Not sure I would know. My intuition says that they are perhaps a function of perception and intellectual models, language, etc, the panoply of contingent factors, with some constraints thrown in from the “reality” we find ourselves in. Your thoughts?
If I ask you to give an arithmetical answer, you are obliged to give the right answer, if you can.
‘What we call “reality” symbolised by the letter “R” in the diagram consists of an elaborate paper-maché construction of imagination and theory fitted between a few iron posts of obseervation’ ~ John Wheeler, ‘Law without Law’.
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You may well have hit on something and the notion that we are talking about a kind of poetry or “jazz” as our friend J-J has said is intriguing to me.
I’m not sure I fully understand this point. Can you expand a little on it?
Thanks for this. It’s difficult, but I get a sense of the meaning.
Not sure you are commenting on Joshs via Derrida, but isn’t he (D) suspicious of any stable thing or alleged “essence” that underpins our language or experience? Is it possible for us to reach anything in its purity, untouched by interpretation? I guess that’s one of the key questions that seems to flow from this discussion. But It seems that for Derrida this is similar to Kant, although much stronger we have appearances, but can never reach a form/essence/eidos.
You may be right about this, although I suspect there are some who can do it. Some people seem to have a gift for inhabiting multiple realities with concomitant immunity to contradiction.
Cool. I was interested in what you would say on this.
Can I ask you then, in simple terms, what would it mean to ground logic? What follows from that idea: does it involve some kind of guarantor of logic’s validity or reliability that would otherwise be missing, and without which our discourse would collapse into meaninglessness?
But isn’t that post-modern philosophy’s general aversion to meta-narratives and the suggestion of a philosophical absolute?
What I’m grappling with is that ideas - by that I don’t mean, whatever happens to occupy one’s stream-of-conscoiusness at any given time - really are structures within consciousness. They are the necessary form that thought must take - hence the whole idea of ‘logical necessity.’ (But I also should add, this is not ‘idolizing’ logic - logic can be sound but convey nothing meaningful.)
Yes. The beauty of
I hear you. That “thrust against the limits of language” is itself a part of existence. Existence is self-transcending. We are the system trying to climb out of itself.
Yes. Although describing it as a “general aversion” makes it sound as if they are determined to uncover nothing in their quest, and I suspect some postmodernists are disappointed by their conclusions.
Yes, and you may be right. I’m agnostic on this, but I’m trying to survey the options as best I can. I can’t help but be “turned on” by more anti-foundationalist tendencies, however. I don’t think we can help what ideas attract us even if they scare us.
A deep issue ! In an important sense, zero was invented. But for us now it is just “there” and “obvious.” I did not construct 0, and I did not construct the sign “consciousness.” I was “thrown” into a world where these signs were being traded. I had to learn to get myself mostly “understood” by joining in.
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To anticipate a possible objection that if all coherences are globally incoherent then likewise the thesis that all coherences are globally incoherent would be globally incoherent: it’s a fair challenge. Interestingly it points to the ambiguity between determinacy and indeterminacy ―to the indeterminacy of determinacy and the determinacy of indeterminacy, The global incoherence of local coherence and the local coherence of global incoherence, all of which would accord nicely with Zyporyn’s own ideas I think.
As I see it, it is the ‘black and white’, binary character of language which creates an illusion of absolute determinacy. For survival in the pre-linguistic “analogue” world of animal perception and action, determination, that is identification or recognition of things, only needs to be “good enough”, that is unambiguous enough to be workable. I would certainly agree that my thesis, and Zyporyn’s, cannot themselves be absolutely unambiguous. They too only need to be “good enough” to get the point across.
I agree. It’s helpful to consider animals emitting this or that cry when this or that predator is near. These cries are things in the world, vibrations of the air.
We inherit a stubborn belief in “immaterial meaning.” Which casts a shadow of meaninglessness on everything else.
Yes. And, in an important sense, the world itself is metaphorical. I mean that we “live” metaphors.
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I think this view makes the most sense when applied to simple perceptions. “There’s a package on the porch.” But what about “open texture” ?
But let’s tackle a more difficult example.
How does “a true proposition maps directly onto some aspect of reality” map directly onto some aspect of reality ? (I am assuming that you would call it “true.” )
Is reality self-referential ?
A very important point! It is an anachronistic attitude that deems "mere matter’ to be necessarily meaningless. There really is no mere matter without forms, and forms have all kinds of significance to all kinds of beings, but the formations of matter do not really add anything extra, since matter without form is unintelligible, unimaginable.
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Actually it was discovered, and its discovery was itself a revolution in mathematics (see Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.) That discovery, first hinted at by Babylonian tallying methods, and then formalised by an Indian mathematician, made modern mathematics possible, as previous arithmetic was hopelessy cumbersome because without it there could be no decimal notation. But it faced enormous hostility in Europe based on Aristotle’s hostility towards the vacuum (something ‘abhorred by nature’. India had no such prohibition possibly because of the Buddhist acceptance of śūnyatā (emptiness) which was culturally alien to Greek philosophy.)
And another point is that zero was never something that could be encountered. It is the conceptual placeholder par excellence.
This reminds me of Derrida, in a good way, because I like Derrida.
From Saussure: Every speaking of a word is unique, but it gets categorized with an iterable sound “image.” So we have a function — that we all learn to “compute” in order to hear English — that maps an infinite domain of fugitive vocalizations to a finite set of words.
This is just one aspect of “unambiguous enough to be workable.”
I say “in an important sense invented” and you say “actually discovered.” But doesn’t that assume the conclusion you prefer ? What was zero like before it was discovered ?
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Another way to frame this is as a pursuit for what is constant in the flux.
Imagine a 100x100 square grid of 10000 pixels. Each pixel can be on or off, white or black. But that’s the only variation we allow. This grid is the “form” of our toy world, which has 2^10000 possible states.
Yes. But doesn’t this suggest construction in some sense ? Zero emerged here rather than there, because of what else was around or not around. Where or when or how exactly does sunyata become a number/numeral ? Because I see the connection.
That seems rather an odd question to me. Zero can’t be ‘like’ anything, as it isn’t anything. It is precisely the absence of anything. But before the concept of zero was discovered, it was impossible to develop a practical method of calculation. (I remember reading many years ago about the cumbersome nature of arithmetic in the Roman Empire. I don’t recall the details but it’s not hard to imagine how difficult it must have been.) But it’s another point on the Platonist score-card - the concept of zero was available in principle all along, waiting to be discovered, and the cultures that found it first gained an enormous practical advantage from so doing.
In any case, the larger question is ‘maths invented or discovered?’ That is a long-standing dispute in philosophy of mathematics. Suffice to say mathematical platonists believe the latter, although once having discovered the natural numbers, presumably such things as imaginary number systems can be invented. (There’s a saying ‘God invented the integers, all else is the work of man’.)