign of vantage which you see and hear, or due to some clear defect of the senses, such as blindness or deafness, by and large the blind and the deaf are willing to admit light and sound exist, even if they themselves perceive them indirectly or not at all. So for this and other reasons, I hope we can take it as granted that objects of the senses are substantial, and objectively exist.
Are we agreed so far?
If so, this raises some questions.
First question: what, if anything, is the relationship between solidity or ‘substance’ and objectivity?
As you wish, let us call the substance of thought ‘logic’. Does logic differ from man to man, or between men of different races, or between the sexes, or between men and other hypothetical rational creatures as may or may not exist, such as mermaid and Martians? It is possible that “A is A” be true on Earth, or true from the male point of view, but not true on Mars, or from the female point of view?
Next question: If logic does not differ according to point of view, is it objective?
If it is objective, is it something like a substance, by which I mean, in the same way you and I in the same room, if the room is small, uncluttered, and clearly lit, would see the same desk unless one of us is blind, you and I contemplating the same thought, if the thought is simple, uncluttered, and clear, would deduce the same implication.
Naturally, for distant or intricate things, such as looking at a labyrinthine Gordian knot in a bad light during a carnival lit by a disco ball, we might not see each man from his point of view the same windings of the same knot, or understand what we see: and, to be sure, likewise, when contemplating some abstract matter involving many nuances of judgment and reflection while the mind is jarred and distracted with powerful emotions or bigotries, we might each man deduce implications remarkably different. But this does not necessarily mean that the implications are created each man for himself. No one who contemplates a Euclidean triangle can conclude to himself that the obtuse angel is opposite the shortest leg, unless he has a mental defect akin to blindness.
Third Question:
Logic has a quality of persistence, independent of the viewpoint of the observer, much like the solidity of the desk top through which your fingers cannot pass. If logic is objective, is it a substance?
Fourth Question:
Now, if we wish to entertain the notion that objects of thought and objects of the senses relate to some common sense, even as smell and touch and taste relate to a common sense, what would this common sense be? In terms of the five senses, if I see, say, a burning lamp, I might smell the lamp oil burning and see the tear-drop-shaped lamplight and feel the heat through different senses, but my common sense will locate the lamp in space: I never, for example, scent a lamp to my left, and feel it my right, and see it below or above. Indeed, the very method we humans use to distinguish between images in mirrors and reality is by the common sense: if my touch feels glass while my eye sees my wife’s face, this is how I know I am looking at my wife’s image, and the real wife is behind me or to one side.
What is the common sense between objects of thought and objects of the senses?
This statement, unlike a fairly useful word like “soul”, deserves unpacking.
“This seems to assume that we have perfect introspective access to our own mental processes. When I move my fingers across the keyboard I am not conscious of ordering them to “go three millimeters left, two up, rotate the knuckle 0.01 radian around such-and-such an axis of rotation””
Holy Mavis Beacon, Rolf! Did you never touch type while staring at the keyboard trying to memorize key positions? Did your fingers come special delivery from the great QWERTYTUS’s forge? Have you never been ham-handed due to sleeping on the wrong side of the bed? You’re making use of your brain’s ability to semi-consciously program macros for novel actions that get repeated a lot.
“nevertheless, signals are travelling down my nerves that must have such an interpretation. Likewise, if the atoms of your brain had intrinsic meaning, would you be able to distinguish between the two kinds of argument by pure introspection?”
For a fun interpretation of this logical mishmash, I’m going to offer that the atoms in a believer’s brain, normally indexed as mundane array values, receive a literal NEW INTRINSIC OBJECTIVE MEANING. Specifically, they’re remade as objects, that can pass and execute new instructions from previously inaccessible, yet omnipresent, data that underlies existence. Christ, Head Dynamic Brogrammer of the Universe, can now effectively work in his life. This transition is, of course, invisible to nonbelievers except as a strange change in their demeanor, as Jesus does not believe in wasting precious neural space on useless marketing GUI upgrades.
“In this hypothesis there is no difference between the metaphysical argument, and moving the atoms of your brain into the position that has the intrinsic meaning of that argument. There’s no need for you to perceive the weight or the position of the atoms; you are perceiving their meaning, which by hypothesis is an empirical quality. ”
The faint perception of what could be a metaphysical fact is fraught with peril. It’s best measured in truth-weight by the interrogation of one’s living and dead human relatives for similar experiences, rather than the immediate designation to tricks of Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns. Leaving the question open to the extent of one’s knowledge is a far more beneficial mental exercise, and will lead to deeper learning and understanding, and, I hope, eventually to Christ.
Or at least to an appreciation for where you learned things. Seriously, when you learned to type, did your brain know what your left or right hands were doing?
Fear not the lawgic trolls, Mr. Wright, their desperate gambits are as diseases to doctors, a regrettable spectacle that nevertheless educates on knowledge we didn’t know we didn’t have.
Yes, and then I might consciously think “There it is, middle of the top row, use the right index finger”; nonetheless there was never any conscious instruction in terms of millimeters and radians, just an intuitive awareness of willing the finger’s movement. Perhaps, before you adopt a tone of sneering disbelief, you might like to make sure you really understood the claim being made. It was quite specific.
You seem to have intended mockery, but it falls rather flat. That is, indeed, what happens in a conversion: The convert’s brain (or at any rate a part of it) is rearranged so that it has the intrinsic meaning of belief. Observe, if you will, that this does not in itself say anything about the truth of Christianity. The intrinsic meaning can equally well be true or false.
He is pointing out is that in your universe the idea of intrinsic meaning is meaningless, but in the Christian universe, where the Christ or Logos designed the universe and the meanings by means of Logos or meaning, it is not. This is because if the universe is a created thing, it could have a meaning to the Creator must as a symphony or poem or even a computer program has a meaning to the programmer but not to the computer: but if the universe is a natural thing arising from nothing and passing into nothing for no purpose, then there can be no intrinsic meanings. (If I understand what is meant by that phrase, which, alas, I do not).
I apologize if my tossed-off analogy seemed a bit dismissive, so I’ll elaborate a little bit. We’re treading into territory that inevitably crosses into ‘styles of thinking,’ which I find are more usefully explained through appeal to uniform experience.
Therefore, let’s put this into Learning To Type: When I’m memorizing keyboard positions, I’m trying to fix a mental image of the keyboard into my head. It may even be a 3-D mental image depending on key depth. I’m not talking to myself using the abstract symbols and syllables of language, I’m imprinting an image of the QWERTY layout in my finger-knowledge (I can type at around 30-40 words per minute, yet can not draw a letter-correct keyboard on a piece of paper from memory, nor could I speak the QWERTY mantra from memory.)
Despite having seen a great deal of keyboards and typed successfully on a great deal more, my fingers and my neural network know the QWERTY layout as an unseen and unspoken abstraction only. Memorization was simply never necessary. Yet when I wish to speak online, my fingers rush to my service, hesitating only momentarily over unfamiliar keyboards, requiring true-vision alignment only in certain physical instances, requiring verbal affirmation or thought-commands never. Basically:
A KEYBOARD EXISTS AS AN INTRINSIC YET CURRENTLY UNOBSERVABLE OBJECT IN MY NEURAL NETWORK. IT DID NOT EXIST BEFORE THE TEACHERS OF THE GREAT QWERTY SHOWED THE WAY. I HAD NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE OF HOW THIS NEW INTRINSIC OBJECT WOULD BENEFIT ME, YET FOLLOWING THE PATH OF QWERT WAS INDISPENSABLE IN BRINGING LIFE, AND THE INTERNET, ALIVE TO ME. QWERT POWERS MY EVERY ONLINE ACTION, YET I CANNOT SEE, HEAR, SMELL, TOUCH, NOR TASTE HIM. IT’S VERY POSSIBLE THAT ATTEMPTING TO OBSERVE QWERT IN ME WOULD KILL, SERIOUSLY INJURE, OR REMOVE MY ABILITY TO COMMUNE WITH QWERT FOREVER. BUT ANY MAN CAN KNOW QWERT AND RECEIVE THESE BENEFITS BY SPENDING TIME WITH A QWERTY KEYBOARD.
Seriously, the questions some older adults ask merely betray the fact that they’ve forgotten so many of the details of the experiences they had when they were young. I blame the universities and the pace of learning among them removing the opportunities to stop and think of exactly what one’s doing at any given time. Most atheists seem rather too much in a hurry to actually discuss things long enough to visualize them differently. It’s why some knock-off tracking device makers like Apple can get away with billions of dollars just by intimating a higher plane of existence and the time to make things arty. (For the right price, with the right connectors!)
I’m not saying that physical things in the world are actually objects in Unknowable Divine C++ Version 7.0. (If it can be conceived, it could happen!) I’m saying that if you have to go on about “intrinsic value”, they might as well be, or you’re perilously close to saying there’s no such thing as a thing, but only everything and anything, which is the logical endpoint of the “evolutionary thinking” Chesterton warned about. That means you’re good for Islam, which places God remote from human experience, atheism, which places him apart from human experience, and little else. (Most Muslims more naturally convert to atheists than Christians, as the conceptual leap isn’t nearly as far.)
On the face of it, “intrinsic meaning” seems to be a contradiction in terms. “Meaning” requires that we have two things, two sets of data and that we recognise some correspondence between the two. Think of a map of a city and the actual city streets. Once I have the information in the map, I am less surprised in exploring the city layout. The “meaning” of the map is the information it gives me about the city.
So how can some data have “intrinsic meaning”? Doesn’t this just mean that something is isomorphic to itself? Everything is identical to itself. If you want to say everything “means” itself, go ahead, but please warn us that this is just your special way of stating the old “A=A” axiom, not some remarkable thing that only happens to carbon atoms in brains.
The only possibly licit instance of “intrinsic meaning” would be when some part of something has some surprising similarity in pattern to the whole. This can happen, when the object has some sort of nested or fractal structure. So you can learn about the whole by examining a piece and using a scaling similarity. This may also apply to wrf3′s (and Hofstadter’s) discussion of “intrinsic meaning” in self-referential systems.
But there are still these two terms needed to generate “meaning”: the part and the whole.
And, yes, I do realise that what I just wrote is just a more plonking gloss to Mr Wright’s comment.
I like that term “intrinsic meaning”. To me (though I might be mistaken) it has about the same ring as “nature” or “essence”, or better still, “intelligibility.” Meaning is about things that make sense to an intellect; intrinsic meaning is about things that make sense in themselves and that the intellect discovers through observation and reflection on their properties and operations.
Yes, it is a beautiful phrases. So too is “inherent meaning”, which, I see, is the phrase wrf3 actually used. One must never forget what a poetical and dreamy philosophy materialism is.
But, as best as I can tell, materialists use this lovely phrase, not to describes the soul’s instinctive response to beauty or to goodness, but rather to denote the mystical process at the heart of their faith, by which matter, on its own, spontaneously generates spirit – the Sacred Mystery of Emergence.
I think your comment made mine more clear. I still don’t understand to what real objects, material or conceptual, the phrase “intrinsic meaning” means? In two of my fiction novels, I propose that there is a pre-fall-of-the-tower-of-Babel language which, upon hearing it, every sapient creature automatically knows exactly what the speaker means to convey. But that is magic; or I propose a ‘philosopher’s language’ based on the universals of physics and geometry, that any creatures sharing our three dimensional continuum, provided they knew the laws of nature, could decipher — but that assumes that geometry is objective, and that Playfair’s axiom is inherent to the universe in such a way that noneuclidean geometry is self contradictory (presumably, due to some error in reasoning not detected as yet by human civilization). Both of these are total make-believe.
But even if one were true, it would not dissolve the symbol-object distinction such that the symbol and the object were one and the same. All that would happen is the symbol would be self-referential like a street sign reading “on this spot was erected this, the world’s most self referential signpost!” or “This Sentence Has Five Words”.
I think I just found out, in the first chapter of Maritain’s The Range of Reason, the origin of materialist reasoning about intrinsic meaning that is not arbitrary and corresponds to “arrangements of electrons” in the brains. I believe it is clearly pointing to what knowledge really is. It seems a deformation of the Thomistic theory of knowledge and, as such, still retains some likeness to the original.
The deformation could be compared to what Chesterton pointed out concerning the differences between religions that Robert Blatchford invoked against the truth of Christianity: the different stories of revelations or incarnations might very well be used in favor of Christianity when examined with the contrary hypothesis. (Essay: Christianity and Rationalism)
For Thomism, to know is to become. Intelligence grows, perfects itself vitally by immaterially becoming its object. I see a deformed reflect of this truth in the “electron arrangements” and “intrinsic” meaning, because our intellect naturally perceives that things outside of it become in some way part of it once we think them.
A few excerpts (condensed) from Chapter One of The Range of Reason
(http://www2.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/etext/range01.htm):
“Philosophy has its own instruments of intelligible perception and judgment which are provided by the abstractive intuition that is a property of the intellect. [This] intuition does require the intrumentality of the senses. But it is precisely the activity of the intellect which extricates from sense experience objects which the senses cannot uncover in things and which the intellect sees: being and its properties, and the essential structures and the intelligible principles of being.
“In order to understand these things, it is first necessary to put an end to the great error that Descartes introduced into modern thought with his theory of the essential and specific unity of science. Descartes’ error is essentially linked to his idealistic conception of knowledge. I believe that the ancients – I mean especially Plato and Aristotle, then St. Thomas Aquinas and his great commentators – had more profound views on the subject than the moderns. Their primary concern was to keep intact the nature of knowledge without reducing it – as we are tempted to do at every moment – to one of the usual comparisons, borrowed from our vision of bodies, which lie dormant in our imagination. That is why they warn us, when they discuss knowledge, to elevate our spirits to a higher plane.
“For St. Thomas, knowing consists neither in receiving an impression nor in producing an image; it is something much more intimate and much more profound. To know is to become; to become the non-I. But to posit such a union between two entities which nevertheless retain their own being – for I remain what I am and the thing remains what it is while I know it – amounts to saying that the process involves an immaterial becoming, an immaterial identification, and that knowledge is a dependent variable of immateriality. To know, therefore, consists of immaterially becoming another, insofar as it is another, aliud in quantum aliud.
“Thus, from the outset, Thomas Aquinas makes knowledge absolutely dependent upon what is. To know, in fact, is essentially to know something which, as specifier of my act of knowing, is not produced by my knowledge, but on the contrary measures it and governs it, and thus possesses its own being, independent of my knowledge. The object of knowledge must, by its very nature of known object, be that which a thing is – a thing other than myself and my subjective activity, a thing precisely taken in its otherness, in what it has of itself and not of me. The entire specification of my act of intelligence comes, therefore, from the object as something other, as free from me. In knowing, I subordinate myself to a being independent of me and the truth of my mind lies in its conformity to what is outside of it and independent of it.
“That is the fundamental realism and objectivism of Thomistic philosophy.”
This is quite an interesting analysis of the process of knowing. If my description of meaning corresponds roughly to “joint entropy”, you may be describing the dissipation of what Wojciech Zurek calls “information discord” in the mind’s act of knowing.
Interesting analysis indeed. And the beauty of it is that it is understandable, unlike modern theories that we have to tear apart to see where their terms and constructs come from and what they mean. For example, I have only a vague idea of what “information discord” could mean and I don’t like it. “Discord” rings like non-correspondence or misinterpretation between what the thing is and what it is in our mind: seems like a pessimistic doctrine at best.
Aristotelian-Thomism is an optimistic doctrine: we will never know all there is to know, but what knowledge we can gain is certain, true, if we let our intelligence be informed by its object and follow rational principles we find in being. Descartes and innumerable others thought they were past Aristotle and Aquinas: they were wrong, they never got to their level.
Ran out of nesting space, continuing here.
Yes, agreed.
It seems to me that I have never seen a solid thing that was not objective; that is, if I saw it, I believe others would also see it. Of course I cannot strictly speaking put this to the test for every object I have seen in my life. Still, I’m willing to assert that if it is solid, it is objective; and I suspect you will agree. The converse statement, that objective things are substantial, is, I think, what is in dispute between us – rather, we are disputing whether the substance of thought is the same kind of substance as the substance of my desk.
Logic does not change between male and female, but, although I hesitate to say it, I cannot quite will myself to make the assertion that “A is A” is true in all regions of time and space. I cannot make any sensible statements about what a region would look like, in which it wasn’t true; it is literally unthinkable – a place into which I cannot force my thoughts, any more than I can force my finger into a rock. (Perhaps less so. For exactly such purposes were drills and dynamite invented.) But I am not quite willing to make that the basis of an absolute denial. My imagination and my mind are limited; the universe is not obliged to pay attention to those limits.
We may at any rate say that “A is A” is true of all times and places of which it is possible for us to speak, and of all times and places we know about. If there are exceptions, we cannot think or reason about them.
I fear that this answer may cause you to throw up your hands in disgust and give up on the conversation, so I’ll return to your other questions later, if you wish to continue.
Let us suppose for the sake of argument that we enter a region of space, such as, say, the core of a singularity, or before the dawn of time, where our normal ways of measuring time and space have no application: let us call this, for the sake of argument, Oddland.
In Oddland, the statement “A is A” is untrue. Hence, in Oddland, A is not A, or, to put it another way, If A is true then A is not true. Now, “A” here is being used formally, as in algebra, to stand for any term whatever we may wish to impose. Let us impose A = the statement “In Oddland, the statement “A is A” is untrue.” Hence, If the statement “In Oddland, A is A is untrue” is true, then the statement “In Oddland, A is A is untrue.”
However, by this same reasoning, the statement ” If the statement “In Oddland, A is A is untrue” is true, then the statement “In Oddland, A is A is untrue.”" if it is true in Oddland, is also untrue.
Now the question is, is this statement both true and untrue to an observer standing outside Oddland, or to one inside, or to one standing with one leg each to either side of the boundary?
The question involves us in insuperable difficulties.
Allow me to suggest that the statement “A is A” is not something that can be true in one place or in another place, at one time and not another, according to one set of sense impressions and not another. Indeed, it has nothing to do with regions of time and space in any way. The statement concerns what can be predicated in a sentence of a subject, namely, it says that at a given a subject cannot both affirm and deny a given unambiguous predicate.
In other words, if it is a rule of logic that a self-contradictory sentence cannot be true, this is not a statement about shoes or ships or sealing wax, or cabbage or kings. It is a statement about the nature of thoughts, sentences, symbols and statements and about all things that have the property “describes a subject-predicate relation.” Hence, no matter what we see with our eyes about shoes and ships and sealing wax or cabbages or kings, we know that if we both say two contradictory statements about them, both statements cannot be true.
I assume you have heard this suggestion before and rejected it. If so, on what grounds?
Or, to put the question another way, if you are unwilling to say that the Law of Non-Contradiction is unconditionally and universal true, why are you unwilling? Is perhaps because you assume that all truths must be conditional and local?
This is a meaty question indeed, because if you answer in the affirmative, I will have to ask you what is the nature of the thing called “all truth” such that you or I can know it is and must be conditional and local, even in Oddland and elsewhere? But let me not get ahead of myself. For now, I ask only the grounds of your reluctance.
I tend to throw my hands up in disgust when I fear you are not being serious, not when you have ideas I either cannot comprehend or with which I do not agree. So far, I have faith that you are being serious, telling me what you actually believe, arguing to discover the truth of the matter, rather than arguing just to argue. In times past, I have lost that faith, but since I cannot read minds, I will again give you the benefit of the doubt. The contrast with wrf3 was instructive.
I note also, that for the purposes of our current discussion, if we simply both agree that neither of us has never seen a non-objective desk nor contemplate a non-objective rule of logic, this is sufficient for the next step in the discussion, which is to ask what the relationship between substance and objectivity, if any?
Yes, I know. That’s why I said I could not say anything sensible about Oddland; it is literally unthinkable – not in the usual sense of being too awful to contemplate, but in the sense that I cannot think logically about it, nor can anyone else.
(As an incidental aside, you may find amusing the Paradox Beasts of Dungeons and Discourse, whose strongest spell is called the Principle of Explosion. Its effect is to summon more Paradox Beasts.)
The inability to say anything rational about Oddland is a human limitation. The universe is not obliged to take any notice of what I can or cannot think rationally about. Perhaps I could say, in answer to your question:
that it is rather that I am unwilling to make the opposite assumption. Finding a statement that certainly looks to be universal and unconditional, I nevertheless mark it down as “to be assumed universal and unconditional for the time being, until contrary evidence should emerge“. Perhaps you will say that this is taking open-mindedness to the point of madness, but nevertheless that is how my mind works. Which is not to say, of course, that I go about devoting a lot of effort to showing the falseness of A=A.
This is certainly fair enough. I shall come back to your questions tomorrow, then.
Allow me to derail the conversation for one more stop, because I am trying to get to something.
You said “Finding a statement that certainly looks to be universal and unconditional, I nevertheless mark it down as “to be assumed universal and unconditional for the time being, until contrary evidence should emerge“.”
What would such contrary evidence be? We both agree that Oddland is utterly unthinkable, and not because it is too horrible to contemplate, but only because the human mind (I would be bold enough to say ‘no rational mind’) cannot think a thought that contradicts itself.
This would seem to indicate that no possible contrary evidence could possibly exist. I suggest to your candid judgment that certain matters are no open to proof or disproof by evidence, if, by ‘evidence’, we mean something one sees with one’s eyes or sensed with any sense.
I further suggest that the universality of the Law of Non-Contradiction is, and logically must be, one of those matters, on the grounds that words, signs, thoughts, statements, concepts, ideas, forms, and abstractions by definition are not seen with the eye or sensed with any sense. The Law of Non-Contradiction is an intuition whose denial is self-refuting, or, if you prefer, an axiom or common notion, a notion which is common to all other notions and underpins them.
The defining characteristic, or, if you prefer, the nature of words, signs thoughts, statements, concepts, ideas, forms, and abstractions is that they are symbols. Symbols represent or reflect or refer to or point at things either physical or conceptual. A circle of ink can represent, in different contexts, the number zero or the Latin letter O or the Greek letter omicron or the astrological sign for Earth. Hence the circle of ink “points at” or represents something other than itself. This is what makes it a symbol.
A symbol that contradicts itself, that both points at something and does not point at it, is simply not a symbol.
In other words, I am not suggesting that you and I need to examine all the worlds that are and worlds that could be to discover whether or not a symbol that contradicts itself has a real thing at which it points. We do not need to look at anything. All we need do is contemplate the alleged symbol to detect that it is incoherent. By ‘incoherent’ I mean ‘nonsensical’ or, if you like, an abortive symbol, a bad symbol, and symbol that symbolizes nothing.
I do not need to examine the world to see if a symbol is self contradictory; all I need do is examine the symbol. If the symbol contradicts itself, it is impeached. It is no good. It is senseless.
There is a second class of symbols, which are coherent but which point at imaginary objects only, such as the word ‘unicorn.’ I do indeed need to travel the world over to see whether or not unicorns exist to discover whether the word ‘unicorn’ refers to a real object, or to discover whether the word ‘dinosaur’ refers to creatures that once existed and now no longer breathe air, and so on. But I do not need to search the world over to see whether any nine-sided triangle might be hiding in Patagonia, because by definition, triangles have three angles and hence three sides.
In common speech, it is often that speakers conflate the first class (thing formally impossible) with the second (things that do not exist). It is a mild exaggeration to say, “It is impossible that Professor Challenger saw a living dinosaur!” because it is only impossible contingently, that is, it is impossible under the contingent circumstances that all dinosaurs have been dead for eons. (But if there is a plateau in South America where certain dinosaurs have been haply preserved alive, then, no, because the circumstances are other than first thought, the matter is not impossible.)
But it is no exaggeration to say “It is impossible to imagine a nine-sided triangle” because the words in the phrase mean “a plane figure that both is and is not composed of three straight lines meeting at three angles.” There is no plateau, no Oddland, where this can be. One can speculate about non-Euclidean geometry, or figures drawn on curved surfaces or volumes in warped spaces, but even so the nine-sided triangle cannot exist unless we change to what the word “triangle” points, that is, change the definition.
There is again a third class of impossibles. In addition to things that are formally impossible and contingently impossible, there are paradoxes, things that, because it delights the poet to speak words that verge on the impossible, seem like absurdities, but which actually demand a careful distinction.
It is not, for example, a formal impossibility to meet Dracula, Lord of the Living Dead. A “living dead” sounds like a formal impossibility, a man who both is and is not dead: but the idea is that there are unclean spirits which can mimic some aspects of human life, such as motion, but who lack other aspects, such as breathing or bodily warmth. It is no more impossible that Dracula would move around the corpse of his lifeless body than that a marionette be moved by puppet strings: animated in the sense of moving, but not animated in the sense of alive.
Another example is wave-particle duality. We see photons act in some respects under some circumstances, as when passing through a double slit, something like a wave in the ether, and in other respects in other circumstances, as when exciting an electric eye, like a packet or particle. Light is what it is and acts how it acts; the paradox arises when we attempt to analogize the behavior to macroscopic objects (waves in water, balls on a billiard table) and one analogy does not cover all the cases. This is a paradox caused by the symbols or images we use to represent something, not an impossibility caused by the thing: there is no paradox (at none known to an amateur like me) in the Schrodinger equation, which describes (if I understand it) both the wavelike and particle-like behavior. Wave-particle duality is not a formal impossibility.
Likewise, it is not a formal impossibility to speak of the French Revolution as “The best of times and the worst of times” merely because Dickens means it was the best in one way and the worst in another. The human mind delights in ambiguities and riddles, but there are games with words, puns, paradoxes, but not formal impossibilities.
Now, if this distinction I have drawn is accurate, when we come across a sign or symbol that seems to contradict itself, I would suggest to you that normal human wisdom and experience is sufficient to distinguish between (1) formal impossibilities (such as a nine-sided triangle) and (2) contingent impossibilities, also called wonders (such as a living dinosaur) and (3) paradoxes or word-plays (the tragic happiness of the French Revolution).
To examine case (1) we need only contemplate the nature of the symbol. Does it or does it not unambiguously contradict itself? Is the statement valid?
For case (2) we need evidence and knowledge of the world. Are the dinosaurs actually dead? Is the statement true?
For case (3) we need both to examine the statement and examine what the statement says. Can the paradox be restated in unambiguous language, upon drawing proper distinctions between close cases? Upon restatement, is the statement true?
I submit to your candid judgment that only cases (2) and (3) require evidence, because only those cases need evidence to confirm their truth. Dinosaurs may be dead in our world in our age, and Dracula may be undead in an imaginary world, but nine-sided triangles cannot exist in any world or age, real or imaginary, because the phrase is meaningless. Case (1) deals with things that, since they cannot be true under any circumstances, it does not matter what evidence says the circumstances or particulars actually are. We call these universals.
So my question here is this: is this distinction correct? Is there a difference between an invalid statement and an untrue statement? Is there is difference between impossibilities, wonders, and paradoxes?
If the distinction is correct, I submit to you that universals are unavoidable. Behind every contingent truth is an axiomatic universal truth. Every system of thought, every philosophy, every world view by definition must have at least one universal and axiomatic assumption or truth on which it rests, including your own.
The argument is a powerful one, and I cannot answer the question of what such evidence would look like. But it does seem to rely on a conceptual jump: From what rational minds can and cannot conceive, to what can or cannot exist. It is not obvious to me that these are the same. It may be the case that I not only cannot imagine the evidence for Oddland’s existence, but that I could not even perceive it (which raises the Lovecraftian possibility that the evidence is all around me, but I’m not seeing it; perhaps the rational universe is only a skein of order on a bottomless pit of chaos); or that it would drive me instantly mad as I perforce believed a contradiction. But nevertheless these are limitations of my mind, or of rational minds. They do not have to be limitations of the universe.
It is, if you like, a bit like solipsism. I cannot demonstrate that there are other minds; but it’s clearly fruitless to assume that I’m the only one around, because what would I actually do differently? Perhaps I’m only imagining all you zombies, but if so I clearly have a subconscious imagination much stronger than my conscious mind, and I’m going to have to treat my imaginings as real, lest they gang up on me. Similarly, perhaps Oddland exists, but it does not seem fruitful to assert that it does, for what conclusions can I draw from that?
Another analogy: There is a hoary old chestnut in theology, which nowadays is sometimes given as “Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot, even he could not eat it?” The orthodox answer, as I understand it, is that ‘omnipotence’ is to be taken as the ability to do all things that are logically possible, but not contradictions. Well, if I were a Catholic, I’d be a heretic: I would be reluctant to impose this human understanding on the divine.
As a matter of pragmatic procedure, I’m going to have to assert that A=A always and everywhere. But as a point of ontology (if that’s the right word), I’m reluctant to impose my limitations on the universe. It is a quibble, a reservation of the same sort as I’m forced to make for solipsism, or that I’m a Boltzmann brain, or that my existence is the nightmare of a Chtulhoid horror and tomorrow I’ll wake up and be relieved to find I both have and don’t have tentacles.
Very well; but may I not also have the footnote, “This foundation is to be taken as universal until further notice, but it remains provisional?” It seems to me that universal and provisional are not mutually exclusive in the way that universal and conditional are.
There is no conceptual jump because the argument is not “Because petty mortal man cannot at this time comprehend it THEREFORE it does not exist anywhere in timespace or any parallel universe of the multiverse ruled by Azathoth”.
The argument instead is this: “Because the nature of statements is such that they represent objects to which they refer, all statements by their nature affirm or predicate a predict of a subject.
“Statements state something about something: this is that.
“Hence, any statement that says “this is and is not that” is saying nothing about this nor about that. It is not a statement.
“Any statement which denies what it affirms or affirms what it denies by definition carries or conveys no information, because it does not refer to anything. It is merely words without significance, or nonsense.
“If it does not refer to anything, there is nothing to which the statement refers. If there is nothing to which the statement refers (because the statement, upon examination, is not a statement at all, merely nonsense) then it makes no sense, IT IS MERELY A PUN OR PLAY ON WORDS, to ask whether there might be something to which the statement refers elsewhere in time and space or under other conditions.”
If a statement is not a statement at all, but instead is nonsense, then there are no conditions under which it is a true and accurate and faithful statement, because it is not a statement at all. The set “not a statement” cannot contain any members of the subset “true statements”.
The statement that you do not wish to impose on Jehovah or Jove or Azathoth the mere limitations of human reason, on the grounds that these superior beings may bring forth things unimagined or paradoxical to us mere puny mortals, cannot under any circumstances apply to the class of things to which non-statements refer, on the grounds that non-statements by definition do not refer to anything.
The blind eye sees nothing. There is not some Oddland where the things a blind eye sees are visible there, even though they are not visible to our mere puny mortal eyes here, because the blind eye does not see AT ALL. It does not perform the act of seeing.
Likewise, the non-statement is not a statement, and the things to which non-statements refer cannot dwell in some Oddland where the Law of Non-Contradiction is abridged: there are no things to which non-statements refer, because the non-statement does not refer to anything AT ALL. It does not perform the act of referring.
I think I see what you are getting at. You are saying, if I understand correctly, that non-contradiction applies to statements, while I’ve been thinking about objects. It might be possible to find an Oddland in which an object was, in some sense or another, both a book and not a book; even if I cannot imagine what that sense is, this needn’t limit the universe. But a statement is something that conveys meaning to a human, or a rational, mind. It follows that human limitations apply.
If that’s an accurate description of what you are saying, then I must perforce agree that you are correct. Whatever may be the Lovecraftian truth about the universe, neither I nor Cthulhu can make any statement, in the sense of a sentence conveying meaning to a human mind, that contradicts itself.
Now, if only I had not lost my temper with wrf3, I could point to the above line of reasoning and show that you and I can indeed come to agreements on topics using logic. Of course, me might object that this is a metphysical or ontological issue rather than a moral one: but I would argue that if all men have a duty to seek the truth, they likewise have a duty to reason and to listen to reason, since reason is the formal structure of truth.
So, yes, I submit that the Law of Non-Contradiction is not a law about the physical universe, but is a law about the relationship of the universe of symbols, the mental universe, to the physical universe.
Granted that a self-contradictory statement, because of the nature of statements, states nothing, the more interesting question is whether there is an Oddland out there somewhere which the human ability to put things in the form of statements might or must fall short of? Are there things we cannot imagine and cannot put into words, or truths that can only be expressed in terms of paradox?
The answer there depends on one’s experience. I would say most or all of life’s deep matters are hard to put into words. When we find a man who can put them into words, we crown him with laurels and call him a poet, or crown him with a mortarboard and call him a scholar. Love is hard to put into words; war is full of horrors and paradoxes; the wave-particle duality of the physicists; the careful distinctions between matter and form and being and essence of the philosophers; and all such things either require us to define our terms or require us to grasp the type of which the word is merely a shadow or an example.
It is easy enough in any profound matter to sound as if we are talking in self-contradictory terms.
One example should suffice: Thomas Hobbes, an examplar of mine, makes much ado over the fact that the schoolmen define a spirit as an “insubstantial substance” and he scoffs that such a thing cannot exist. Now, if Mr Hobbes, for all his learning, were to tell me my mind does not exist on the grounds that mental things are substances that are insubstantial, all I would reply is that this is a paradox, a seeming self-contradiction, not a true self-contradiction. The seeming is caused by an ambiguity, an accident of words. For a man who carefully spends more of his writing defining his terms than Kant or Euclid, Mr Hobbes should be the last to fall into so simple an error: but no son of Adam is immune from being tricked the ambiguities of language. (The error in his case is that the mind is “insubstantial” in that it is not solid like a desk, but it is “substantial” in that it is a persistent entity or actor with objective properties.)
So, I submit to your candid judgment that self-contradictory statements cannot be true, no, not even for extraterrestrials nor devils nor gods: but that many things which seem to human beings to be paradoxes or mysteries can certainly be true.
Which returns us to the former question: what is substance? You defined it for material objects as “solidity”. I asked you for a word to define the substance of the mind, and you provided the word “logic”.
Well and good, provided by this word we mean only what we are agreed it means in this conversation: namely, the persistent and objective qualities of the mind and of the non-sensory objects, if any, that the mind contemplates.
Do “solidity” and “logic” have anything in common? Do they have any properties not in common?
All right, but hang on a moment. We agree that rational minds have this property, that they cannot make contradictory statements. But it seems to me that this does not, of itself, demonstrate that minds are not physical. (Perhaps this is jumping ahead of what you intended to show?) If a mind is a physical object, then a statement of the form “All minds are X” is a statement about the physical universe, or about a subset of it. If that’s so, then the phrase “mental universe” contrasted with “physical universe” should be taken as a shorthand, not a literal dichotomy: It does not refer to a different thing, but to a subset.
On the other hand (bear with me, I am thinking out loud in your combox) it also seems that the law of Non-Contradiction is more a definition of rational minds, than a statement about them. If I say “A planet has such-and-such properties”, and then find that I have excluded Pluto from the list of planets, I have in some sense made a statement about physical objects, to wit, the planets; but the statement is not really true or false, it is useful or not useful. I might find that I had accidentally made the list of planets empty, or made it include all things; neither of those would be very useful, but neither definition could be said to be untrue.
On the gripping hand, this of usefulness seems to relate back to the minds; and if minds are physical, then again we are not escaping the physical universe. If the atoms of my brain contain, by virtue of their arrangement, an objective, discoverable meaning, then the statement that some particular definition is useful to my mind is a statement about that meaning, which by hypothesis is to say about their arrangement.
It therefore seems to me that Non-Contradiction by itself does not get us out of the woods; we have not yet distinguished between materialism and – is there a word for the opposite of materialism? But as we have gone back to foundations and axioms, that may be too much to expect at the current stage. Feel free to ignore my ramblings.
I would add a third category: Truths that we cannot prove by means of logic. Godel’s incompleteness shows that such truths must exist, unless we are to accept that human reason is inconsistent.
I’ll start a new thread for this, and return to your numbered list of questions; but I am attending a friend’s wedding and have also some other commitments today, so it may take me a while.
I thought we only agreed that the symbols have this property: that any symbol which represents a predicate of a subject cannot at the same time and in the same sense deny that predicate. There is no argument so far that this is a property of the minds, rather than a property of the reality the mind contemplates.
The the Law of Non Contradiction a property of the mind which thinks thoughts, or is it is a property of the thoughts which the mind thinks?
If the the Law of Non Contradiction is a property of the mind or of the thoughts created or caused by the mind, there may be minds out there in the Beyond, the men of Oddland or the Fungi of Yuggoth, who can think a self contradictory thought and have it represent reality. In this case, the Law of Non-Contradiction is an epiphenomenon or by-product of some tubule or fissure in the human brain, a knot of pulsing tissue or an extra sodium atom in a molecule, which could be amended by surgery or chemistry.
If it is the Law of Non Contradiction is a property of the thoughts contemplated or discovered or received by the mind, then there are no minds which can think self-contradictory thoughts and have those thoughts represent anything, because it is forbidden by the very nature of representation (representation being the subject-to-object or symbol-to-face relationship).
No demonstration has been attempted. At the moment we are still defining our terms. Neither one of us as yet has made any argument about this main question.
Yes. So far, all we have established are the facts, the datum. I have not made any attempt as yet to interpret the facts, or offer one model as superior to another. I am establishing the groundwork of the discussion: one argument is that the mental and the physical are two things, or two dimensions or two views of one thing; that other argument is that the mental and the physical are one thing. But before that discussion starts, we need to establish some basics about the mental and the physical, and agree on what terms to use to talk about them.
I have not yet even established that the mental universe is a substance, albeit I have implied that by pointing at what seem to be objective and persistent properties.
I am trying to get around to asking you about ontology, the theory of what has that strange property we call “being” or “existence”; I plan next to ask you about the means by which we know the answers to questions about such things, if we can know any answers at all, and if such questions are coherent, that is, are logically valid questions.
The opposite of materialism is immaterialism (Buddhists, Christian Scientists and Bishop Berkley are immaterialists). The opposite of both is dualism (Descartes is a dualist, and his is the default assumption of the modern age). Distinguished from all this is Thomism, which holds that the mind (or soul) is the form of the body, that is, that the animating principle is the principle that makes animate life animate as opposed to non-animate or dead. It almost sounds like a tautology when stated this way.
Me personally, I am defending the idea that human life has a physical aspect which we describe physically, and a nonphysical (mental, spiritual, vital) aspect which we do not describe physically because we cannot: the meaning of the nonphysical reality concerning human life cannot be reduced to physical terms without a loss of essential information.
The paradox is that the one can effect the other (I blush when angry and make a fist when angry, but I also get angry when I am, due merely to chemical cues in my body and blood, suffering the sensations of being tired or hungry) whereas Descartes says that no physical events can occur except when a necessary and sufficient physical cause is present. That is the paradox we are eventually going to be discussing.
I certainly believe in truths logic cannot prove. For example, I believe that math describes the universe; that moral laws are objective; that other people exist. I take these things on faith, because it would be silly and soul-destroying not to believe them. (My belief that God exists is not, by the way, in this category. That is a metaphysical certainty based on reason and confirmed by abundant experience, both empirical and mystical.But this is a topic for another day.)
There are more categories than this, but for now, all I wanted to do was forestall the specious argument that a paradox could prove that a self contradictory statement could be true. Paradoxes prove that men can phrase things ambiguously, so that a true statement can sound as if it is self contradictory without actually being self contradictory, because words have more than one meaning and more than one shade of meaning.
I find that I cannot answer this with any confidence. I am not entirely certain there is a difference. It seems to me that a mind consists of the thoughts it thinks. If I have a bucket and a rock, and I discover that the rock won’t fit into the bucket, is that a property of the rock or of the bucket? The question becomes more complicated when, in some sense, the rock is the bucket. I find this confusing and need to think some more about it.
I note that there is nothing preventing me from deliberately thinking, say, “I am both alive and dead”, as part of my internal monologue. But there does seem to be something that prevents me from believing that sentence, so I might be justified in not classifying it as a thought proper; or perhaps the thought should consist not only of the English sentence, but also of the wordless beliefs I have about it. In that case the actual thought would be “The sentence “I am both alive and dead” is meaningless”, which is reasonable.
There may be an ambiguity here. When I think of the word “elephant”, no elephant appears physically inside my head, stubby legs wiggling from my ears, trumpeting in panic. There must be a difference between the word (or the thought) and the thing the word (or thought) represents; that is, a difference between the thinker and the thing of which he thinks.
Unfortunately, in English there is only one word “thought” which refers both to (1) that thing that is being thought and (2) the thing that is being thought about.
Again, we use the word “idea” both for imaginings we invent and concepts we discover.
Let us use a more precise term: “sign” means the thought that does the pointing; “signified” means the subject to which the thought points, i.e. the thing the thought is about.
If by “thought” we mean “signs” it is perfectly reasonable (albeit I happen not to agree) to say that the thinker is his thoughts and nothing but; on the other hand, if by “thought” we include “signifieds” it is an absurdity like unto solipsism to say that the thinker is his thoughts. The thinker may be the thinker, but he cannot be the thinkee.
Wouldn’t “object of thought” be clearer than “signified” to designate anything we can think, either a concept or a material object? I think “signified” has a technical and more restricted meaning in Lacan’s psychoanalysis theory.
I don’t know who Lacan is, nor am I familiar with his theory. You, of course, may use any terminology you wish provided it is not misleading. I am not interested in semantic arguments.
Sorry, that was awkward. I was not able to edit the post as it went to moderation.
I am not interested in semantic arguments either, because I just don’t understand these terms “signifier” and “signified,” that I stumbled upon in linguistics (semiotics) while studying translation, and, unfortunately, also in theology: I had a teacher interested in Lacan’s theories — mildly interesting, but not as much as classical thought, and anyway, I never really understood those concepts. Sign or symbol and referent I can grasp, but the other two I can’t. Sorry again.
I merely wanted to make the distinction between a thought (a sign that points at a thing) and an object (that thing at which the sign points).
Provided this distinction is made, I have no objection to using any terms or labels whatsoever, provided that they are not misleading in connotation. The words “signfier” and “signified” in this context mean exactly what I say they mean and nothing else. For my purposes, the label is utterly arbitrary. So there is nothing one need to understand about these labels aside from what the discussion has established.
Apologies for the late reply; between a wedding, painting my in-laws’ house, and being invaded by Japan, I had a busy weekend. I did have in mind that ‘thoughts’ should refer to the internal processes of my consciousness, what you’ve labeled ‘signs’ and not ‘signifieds’. I would be interested to hear why you don’t agree that the mind consists of the thoughts. If we do take it to be so, it seems to me that the question “Is non-contradiction a property of the mind or of the thoughts?” is tautologous: It is encapsulated in the definition of minds and thoughts.
No apology is needed, since the Internet is not time sensitive. This conversation will be here until terrorist set off the EMP pulse that wipes out all computers and throws us into the future of James Cameron’s DARK ANGEL. No hurry. You and I have already been discussing it for over two years.
We can use ‘thoughts’ to refer to the process of consciousness if you like. In that case, your mind is not your consciousness but is your thoughts are what you call the processes of that mind: the thing done but not the doer. My only objection to this definition is that it is misleading: you are defining your “car” as the distance traveled on the odometer, without mentioning that there is a steel frame with an engine and tires and gas making it go and a motorist working the controls.
I would define the word to include more. I would say that the ‘mind’ includes the processes of thought as well as the thoughts themselves; includes awareness and self awareness; including odd stages of semiawareness as in dreams; as well as the habits built up of old thoughts or by natural inclination, called virtues and vices.
I would also say that the ‘mind’ includes the thing doing the thinking as well as the thing (whatever it is) that allows the thing doing the thinking to do what it does.
I would also say that the ‘mind’ includes the appetites, aversions, emotions, passions, will, reflections, inspirations, intuitions, imaginations, memories, forethought, promptings of the conscience and the ability to appreciate beauty and to love the truth and the ability to think in the abstract, as well as other faculties or mental tools for which we have no name. (For example, I have never heard any philosopher or psychologist give a name to that faculty of mind which enables a man groping for a word to find one.)
If your definition of ‘mind’ covers all these things, we can use it.
I think we are running into a problem of different understandings of the same word. I am not sure what distinction you are drawing between a thought, and the process of a thought; and I would include awareness and self-awareness, along with several other examples you go on to list, as being thoughts.
Rather than trying to pursue the mind/thought distinction into semantics, let me try to answer your question using a specific example. Suppose we consider the sentence “I am both alive and not-alive”. It seems to me that in the usual intuitive meaning of the words ‘mind’ and ‘thought’, my inability to believe the sentence (or to conceive of what believing it would mean) is a property of my mind; while the fact that it contradicts itself is a property of the sentence. By way of analogy we might say that the ability of a bucket to hold rocks of a certain size is a property of the bucket, but the size is a property of the rock.
I agree and welcome this useful distinction. Like you, I cannot believe nor imagine believing a self-contradicting sentence. I do think that the fact that it contradicts itself is a property of the sentence. But in what sense is my inability a property of the mind?
First, I submit that this is not a sign of a defect of mind, mine or anyone’s. A mind unable to understand the self contradiction, someone who did not and could not comprehend that the sentence was nonsensical, suffers a defect of thought, like retardation.
Second, I submit that this is not a sign of an limitation of my capacity.
I find that I can visualize a triangle and a rectangle, pentagon and octagon well enough: What I cannot visualize is a Chiliagon, a thousand-sided figure. Now, I can reason about the chiliagon, calculate the angles in a regular chiliagon; and likewise I can reason about a hypercube or other fourth dimensional hypervolumes, even if I cannot visualize one.
But nothing in the nature of thinking itself makes it so that some mind smarter than mine, particularly skilled at visualization, perhaps the mind of a Martians with an IQ of 500, should be unable to visualize a chiliagon. In other words, even if I cannot do it, I would not doubt if some other mind could do it, because it does not seem innately impossible.
But if that same Martian. no matter what his IQ, said he understood the sentence “I am both alive and not”, then I would doubt, and have firm grounds to do so. The thing is impossible.
So a thing can be impossible for me due to the limits of my mind, that I am simply not smart enough to perform the trick of visualizing a chiliagon. Call this contingently impossible. If I grew in intelligence somehow, the thing would no longer be beyond my powers. If I had better eyesight than men have, eyes like a hawk, I would see the moons of Jupiter at night.
But this other thing is impossible for the wisest as well as the most foolish. No mind, not even a divine mind, can made sense of a self contradiction. No matter how good my eyesight, I cannot see what an hour of time looks like, or a note of music.
So, in this case, which is it? If you were smarter, could you understand the sentence “I am both alive and not”?
Now, please do not tell me that you cannot imagine what a mind smarter than ours might be thinking, because while it is true that our highly intelligent Martian might know and think things beyond our ken, this topic is not beyond our ken. Twice two is still four and will always be four, as much for an idiot of IQ 50 as a supergenius of IQ 150, so why should twice two be five for a Martian of IQ 500?
If the answer to simple questions changed, if truths became untrue or untruths became true as one’s IQ went up, then there is no truth at all, since no man knows what a smarter man might think: the Martian of IQ 500 would be overruled by the Alpha Centaurian of IQ 1000, so on.
I promised I’d give answers to your remaining questions; here they are.
Yes, this does seem to be the case. From a given set of axioms there is a specific set of theorems that can be deduced, and all rational minds must necessarily find the same ones – at least, if given enough time. I have put this in terms of formal logic, but it is equally true of probabilistic reasoning: There is only one correct probability assignment for a given set of sense impressions and priors.
This seems like a question of definition. Logic is not a substance in the sense of preventing my fingers going where I like; it is a substance in the sense of preventing my mind from going where I like. Whether it is useful to distinguish between these two kinds of prevention, or not, seems rather to depend on our purpose in classification.
If I understand the question correctly, I think I would answer ‘consciousness’, or perhaps ‘awareness’. It is the conscious mind that notes the heat and light of the lamp, and the validity or invalidity of the argument.
But from your example of the lamp, it seems that you might also be referring to an underlying reality. It is the atoms of the lamp that have temperature and emit light, which they have regardless of whether I sense them or not. But I should be more specific. The lamp is a particular arrangement of atoms; that arrangement has heat and emits light, whether or not it actually exists anywhere in the universe. If entropy ran until all the universe was a mush of low-energy photons, it would still be true that “The arrangement of atoms we call a lamp has such-and-such a temperature”, even though there would be no atoms. Likewise a particular thought is invalid or valid, independent of whether anyone is thinking it at the time; but – if we suppose for a moment that the thought consists of atoms – when I think the thought, and judge it valid or invalid, I am sensing the validity of a particular instantiation of the thought, involving particular atoms, just as I sense the heat of a particular lamp at a specific time and place. It is the pattern of atoms that has heat, or validity; and the pattern in some sense exists whether or not any atoms are thus arranged at any given time. (That is, I can say “It is possible to arrange atoms thus”, and the sentence makes sense – it is even falsifiable in the weak sense that if I try long enough and fail, it is reasonable to conclude that I was wrong and atoms cannot, in fact, be arranged in that pattern.) But if I am to directly sense either one, I must have some specific atoms arranged in that pattern, at a specific location and time.
Let me suggest that reasoning about what you call “patterns” of things, either of logical propositions or of speculations about lamps, is “formal” reasoning, and that whenever we answer a question about why something is the way it is not in terms of what you call its “instantiation” but in terms of the general or abstract relation of its parts to its whole, we are giving a “formal”cause.
Ok, yes, ‘formal’ can mean ‘of or having to do with form’, and pattern is a synonym for form. So, in that sense, if I say that such-and-such a collection of atoms has the intrinsic meaning of justice because of the way the atoms lie, I suppose I am giving a formal argument. I don’t quite see where you are going with this; perhaps you could expand?
That aside, it is not clear to me that I said anything about an “abstract relation of its parts to its whole”. By ‘pattern’ I mean a list of relative positions; for example, my desk could be described in terms of putting down a single atom at an arbitrary location, then adding atoms at locations relative to the first one, ie “two fm left and one up, three fm right and one down, …”
I hope this doesn’t derail your conversation, but both of you seem to have agreed on one point which seems quite shaky to me. You both agree that the mind cannot think that which is self-contradictory.
And yet, my mind and my thoughts (and yours, I suspect) violate the Law of Non-Contradiction, every day. Don’t you ever dream? And in your dreams, don’t you ever get on a bus and notice that the bus driver, both is and isn’t your mother-in-law. And don’t you sit down on a seat on the top deck of the bus, which is also a train and you are also standing, while you watch the bus/train move (but you don’t ever get anywhere or actually move) through the city, which is also the countryside, to your home, which is a place you’ve never lived in or seen before.
Clearly, my mind is quite capable of self-contradictory thoughts. Perhaps, I am one of the great mystics, and you fellows can’t do this. But I doubt it. It actually takes effort to stick to logic. I can imagine that God could create a universe which was a dream-like succession of contradictory impressions. He might create that burrito so hot that He couldn’t eat it. And He eats it. It is because things stubbornly follow certain laws and rules that we deem them “real”, but the mind can and does entertain the self-contradictory.
Allow me to make a distinction here. Clearly thoughts and symbols CAN violate the law of non-contradiction, that is, a sentence can be constructed wherein the same thing is confirmed and denied of the same subject. The Law of Non-Contradiction holds that all such sentences are incoherent, that is, that they represent nothing in the real world.
One of the ways in which common sense assures us that the real world is real and not a dream is that it does not (or does rarely) act like a dream in the fashion you describe, with one object becoming another, and so on.
To put it another way, the brain, which is a physical object, cannot betray the law of noncontradiction, whereas the thought, which are the symbolic content, can do so easily, and with frightening frequency when we are unaware or blinded by passion or interest.