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Re:Arguing against belief in 'abstract objects' 1 Year, 11 Months ago
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creativesoul wrote:
[Szav's point follows if] and only if we assume that semantic reference/concept subsumption entails all possible existence.
Szav:
Well, look at it this way: the concept of existence itself is a concept that we have in space and time. So it seems to me as if the concept of existence would be intrinsically spatiotemporally determined.
Agreed, while holding to the earlier distinction between names of things and the things themselves. I am thinking here that existence, space, and time do not have to conform to our concept of them.
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Re:Arguing against belief in 'abstract objects' 1 Year, 11 Months ago
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I don't know if this will help, and it is not very well articulated, but will give it a try.
'Being' is not the same as 'existence'. Being is irreducibly first-person: it is 'knowing-being', that to whom everything occurs. This is represented in Schopenhauer as the Subject. Also, in Kant, as I understand it, space and time are primary intuitions, which provide the ground for all our other perceptions.
We cannot perceive anything outside the space-time matrix. But being is that within which space-time occurs. Being itself is logically prior to it.
I think the confusion has come with the very idea of 'abstract objects'. The Stanford article on Abstract objects says that these are of very recent pedigree, perhaps only 20th Century. I see them as a failed attempt to represent 'immaterial substances' or 'non-corporeal beings'.
'That which transcends space and time' is 'pure being' or 'the ground of being' or 'urgrund'. It is impossible to objectify or know this through discursive means. The operations of the normal intellect cannot possibly do that. This is why it is in the domain of mystical awareness, starting with Plato, Plotinus, and then incorporated into monastic disciplines in the East and West (and now mostly abandoned).
Anyway that is the direction in which the solution lies, I think, and possibly what is occurring to you on one level or another. Very sketchy I know.
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Re:Arguing against belief in 'abstract objects' 1 Year, 11 Months ago
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creativesoul wrote:
... while holding to the earlier distinction between names of things and the things themselves[,] I am thinking here that existence, space, and time do not have to conform to our concept of them.
Would I have reason to call something "existent" if I couldn't apply my concept of existence to it? Inasmuch as our concepts of space, time, and reality in general are derived from protoconceptual representations, then the thing is that the conformity of these things to our conceptual representations of them devolve on a prior conformity of our concepts to the objects themselves (in order to their being derived therefrom). But even so, this is something of an aside, for I don't think it makes ultimate sense to talk about "existence apart from our ideas of it" when the ideas in question are too general and primitive to admit of being delineated in an alternative way.
Some aspects of our innate conceptual schemes, or sorting principles, or whatever, if mapped by synthetic truths, could be therefore denied absolute validity. But if space and time are analytically true of everything we can possibly conceive, then spatiotemporal description would be absolutely valid of everything, too.
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Re:Arguing against belief in 'abstract objects' 1 Year, 11 Months ago
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Szav,
The difference between our views seems, to me at least, to be had in the level of certainty placed upon the idea that nothing can exist beyond, outside, or independent of space and time. I feel that we are both quite certain that we cannot make sense of the idea, and definitely cannot describe such an existence. You've given my own grounds for that conclusion, perhaps better than I could myself. However, from our only frame of reference, I feel that it is impossible not only to describe another frame, but it is equally impossible to determine one way or the other if another is possible via unknown means of which we necessarily have no ability to imagine.
Therefore, I will acknowledge the possibility while denying anything further.
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Re:Arguing against belief in 'abstract objects' 1 Year, 11 Months ago
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creativesoul wrote:
Szav,
The difference between our views seems, to me at least, to be had in the level of certainty placed upon the idea that nothing can exist beyond, outside, or independent of space and time. I feel that we are both quite certain that we cannot make sense of the idea, and definitely cannot describe such an existence. You've given my own grounds for that conclusion, perhaps better than I could myself. However, from our only frame of reference, I feel that it is impossible not only to describe another frame, but it is equally impossible to determine one way or the other if another is possible via unknown means of which we necessarily have no ability to imagine.
Therefore, I will acknowledge the possibility while denying anything further.
The concept of possibility is the only one I can think of right now that I'm not going to say I'm totally confident is spatiotemporally limited. On the one hand, it seems (to me) that my earlier arguments should hold for this concept/word, too, but on the other, I can also admit for now that there seems to be something about sheer... maybe epistemic possibility... that allows for some kind of extradimensionality to it, maybe.
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Plotin
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Re:Arguing against belief in 'abstract objects' 1 Year, 11 Months ago
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Szavieur wrote:
creativesoul wrote:
Szav,
The difference between our views seems, to me at least, to be had in the level of certainty placed upon the idea that nothing can exist beyond, outside, or independent of space and time. I feel that we are both quite certain that we cannot make sense of the idea, and definitely cannot describe such an existence. You've given my own grounds for that conclusion, perhaps better than I could myself. However, from our only frame of reference, I feel that it is impossible not only to describe another frame, but it is equally impossible to determine one way or the other if another is possible via unknown means of which we necessarily have no ability to imagine.
Therefore, I will acknowledge the possibility while denying anything further.
The concept of possibility is the only one I can think of right now that I'm not going to say I'm totally confident is spatiotemporally limited. On the one hand, it seems (to me) that my earlier arguments should hold for this concept/word, too, but on the other, I can also admit for now that there seems to be something about sheer... maybe epistemic possibility... that allows for some kind of extradimensionality to it, maybe.
Good; I know the trouble of '1984'. It had a moral theme based on people being able to think when needed to.
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Last Edit: 2010/06/21 13:14 By Plotin.
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