The way I see it, change requires time, but time does not require change, so time is logically prior to change. But “change” here would be defined as physical (spatial) activity. This allows that time, being immaterial or nonphysical itself, could have been passing, as an immaterial activity (therefore not qualifying as “change”), prior to the coming into being of physical (spatial) existence.
A big problem with joining time to space, as the fourth dimension, is that it renders the emergence of space-time, at The Big Bang, as unintelligible. People commonly say that space-time emerged. But emergence is a temporal concept, requiring time. So this means that there was time before space-time, and within that time, space-time emerged. So it makes more sense just to place time as prior to space and material existence, and say that these emerged from the passing of time.
I think change relates cause to effect through a principle, whereas time, while not itself a principle, represents a set of conditions which ground such principles, and thereby the relations of things to which the principles apply, re: succession, duration, coexistence.
Noon, e.g., is a time but not a change. While it is true there wouldn’t be a noon without a change within a series of progressive times, noon, in and of itself, represents a singular duration regardless of any succession required for it.
So, yes, time and change are inextricably linked, but that doesn’t say much of anything about either one, insofar as they remain substantially different in source and mode of representation.
Given enough thought, it is true change without its relation to time is incomprehensible, but time without change related to it is perfectly intelligible, that is, we can represent time to ourselves without anything that changes connected to it.
Time related to change is a particular time; time itself is any or all time in general.
I discussed this in the About Time OP on the other platform. Hesitant to re-hash it here, although I might recreate it for this platform at another time.
Neither. Adaptation, strictly in evolutionary sense, is genetically driven. We are not responsible for this.
Neither.
Maybe you are thinking about conditioning. In that case, we are neither responsible nor aware of the changes. We are being acted upon, yes, but we are not a willing participant, if you get the gist.
Yes, I understand. But adaptation is not what I think happens when life events happen. For example, hibernation during the winter is a metabolic change, yes, but it’s not considered an adaptation. I suppose you can see it as a temporary reduction in metabolism, not a permanent characteristic.
Well, this is the position I have taken in the OP.
Adaptation is a constant in our lives. You walk into an unfamiliar room where you have never been, and you adapt. You take on a new job and meet new people, and you adapt. You are diagnosed with cancer, and you adapt. You suffer a loss in your life, and you adapt, finding your “new normal.”
How we adjust, or cope with, changes in our environment, to a great extent, determines the level of strain, or psychological suffering, resulting from the change in circumstances.
I would like to take it to the level of neuroplasticity. This, to me, is a good example because the evidence has been shown scientifically. The research is actually more interested in old people because this is where the issue of the brain aging is more relevant.
Imagine seeing changes in the brain in just a matter of weeks or months.
If you go back to the comparison with natural selection, there the environment (taken quite broadly) selects for characteristics (taken just as broadly) that further a single goal, reproduction. (As a means to that there’s survival and everything else.)
Here, it’s not so simple to the say what the goal is. It might be useful to distinguish between two responses to a change in circumstances: a change in how the goal we retain is pursued; a change in the goal itself.
We do both, and it’s not always easy to figure out which is available and even which is desirable. Sometimes people doggedly stick to a goal when they shouldn’t (in whatever sense). Sometimes people give up on a goal when they needn’t.
That’s very interesting that you have introduced this word - neuroplasticity. This involves the actual re-wiring of the brain, and new neural circuits made.
It can involve them, but they are not necessarily required for everyday adaptation. My brain circuits are not changed by walking into an unfamiliar environment. I already have the capacities required to scan and analyze, and come up with an effective response, wired into my brain.
Au contraire. This is exactly why neuroplasticity has gained importance in the discovery of regeneration of the mind. Doing daily unfamiliar, complex things strengthens the brain.
Sorry for such a late reply. I had some business to attend to, and I also had to return to developing my formal system. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), the developments I made in this most recent phase is relevant to the discussion we are having here.
That seems to be true, yeah. To me, time has always been inferred from change. We experience that multiple, mutually exclusive facts are true, and we experience one of those facts to be phenomenologically different from the other (one feels present, the other feels past). I had reduced time to be inferred from nothing more than this, whether time be temporal progression or the temporal axis. Either one of those concepts have, to me, always been inferred/abstracted from the above.
Yep. In my formal system building, I employ extreme minimalism as a matter of methodology. I do this because it is better to under-assume and thus derive the essential need for things one is missing (and thus add them slowly), rather than over-assume and perhaps never notice the unsound assumptions that were snuck in. Years ago, I started my system with no temporal predicates whatsoever. I found that to be insufficient for my “final, most fundamental logic” purposes.
So, the next step was adding temporal predicates belonging to the present and the past. Exactly which predicates is an area of active research for me, but yeah; my phenomenology and conceptualization has been limited to the past and the present. I have put the future aside as something I would either discover to be logically inferred/constructed, or I would discover that some future-related predicate(s) would be an essential addition to my set of primitives. I was leaning towards the former being true, but after my latest round of development, the latter is seeming more plausible…
Going with the latter, I would be in good company. Husserl thought that the now was inseparable from retention and protention. What that actually means and why he believed it, I don’t know, as I haven’t done a deep dive into his philosophy. I usually don’t do deep dives into other people’s philosophies as I am too busy developing my own. Re-inventing the wheel has its benefits if you intend to revolutionize it afterwards.
The topic of the future is currently a very undeveloped part of my temporal philosophy, as I explained above, so this is a perfect opportunity for me to delve into why a grasp of the future might be necessary after all. I just wanted to add this context before continuing with my response to your points.
Changing my mind
There were some parts of your post I disagreed with, but they don’t matter too much. The crux of our discussion is what kills. Which has logical priority, time or change?
It wasn’t until this part where I truly grasped why your idea of the future’s forceful passage into the present, and then soon thereafter the past, actually entails why time is the killer after all. I was getting my ideas in a twist I think.
I believe I was conflating the existence of the difference between the actual now and the potential future, with the existence of change. But change is the effect of the potential becoming the actual. At least, that is how I see it now, after reflecting on your post. I made a simple diagram to see if understand your position correctly:
The force of time obviously cannot kill us without change, but that is because our death IS the change, it is not caused by it. The general existence of change is merely the difference between the present moment and many past moments. The difference between the present and a future moment does not exist, for there are no future moments, only future possibilities. I believe that as someone who subscribes to indeterminism, meaning I was really positioned to agree with you here from the start.
My Model 2 fails simply because it gets caught up in all of the after-thoughts, but the fundamental truth is that there must be something (most aptly called a force) that takes the potential into the actual. That something is what we call time.
The baby in the bathwater:
I still like the idea that time exists in order to resolve logical implications where the antecedent and consequent would contradict each other, if it weren’t for their separation in time. That is compatible with this model. We would say the consequent falls into the realm of possibility, and it is a detail of ALL possible world-states. It is a necessary detail of the future. Then, the force of time brings the consequent into the present, and the antecedent into the past, thus allowing them to both be true without ever contradicting each other.
If you disagree, this would probably best be debated in a different discussion, as I feel it would probably be off-topic here.
I didn’t necessarily disagree with this last we debated. I was merely pointing out the discomfort that the category of that which is merely intelligible, but insensible, brings to someone like me, who tries to maximize certainty.
I will say though, I have gained a new appreciation for how potentiality and the future relates to things that are only (at least in that moment) intelligible, and not sensible. I gained some of this insight during my system building (through somewhat adjacent topics), but my return to this discussion really developed it further.
True. I have yet to properly investigate the consequences of this for my system. My system is paracomplete already, so taking the Aristotlean approach here wouldn’t be too difficult for my system.
Conclusion:
So, you changed my mind. Time, the force that moves the future through the present and into the past, is what kills. Change is the effect, or the enaction, thereof. My death is a possibility that floats around in the future, and it is time that brings it into the actual now.
This was a very valuable discussion for me, and I thank you for the time and care you put into it.
I find it a bit funny that this is a thread about change and adaptation, and our discussion of it is a demonstration of it, in that it changed my mind.
Hi AlveK, glad to see you’re back. I was beginning to wonder what happened to you. I’m glad to see that you were not a victim of time, and happy to see that you are willing to adapt. Most TPF members are here with an attitude. They put forward some beliefs, support them to no end, and no matter how many faults are demonstrated, they refuse to change. You seem to be quite different, here to learn.
Notice, the thing inferred is logically prior, that’s what allows for the inference. It’s sort of like a necessary condition, or what is known as an essential property. So “time” can be inferred from “change”, like “animal” can be inferred from “human being”. In Aristotelian logic, the concept inferred is said to be within the other concept. So “animal” is within “human being” as a defining feature (within the definition), and “time” is within “change” as a defining feature. The necessity in the relationship enables deductive reasoning
The modern way of looking at things, as sets, tends to confuse us because it reverses the order by dealing with the particular things which are tokens, rather than the concepts themselves. We would say that the set of human beings is within the set of animals. This gets confusing when we start dealing with pure abstract concepts which do not necessarily have physical tokens. We have instances of change for example, but do we have instances of time passing? The more general the concept, the more difficult it becomes to determine the boundaries of particular instances.
I will tell you the way I conceive the now, which is probably very much consistent with Husserl’s conceptions of protension and retension.
From our experience, we notice a very distinct difference between past and future. Since they are clearly different, the present “now” naturally slides into a divisive role. It separates past from future. The influence of mathematics, and the need for measurement has made this boundary into a nondimensional point on a number line. We measure from now to now, and if those are both precise points, we get a very accurate measurement. Notice how this nondimensional characteristic puts the now as something other than the time that it divides. That supports the platonism where the human mind and its ideas are eternal, outside of time. However, modern measuring techniques, speed of light, quantum physics, have demonstrated that it is impossible to have an accurate point of “now”.
So if we revisit what the now actually is, in our experience, it’s not a division between past and future, but an overlapping of the two. This is represented with Husserl’s protension, retension. The experience of the present, now, within the living being is actually a union of past and future, rather than a division between them. This is an important difference which accounts for the relativity of simultaneity and the uncertainty principle. The now is not a point of division but a broad area of overlap. That is the second dimension of time which some philosophers speak of. I call it the breadth of the present.
Yes, I think this depicts it very well. It’s actually quite simple to imagine, but it’s contrary to the way we are trained in the mode of determinist causation, which supports scientific inquiry. So it just takes a “turning around”. We are trained to look at the past as what drives us into the future through causation. So that is our perspective, looking at the past as the driver.
However, what I think is that the living organism has an innate perspective, deep within, which is looking toward the future, survival. So to get the perspective of the conscious mind in synch with the innate perspective of the living being, we need to turn around and face the future.
When we turn toward the future we have options. Your chart shows what we’ve been discussing, perhaps the most fundamental two options, death or not death. We can characterize these two, “death” is immanent if we do absolutely nothing, and “no death” requires action. This validates the claim that the passing of time is a force which will kill us if we do nothing, and it underscores the importance of decisive action. And, since the requirement is to decide, it is clearly options which are forced upon us, therefore the force is properly located as in the future.
This sets up the entire perspective which hands priority to intention. As much as death/no death is the fundamental option, once we get comfortable in those habits of sustenance, foreseeing and avoiding danger, etc., we look for other reasons to act, “goods”. Now we have two principal reasons to adapt, one is to avoid death, the other is for the sake of some specific good.
This is still the perspective of looking backward, at the past. The difference between any two proposed moments (points as described above from the measurement need), is “change”. But look at the problem which emerges from this perspective (a problem Aristotle outlined). We describe states of being, this was the case at t1, this was the case at t2, and real “change” is what has occurred between those states. If we posit another state in between to account for the change, we still have the same issue, real change is what occurs between the states. So we’d just head toward an infinite regress that way.
To understand real “change” we have to turn toward the future, and look directly at what is occurring at the present under the force of the imposing future. So what is going on here, is that possibilities are being selected for, and actualized within the breadth of the present, and that is the real activity of “change”.
This is the tricky part. Let’s say that the force of the future simply forces the potential into being actual. Then, at the present, potentialities are actualized according to that force. If this were the case, then the supposed possibilities would have to actualize exactly according to the force, and we’d simply have a derterminist representation. The supposed potentialities (possibilities) would not be true possibilities at all, because they would be predetermined to simply get actualized by the force. So if the possibilities are supposed to be true possibilities, then we must assume that something selects from them.
Now we have the force of the future imposing real possibilities for actualization, but we need to assume something which selects from, and thereby determines through a process of selection, which possibilities will be actualized. Without the selecting agent, the actualization would be nothing more than determinist, without any real possibility.
I agree with this in principle, but notice the need for a selecting agent. If the so-called “realm of possibility” is to be true possibility, then the consequent must be selected for.
I thank you for for the encouraging words, and I’m always happy to spend the time in a productive conversation.
Sorry for the late reply! I was busy with my business and also developing my formal system, so I couldn’t reply. But now I am back to TPF for a new round of mind expansion.
I did read both your and @Meta_U’s responses before I went off-site for a while. There were seeds planted, I suspect.
I didn’t really necessarily disagree with anything in your post. I just find it somewhat insufficient. My goal is maximal certainty. I am no stranger to adding primitives to my system. I know they are essential, I just try to minimize them so that I don’t add any false primitives.
As such, I am prepared to simply say something like this:
We have phenomena, and we have the mentally abstracted universals from those phenomena. This latter category is that of intelligible objects, objects of the intellect. We grasp them not in isolation, but as inhering in phenomena.
To me, this is just unsatisfying or insufficient. I am prepared to accept that this is as deep as it goes, that there is no deeper or more elaborate explanation. But I think there might be.
Firstly, the final sentence in the above paragraph is perhaps not something all phenomenologists agree on, but it is to me an obvious reality. As such, formal-logically, I think universals ought to correspond to nothing else but predicates. I don’t believe in objectifying/reifying universals. And this belief was hard-won, as I like to exercise the via negativa in my system building. For months on end, I was creating systems with objectified universals, and I believe I killed that horse and then beat it afterwards. So now I feel confident about this.
Variables to me are truly that. They are always referring to some constant, or particular, in any one moment. The only object with variability is the symbol for the variable, and thus the full sign. I tried having variability exist at the referent level, and it did not work. So, “string variables” as I call them, are really just strings who at any point in time work like any constant symbol, but who across time take different referents.
And these variables are defined not by what they actually are at any point, but by the bounds of what they can be at any one point. This is where predicates as universals come in. Predicates always inhere in arguments. When they inhere in variables, that is basically supplying our language, our representations, with the necessary freedom to capture the full potential within these universals. We don’t really speak generally; we speak arbitrarily. We speak using statements that can be appropriated for (ie. instantiated into) any specific scenario. I’d say conventional formal logic has already done a good job of structuring itself to match this truth, but there has still always been a question of interpretation.
My first attempt at entering the realm of generality, of universality, was a more direct and actuality-centered approach. I didn’t want to involve notions of potentiality and stuff, unless I could prove to myself it was necessary.
Now, I believe I finally have. I understand that my language ultimately has to achieve generality through strings with changing referents (that might sound obvious, but I had to consider the alternatives). If my language is achieving generality through variability bounded by predicates, then the only way for us to claim that universality is intelligible or graspable is by saying we grasp that which is potential. At least, it seems like that.
Now that is a very vague claim. And that is by design. I don’t yet know exactly what all this means. I first tried a more minimal approach, sticking to that which is actual, and talking about mental imaginations, who are themselves actual as imaginations. To speak of true potentiality, whatever that means, was something I didn’t want to commit to unless absolutely necessary.
And now I think it is. And that gives me the chance to perhaps get a higher-resolution understanding of what purely intelligible objects, as opposed to phenomena, are. What is their difference, and what is their unity? I had of course considered the intuitive notion that one is the grasp of the potential, and the other is the grasp of the actual, but it is only now when that approach has become the most attractive one to me. It seems I have exhausted the simpler, more primitive approaches.
What do you think? I know my above explanation is somewhat vague, but I have only just arrived to it. I have yet to develop it formally, or even conceptually. In fact, not only did I develop much of the above just in my most recent dive back into my system, but also, a lot of the motivation for the above approach came to me just yesterday, when I properly digested MetaU’s rebuttal. So, this is very fresh to me, new territory, ripe with possibility (pun intended).
What do you think is the connection between intelligible objects and potentialities?
Tying It into the Discussion
I wanted to respond to your post, but I didn’t want to start a new discussion due to the lack of a very concrete question to base it around. So, to justify this post’s existence in this discussion, I want to make it more explicitly on-topic here.
And I don’t think that is very hard, since this discussion is about change, and I am here talking about potentiality.
Firstly, I said a lot of stuff in this thread I no longer agree with after my latest phase of system building. So, there’s of course the flip I had after discussing with MetaU, but even before that, I discarded certain ideas that used to work in my system, but no longer do. Firstly:
By this, I was basically espousing object monism. Although I still think I am a substance monist, I am no longer an object monist. I always knew the latter was a strange position, but my system happened to be in a transitional phase at that point where it truly was the most sensible position at the time. Why is not really important, because I have now solved the issues that forced me into that weird position. Here’s another position I have moved away from:
I still agree with this in spirit. However, a long-standing pillar of my philosophy, higher-order predicates, has been abandoned. As my insight deepened, I realized higher-order predicates do not make sense, though I still believe in quantification over predicates (meaning my system is a 2nd-order system). However, I was able to find the spirit of the truth of higher-order predicates in their replacement: adverbial predicates. These are predicates that hold of formulae. I don’t want to get too specific on the formal side of this, because I don’t want spoil my system too much.
Finally, I want to mention one of the claims I don’t think I agree with anymore, though I am not sure.
I don’t think I believe in identity predicates anymore. So, there are primitive predicates, and there are primitive objects. But, I thought that all things had some predicate holding of it. Even primitive objects needed a predicate that held uniquely of them. In my first response to MetaU, I espoused this view.
I thought the primitivity of identity predicates could explain the indeterminacy regarding the conditions upon which a primitive object exists. But with my newer view of predicates as a grasp of potentiality, this doesn’t make too much sense.
I think primitive objects are not defined by a predicate at all. Instead, primitive objects are sustained in a kind of transactional process with the subject that beholds them. I don’t think this process is convertible into a predicate (meaning identity predicates don’t exist), though I haven’t been completely convinced of that yet. So, what is this process?
Take my Cup A, which happens to white right now. I truly do not know whether it will remain Cup A if it is repainted black. It has no defining predicate, so of course there is no formal proof that its whiteness is an essential property. But still, there surely needs to be some rhyme or reason to whether or not it continues to be or ceases to be as it suffers different changes?
A primitive object becomes and ceases at the mercy of our focus.
At first, all there is is the one substance, filling everything. That substance is white-ish here, black-ish there, hand-ish here, and cup-ish there. Some predicates have more salience than others. Some combinations/bundles of predicates, even more so.
Our focus is drawn to a bundle of predicates, and an object is born as the unity of our focus with this bundle. Perhaps we pick up the predicate bundle and move it around. We change it, but it remains similar enough to keep a grip on our focus. And the stability of our focus, in-turn, takes off some of the burden of the object to remain self-similar.
The focus grips the object, and the object grips the focus back. See a very academic visualization of this complementarity below:
These are the two forces that keep the object in existence. The force of the object’s similarity to itself, and the force of one’s focus’ persistence on it. But it is nonetheless ultimately one’s focus that decides whether the object is or is not; but it is not able to do that without the object maintaining some similarity with itself, and perhaps equivalently, some dissimilarity from its non-self, its background.
If I leave the object, does it cease to be? Firstly, the object (as a phenomenon) ceases to be for the whole time it is not present with me. But, it can return/I can return to it. What dictates whether this return is possible?
Well, this is where something adjacent to identity predicates get a semi-revenge. You see, throughout my interaction with the object, some predicates will have been constantly holding of the object. Some of those predicates were describing the object’s static nature at any point, whereas some of the other predicates were describing its dynamic nature.
None of these predicates need to be essential for, or eternally holding of, the object. But if they were the “final word” on the object last I interacted with it, then they will need to be mostly intact by the time I return to the object, lest I will not recognize it. If I don’t recognize it; if I don’t ever find it again, even if it in an objective sense is still present around me, then the object-as-a-phenomenon will have ceased to be. As a phenomenologist, this is what I am primarily interested in. “Objective objects” are constructs and subject to different rules, and for me, they’d fall within the topic of science, objective idealism and intersubjectivity. I am in my system building still developing the subjective phenomenology of reality, which I think is more fundamental and must therefore be dealt with first.
So, every primitive object’s existence is predicated on holding, or regaining, our focus. Reflective objects, defined atop these primitive objects, are subject to the same boundaries, but they loaded with additional criteria. For example, the reflective object that is Cup A, but it must be white, is contingent on Cup A, but the opposite is not true. If Cup A is repainted, then the aforementioned reflective object would cease to be, but Cup A would persist. Or would it?
If Cup A could keep a hold on my focus throughout its repainting, then yes. Yes, it would survive that change. And realistically, if I myself repaint Cup A, then it will almost certainly succeed in that.
But, if someone else takes Cup A when I am not looking, repaints it, and then puts it somewhere new… then to me, it would probably seem like Cup A simply ceased to be, and a new cup happened to appear somewhere else.
So, in short: Primitive objects are ultimately sustained by the force of one’s focus, and this force is somewhat dependent on the object’s self-similarity across time. The need for self-similarity is especially strong when there is a discontinuity in one’s focus on the object. It is allowed to change much more drastically in front of me than when I am not looking.
I don’t really know how we may account for primitive objects in any other way. And I don’t know how we may account for anything without primitive objects.
They live and die by our focus, and our focus relies on their self-similarity across time. An object may change as much as it wants, so long as that change is sufficiently orderly and gradual so as to allow our focus on it to persist.
A question:
What kind of object is the 1st person pronoun, the “I”?
When we have a universal predicate, we have its argument. This is an arbitrary object. This is a variable, a string variable (see above).
But “I” could also perhaps be a primitive object…
The latter changes, only requiring the persistence of our focus on it to survive. The former however, changes at two levels. At the string/sign level, it changes its referent. At the referent level, it changes by virtue of being some primitive object.
What is the “I”? Is it a variable with a defining predicate? Or is it a primitive object?
Is an “I” a primitive object that survives only by its own self-focus? Or is an “I” a string variable, and if so, which are its possible referents? To relate this question to my developments above; I think we probably need to figure out how we grasp the boundaries of our own potential. Am I nothing more than my own self-focus? Or do I have some defining universal predicate that I have yet to make explicit? I am currently leaning more towards the former option… This has big ramifications for if and how we may we die.
I have long had an intuition that we are immortal at a certain level. That our consciousness always lives on. My ego is definitely killable, but I am not so sure my consciousness is. If my consciousness is merely its own self-focus, then maybe that accounts for how it is immortal. Our ego can then be a more reflective object defined atop that primitive object that is nothing more than the self-focus.
By transcendental, I suspect you are referring to Kant? I am not very well-read on transcendental idealism and what that entails.
But, since you are Model 3 guy, why do you think things change? What drives or permits change? Perhaps nothing? When I ask “Why do things change?”, is your answer a simple “Why not?”
Secondly, how do you feel about a universe with NO patterns in its change, and thus, no way to measure time? Do you think this concept is somehow impossible? And if it is not impossible, then how does one account for the fact that it seems even such a universe would also have time? There is no pattern to its change, so by Model 3, no way for the clock to tick. But, it still intuitively seems like this universe would have a succession to its events, nonetheless. Physicists would have a hard time measuring time, but they’d still experience one thing happening after another, no?
Lastly, I want to ask you what, if anything, you think of Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) model.
Model 3 makes me think about this, because Penrose believes that when you take the limit of the universe’s evolution as t \rightarrow \infty, then all particles will have decayed into massless particles (dubious given the Standard Model, but let’s proceed for the sake of argument).
Massless particles have a proper time equal to 0. They do not experience time. In General Relativity, you don’t have a measure of space without a measure of time. So, Penrose argues that at the end of the universe, there are no more time-tellers, and so spacetime loses its scale.
This loss allows for a conformal rescaling that equates the infinitely expanded, massless universe to the infinitely compressed start of the universe, at/before the Big Bang. There is no crunch, there’s just a smooth redefinition through loss of scale, going from infinitely big to infinitesimally small, because they are equivalent without time-tellers. Once it’s done however, the universe regains its time-tellers through the infinitely hot and dense conditions of this Big Bang. Related to this is Penrose’s argument that the gravitational entropy of his massless universe is equal to that of the very start of the Big Bang; both being equal to zero.
I might be wrong, but this mind-boggling take on cosmology seems to necessitate a Model 3 view of time. That losing the time-tellers is enough to lose time seems explicitly to be a Model 3 stance.
Good explanation, very clearly written. I’m going to take issue with it, but as we’re talking metaphysics it is going to be challenging to articulate my objection. I will start here:
I will take issue with the expression that universals are ‘mental abstractions’. That is close to two kinds of view of universals, conceptualism and psychologism. Conceptualism is the theory that universals—general concepts like “beauty” or “humanity”—are only real within the mind as mental constructs, rather than independently so. Psychologism is a more modern term but similar in meaning, in that it too wishes to depict universals (numbers, logical laws, etc) as products of the mind, not as recognised by the mind. And there’s a difference.
On the other hand, I definitely heed the warning about reification and agree that in no way are universals objects. In classical literature, they are spoken of as abstract objects or intelligible objects, but I don’t believe they are objects in any sense but the metaphorical. I would say they are nearer to acts. When we grasp a number or mathematical relationship, the word ‘grasp’ is more than figurative - the mind holds the idea correctly. It’s an activity in that sense.
It is often said that universals are predicates which inhere in a substance (in the proper use of substance) but I’m also wary of describing them in wholly linguistic terms. Of course it is true that much of analytic philosophy wishes to analyse everything whatsoever in linguistic terms, but I don’t believe this truly comes to terms with the kind of reality they possess.
This is why I say that I believe that abstract ‘objects’ can be described as real, but not necessarily as existent. To say that, for example, the number 7 exists, is to reify the concept as object, when it is the grasping of specific quantity. And while the number 7 is in no way dependent on your or my mind, it can nevertheless only be grasped by a mind. That is what is meant by an ‘intelligible object’, bearing in mind the caveat about the use of that term in this context.
Forms…are radically distinct, and in that sense ‘apart,’ in that they are not themselves sensible things. With our eyes we can see large things, but not largeness itself; healthy things, but not health itself. The latter, in each case, is an idea, an intelligible content, something to be apprehended by thought rather than sense, a ‘look’ not for the eyes but for the mind. This is precisely the point Plato is making when he characterizes forms as the reality of all things. “Have you ever seen any of these with your eyes?—In no way … Or by any other sense, through the body, have you grasped them? I am speaking about all things such as largeness, health, strength, and, in one word, the reality (ouisia) of all other things, what each thing is” (Phd. 65d4–e1). Is there such a thing as health? Of course there is. Can you see it? Of course not. This does not mean that the forms are occult entities floating ‘somewhere else’ in ‘another world,’ a ‘Platonic heaven.’ It simply says that the intelligible identities which are the reality, the whatness, of things are not themselves physical things to be perceived by the senses, but must be grasped by reason (p 28).
This, of course, is the original form of metaphysics, before it was even taken up by Aristotle. But I still think it conveys the point about the kinds of reals that universals are. They’re not things, but they’re also not just thoughts. They are that to which thought itself must conform.
Well, whatever the I is, it is not an object. It is that to whom or which experience occurs. But you can never grasp the identity of the subject for the very simple reason that ‘the eye cannot see itself, the hand cannot grasp itself’ (a maxim that is conveyed in the Indian philosophical scriptures, The Upaniṣads.)
Speaking of which there was a famous Indian guru, died 1960, who’s entire teaching was based on the question ‘Who am I?’ It was the central self-inquiry method taught by Ramana Maharshi to realize the true Self (Ātman) by tracing the “I-thought” to its source.
Here, I’m not wanting to evangalise or advertise Ramana’s teaching, but only to point out the central role of the question ‘Who am I?’ in his Advaita (non-dual) philosophy. Advaita seeks to impart to the seeker his/her ‘true identity’ as Ātman rather than as the transient personality or ego with which s/he usually identifies [more info].
