What reasoning leads you say that?
Sounds about right. You put it in quotes, indicating it’s the concept rather than the thing itself. And yes, its sensory quality, objectness, and even existence all would vanish without the conceptualizations required for each. It doesn’t leave much. Dehydrated water indeed.
I like the Mach quote.
Careful. A mirage is a sensory-shared object, yet most would designate it with words like ‘illusion’ or ‘hallucination’.
But we weren’t taking about say emotion. We were talking about mathematics, which is arguably entirely valid even outside quality and sensation and obsesrvation.
I grant that, but that brings in time. It wasn’t “real” then , after all, because now we are dying of thirst !
Basically I agree with Mach that reality/appearance is a pragmatic distinction. Hugely important, of course. A crooked stick looks straight when you pull it out of the water. This joke suggests that we privilege the constant tactual manifestation over the the inconstant visual manifestation of the “glued together perceptions” that we call a “stick.”
The tactual gets in our way. I can “just walk through” a “ghost.” Which makes the ghost a ghost, as in “unreal.”
That is a thorny issue ! I’m passionate about math and sometimes obsess over computability theory and philosophy of math. This “validity beyond all sensory-affective instantiation” is not so obvious to me.
Granted, there is something eternal-ish about some math. As if we “just can’t think around” the positive integers.
We might dive into this in the new math-platonism thread. A great topic !
It’s been at least equaled. I poked around for various talents that make a given species a specialist, something it does better than anything else. For humans, it is perhaps throwing. Nothing else can throw a projectile with any force or accuracy. Chimps and gorillas are far more muscular and evolutionarily cousins, and they can’t throw better than a horse. Humans can kill at a distance, an advantage unmatched.
Much of the mental abilities come from the calculus needed for accuracy at significant distances, unlike straight line shooting (e.g. archerfish, also bringing down prey at a distance) which requires trig at best.
But as I posted in the other thread, the intelligence may benefit the individual, but not the species in the long run. We’ve misused the gift. We must pay the wages of unfitness.
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Humas are also excellent long distance runners, far moreso than most other mammals. They may not be able to run as fast as some other mammals over short distances, but they can keep on chasing prey for such long distances without ill effect that their prey literally dies of exhaustion.
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