| | I very much appreciate the intelligence of your responses. You raise many good points which deserve more attention than what has heretofore been given them. I hope, therefore, that you'll find my next few posts to be products of significantly more deliberation, and not so hastily written as to require your grammatical correction.
What a thing IS is not determined “by the way we see it acting”; how we IDENTIFY it is determined by the way we see it acting. A thing’s identity is independent of our identification of it. Whatever it is, it must have the characteristics it possesses and no others. Included in those characteristics is its mode of action under a given set of conditions. It could only have different characteristics if it were different. I would dispute the point that whatever a thing is, it must have the characteristics it possesses and no others. True enough, it must retain its essential characterists, otherwise it would cease to be itself. But acquisition or loss of accidental characteristics ought not to have a substantial affect on what an entity is. For example, if Socrates were to acquire the accidental property of a tan, though we could refer to Socrates before and after his tanning as 'white Socrates' and 'tanned Socrates' (respectively), we would in both cases still be referring to the same entity, viz. Socrates.
You would have it that among an entity's essential characteristics is "its mode of action under a given set of conditions." I agree with this much, but deny the inference you make from this, i.e. that "it could only have different characteristics if it were different." This is because I maintain that the laws of nature could be changed such that an entity could be placed under conditions completely foreign to those permitted by our own universe. Under these inconceivable conditions, the entity would necessarily be shown to have inconceivable characteristics, according to your inference. But this is absurd, because, as you've rightly said, among an entity's essential characteristics is its mode of action under a given set of conditions, though here I've suggested a case in which, as it were, the conditions of the conditions have been changed, such that the entity takes on different characteristics (based on its acting under different universal circumstances) even though the entity itself has not changed.
My point, then, is a practical one. Though we are justified in believing that "the future will resemble the past, certeris paribus", it is not as if such a proposition is a necessary truth. For in the statement "the future will resemble the past, ceteris paribus" lies the hidden assumption that "all things being equal" only applies to what is possible within this universe, under its own particular laws of nature. But this universe and its particular laws of nature are not logically necessary. (I shall discuss this point later).
I wrote, "When we describe things in our universe, we don't just describe them in themselves, though that is certainly the lion's share of metaphysics. We also describe them with reference to those things which act upon them, like the laws of physics. If the laws of physics were significantly altered, then things would be acting very differently, though they may not become much different in themselves."
You responded:
Again, I am not talking about their descriptions, but about the things themselves. You are confusing identity with identification. I stressed the descriptions of things over things-in-themselves in order to emphasize the contingency of these things, and to show that what you take to be the fundamental identity of a thing (as opposed to its description) is in fact conditioned by a contingent universe.
William wrote:
You accept your parents as loving you, because their actions reflect it. This is not faith; it is hard evidence. To this, I responded, "No, I accept it to be true that my parents love me based on hard evidence."
To which William wrote:
Same difference. No, not the same difference. Faith is intellectual assent, whereas hard evidence is what influences intellectual assent. You speak as though faith merely means 'the absence of evidence', such that faith and hard evidence compose a disjunction. But this is simply not how I'm employing the word.
Indeed, though you might often hear people say, "He had no evidence; he took it on faith", this is not the way I use the word. What I mean by 'faith' is 'intellectual assent' or 'belief'.
William wrote:
If we say, your perceptions “represent” the external world, the implication is that what you’re aware of is a representation of the external world, not the external world itself.
I would say that perceptions represent the external world to us, and would hold that we are aware of the external world insofar as we are aware of our perceptions of it.
According to Objectivism, concepts (including mathematical concepts) are not a priori, but are acquired experientially. Man is born tabula rasa (as a blank tablet), for he can have no knowledge of reality prior to any contact with it. In my opinion, the tabula rasa understanding of the human mind is both philosophically and scientifically repugnant. Philosophically, the idea is without merit, since it somehow maintains that necessary truths like 1+1=2 and the absurdity of the conjunction A^~A can be deduced from particular representative examples. It makes much more sense to say that geometrical, mathematical, and logical truths exist latently in the human mind, and that experience is what triggers our awareness of them. The tabula rasa notion also flies in the face of scientific studies, which have shown that the brain is in a certain sense 'preprogrammed' to organize and assess conceptual relationships and hardwired to react in certain ways to sense-perception, to monitor certain emotions, and to process thought in terms of language.
To give a simple example, the concept 5 refers to a quantitative aspect of reality, namely |||||, and is acquired by observing different instances of such a quantity, like five oranges, five pencils, five lines, etc. No, the concept of 5 is present in the mind before the mind perceives 5 entities as |||||. For, when the mind perceives |||||, it understands them to be 5 by a correspondence between the inherent concept of 5 and its application to reality.
I was simply stressing that what you perceive must be something other than an aspect of your awareness (i.e., a mental representation of the external world); it must be the external world itself, because in order to be conscious, a consciousness must be conscious of something other than itself. If you believe the mind to be tabula rasa, you are forced to admit this. But tabula rasa seems dubious at best. Furthermore, I find that, even if your principle could be true for us, it could not be true for God. For God is not a composite of mind and body, but is rather pure consciousness, such that his self-awareness is immediate and timeless. Indeed, God's understanding is his being, whereas our understanding is derivative of our being. There is no 'external world' for God, since God is immediately present to all things as a cause is to its effect.
I don’t think you’re getting the point of my argument. “Hallucinatory” means at variance with reality, but you can’t know what “at variance with reality” means if you don’t know what reality is to begin with. If you don’t know what reality is, then you can’t know what it means to deviate from it. I can know what an hallucination is only because I recognize it as departing from what I know to be the real world.
This is arguing in a circle. You cannot argue that our perceptions represent something 'real' because they must needs have access to the real in order to come up with the notion of 'imaginary'. Indeed, imaginary could just mean 'at variance with what is perceived to be real'. Take the brain in a vat example once again. Now, as I've said, it is possible to stimulate the brain in such a way as to make it perceive things which, from a third person perspective, do not exist. A supercomputer could be attached to a brain-in-a-vat, such that the brain's mind would be subjected to extremely complex stimulations. The brain could be duped into believing that its perceptions represented real things, though it would in fact be the case that the supercomputer was merely triggering the brain to perceive certain non-existent things. Now, from the perspective of the mind inhering in the brain-in-a-vat, this would all seem real. In fact, its perceptions would be indistinguishable from the perceptions of the scientists monitoring its activity. But the scientists would know that their perceptions were actually real (or might not they also be the victims of the same sort of scientific experiment?). Anyway, suppose these same scientists, in order to be philosophically irritating, opted to have the programmed supercomputer create 'dreams' for the brain-in-a-vat. Let's say they deliberately designed these dreams to be incoherent, perhaps, or fanciful, so that the brain-in-a-vat would be convinced that they were at variance with what he perceived (falsely) to be reality. A dream within a dream...And the brain-in-a-vat would not require access to the 'real world' in order to be capable of imagining an unreal world. His imagined world would be part of a greater imaginary world, from the third person perspective.
William wrote:
...[A] person who exhibits conscious behavior is actually conscious. And we can tell the difference between conscious-like behavior and conscious behavior. Again, since we are not capable of crawling inside the minds of other people, all we can strictly conclude is that a person exhibits conscious-like behavior (i.e. that he acts in a way which appears to be conscious). How are we to know persons are actually conscious? We can only be aware of our own consciousness. Indeed, we will soon be capable of creating algorithms for computers so that they will be able to 'communicate' with us. But this is just input-output. The computer receives certain symbols and it knows which signals to fire back. It doesn't really know the language, though. It doesn't fully understand what it's doing. There is no supervening consciousness.
I wrote that "invoking the law of causality begs the question" with respect to consciousness being behind conscious-like behavior.
William responded:
Causal inferences are entirely legitimate. It does not beg the question for me to infer that if I leap from a tall building, I will plummet to my death. It is a valid and reasonable inference, one based on the law of causality. You misunderstood me. I agree that causal inferences, when employed properly, are entirely legitimate. But to say that you can draw the inference from conscious-like behavior to a consciousness behind such behavior is conclusion-begging. You've done nothing but assume that actual consciousness underlies conscious-like behavior.
On the contrary, what you’re accepting as true is that it is very likely you will be alive tomorrow. Truth is a property of propositions, and the proposition that you are accepting as true is not that you will necessarily be alive tomorrow, but that it is very likely that you will be alive tomorrow. Again, conflating actuality and necessity. Of course I wouldn't accept the proposition "I necessarily will be alive tomorrow," since it's not even necessary that I exist at all. If my parents hadn't met, I would not be here. I rather accept the proposition "I will be alive tomorrow" to be actually true.
The law of identity is a necessary truth (there is no other kind), and existence IS identity. Everything – every existent -- must act according to its nature. To deny this truth is to endorse a contradiction. It is a necessary truth that birds can fly but man cannot, that ice can float but rocks cannot, that gold is a precious metal but tin is not. Every true proposition is necessarily true in the sense that it could not possibly be false. You simply do not understand what necessity is. Absolute necessity takes the form: Necessarily, x. You are talking about necessity of the consequence, i.e. if x, then (necessarily) y. For you are saying, 'Given the universe as it is, and the laws of nature as they are, (necessarily) men cannot fly.' But I object, for I say that, since it is not necessary that the universe exist or be like ours, it does not follow as a necessary truth that men cannot fly. On the contrary, I believe there are logically (and, of course, metaphysically) possible worlds in which men can and do fly.
Well, if you live for the sake of obeying God’s commandments, then if God tells you to sacrifice your life for some cause or for the welfare of others, you must do it. You must obey God’s commandments rather than pursue your own self-interest. And that, I submit, is a form of suicide. False. Catholics take it as a maxim that obeying God's commandments will always be in our (at least long-term) self-interest.
You are placing the commandments of God above your own needs and values. There is no such opposition.
Catholics cannot practice artificial birth control, nor can they have abortions. So, if a woman becomes pregnant accidentally, but cannot afford another child, she must carry the fetus to term and then make sure that she finds a decent home for her offspring. If she cannot find a suitable foster home, she must raise the child herself, even though doing so can take years off her life. A Christian must obey the dictates of her religion, even if it conflicts with her own her interest and her survival requirements. This is because Christians, in placing the interests of God above their own selfishness, truly act in their own self-interest by demonstrating a love for God, a love which God ratifies by offering them communion with him in eternity.
"Survival requirements"? The human mortality rate is 100%, William. Even the universe is tending toward a heat-death.
-Leibniz
(Edited by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on 2/12, 6:48am)
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