Too much then.
Read somewhere that bees can count up to 4. 
Right. Try to explain the concept ‘prime number’ to them.
There are the Piraha tribe of the Amazon and the Khoi-khoi of South Africa who can count only up to 2/3. Their number system goes 1, 2, (3), many. There’s no oneth and twoth. Instead we have first and second; after that we have third, fourth and so on. We still can’t count beyond 2 e.g. monotheism, occasionally ditheism but after that it’s polytheism.
Not all living conscious beings can count (?).
That humans are good at math is also a myth. Math is one of the most difficult subjects in school.
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Of course ‘humans are good at math’! In fact until very recently with AI those abilities were exclusive to us.
Alfred Russel Wallace noted the extreme discrepancies between the mathematical abilitlies, and absence thereof, between indigenous peoples and Blaise Pascal, saying that as the entire species of h.sapiens is the product of the same evolutionary processes ‘We conclude, then, that the present gigantic development of the mathematical faculty is wholly unexplained by the theory of natural selection, and must be due to some altogether distinct cause’ (‘Darwinism applied to Man’.)
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I take back what I said. Humans are good at math. It’s just that mathematical pedagogy is wanting in many ways. I read an old book titled Mathematics for Elementary Teachers and each chapter on a new concept is accompanied by a short account of the difficulties students face with the concept being introduced. It was an illuminating experience for me. The book comes with manipulables that can aid in understanding ideas such as the Hindu-Arabic base 10 number system. I spent near a year reading the book with good results.
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Well surely the fact that Charles Pinter, subject of this thread, was an esteemed maths professor means something!
What do you think Schopenhauer means by ‘the world is idea’? Can you see the connection with Pinter?
Hypothesis non fingo. I haven’t the credentials for a substantive interpretation. I can say this though: the preeminence of the mind, alas, couldn’t provide free will.
I’ll presume that is a decision you’ve arrived at.
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Perhaps, I don’t know. Here it isn’t the naturalistic framework that forces the conclusion though. Schopenhauer clearly stated that a man can do what he wills but he can’t will what he wills. It’s the fly in the soup.
Not at all.
The subject of my thread was “Imagine That…and it was so!” and the OP was giving another thought experiment related to the quote by Charles Printers own thought experiment to show that his was faulty.
In the opening post I used something you had linked to in Tom Storms “For the idealists, why do we have apparent materialism?” thread where JJ wrote “I’d like to get a sense of your current position.” and you replied with " As far as Charles Pinter’s book is concerned, here is my review. That should make it pretty clear. As far as my general philosophical outlook, see The Mind-Created World (which also mentions Pinter. Incidentally, I corresponded with him briefly in 2023 — he has since died. But I sent a copy of the review to his son Nicholas Pinter, a professor of Earth Sciences, who was very positive about it.)"
I subsequently followed the link, read the article and noted the fault of reasoning and decided to create a thread based in the particular line I quoted when I made the opening post - the line you have since argued I got wrong until I pointed out that it was you who got that wrong and which you then replied with “I suppose you can read it that way. I took it to mean ‘a universe devoid of life’.”
It was you who requested that my OP be merged with your thread here…
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Wayfarer TPF Supporter October 1 |
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I’ve requested this OP be merged with the existing OP Mathematics of Idealism which is about the Charles Pinter book. I would prefer to respond in that thread, and will wait and see if it’s merged.
…and as a result, my opening post was flagged and my thread removed.
Your post was flagged for moderator attention: the community feels something about the post requires manual intervention by a staff member.
This post was flagged by the community and a staff member opted to remove it.
None of which would matter, except that clearly you are not interested in discussing the actual content of the post you got flagged even that you requested it be moved to this thread, so perhaps you might think about asking for my thread to be reinstated on the grounds that you got it wrong and did not want to actually discuss my post, assuming this is not just an effort on your part to mother hen and see this as an effective way to bury anything contrary to that?
I addressed what you described as a ‘fault of reasoning’ after the threads were merged.
This has been an interesting discussion to me. Learned a lot in the dialogue between you and @j_j, @Astorre and others.
I want to put this question another way, hopefully, without losing any of the sense of the original question. I’m seeing the triangle as representative of something that could be subjective or not just subjective, and the coins as a stand-in for the ‘ontologically real’. We need something ‘ontologically real’ to reconsider the ontological reality of ‘the subjective’.
So the question could be, “is the triangle ontologically real, like the coins are ontologically real, or is the triangle purely subjective?”
(Really, each coin is a prior gestalt moment, so the question of whether the triangle is real or subjective, could be asked of a single coin… But we have to start somewhere, and we already did with triangles. “Already did”, is becoming something…like a gestalt.)
A totally different way to ask this same question is, does the triangle matter as much as the coins seem to matter? This creates a useful play on the word “matter”, but more importantly, if the triangle is subjective, and we are wondering whether the subjective triangle is ontologically real, I think gauging how much something matters sets out an aspect of what’s at stake between the ontologically real and the subjective. We are asking if mentally crafted triangles matter as much as really crafted things.
So maybe ask “Does the triangle come with the coins (four existing things), or is the triangle superimposed by a subject (three existing things and a triangle somehow)?”
(Again, we can fall back and ask “Do the coins come with circles, or are the circles superimposed…?” But we don’t have to for sake of saying something about the gestalt triangles.)
So I think before answering, I should talk about the gestalt itself. I like the canvas of “the undifferentiated.” In that, or with that, or from that, we perceivers have a gestalt, “an organized whole grasped by a mind as a primary unit of perception.”
As the gestalt makes itself the “primary unit of perception” it sort of seizes all of the being, like a present moment does, as you read your computer screen in your chair. These gestalt unities, however they arise, have arisen, and exist, or at least, they are the first perception of the ontological.
So this notion of gestalt (which may be wrong, hope not) could be used to flip the ontology, and beg our question from its opposite end. We were wondering whether the triangle was real at all, because it wasn’t like the coins, and now, with the gestalt triangle, we can wonder if the coins are as real as the triangle-maker mind is having a gestalt moment.
Plato would run with that and say "yes, the triangle, the mind’s possession (or more modernly, the mind’s projection) is certainly real, and though you found it in coins, the triangle can remain with you, eternally so, unlike the coins, which are more like the undifferentiated, and merely incidental to grasping and perceiving the triangle.
But let me remind myself of the original question:
I think the answer has to be, both. Triangles are there for minds, like coins might be there for eyes.
In the gestalt perception of a triangle, is the gestalt perception of three, of lines, of angles, of coins in this particular case - all at once in the gestalt. So we’ve already dragged existence in for the triangle to the same extent existence is already there with the gestalt moment itself. However, we’ve potentially done all of this solely in/with/from our minds (the subjective).
There is something nagging about the “undifferentiated” backdrop to the gestalt. It doesn’t seem necessary that the undifferentiated even be there to continue a mereology of gestalt wholes, especially when they are viewed as the primary unit of perception. (This is an overlap with phenomenology/Heidegger. I think.)
But in order to ask about the triangle (the gestalt) you had to mention the coins. So, do we have to mention the undifferentiated or we cannot have gestalt perceptions? And if we do, doesn’t that mean the undifferentiated, like the coins, is the more certain ontological reality, and now the triangle maybe less real, or not real at all, again?
I don’t think that is where we need to go to find a satisfactory answer. We are really wondering whether any of the objects we perceive really exist, or whether they have nothing to do with some underlying reality and only to do with me, subjectively making them up, carving the differentiation into the universe where it otherwise does not exist.
On one level, this can almost be dismissed. We are all talking about a triangle, so something we know called “triangle” certainly exists. I bet you could describe it with three lines of text. 
It’s really there for us.
But a question arises if we think there are other things (like the coins or the undifferentiated) that also exist besides the triangle but not in the same way as the triangle exists.
In this case, again, we’ve bifurcated, or hierarchized, existence itself, attaching more of it to some substrate (coins, the undifferentiated), and less of it to gestalt, differentiated triangles.
I like sticking with the ontological flip the notion of gestalt provides. But I don’t like any hierarchy of being. (A thing is, or it isn’t, a triangle is, or it isn’t; triangles aren’t less or more existing than other things that exist.) I think more precisely than flipping the ontology between “the real and the subjective”, the gestalt unifies and levels the ontology a bit.
When we perceive triangles, we may have carved them, but once carved, sometimes, there they remain. Our ideas can be kept, they matter, and have weight.
Either the undifferentiated canvas provides some sort of backdrop contributing to the existence of our gestalt units of perception (eg. because of the coins I perceived, I could perceive the triangle), or our gestalt moments are themselves both canvas and painting (eg. we live entirely in the subjective world, and see the triangle and the coins as one and as parts, at once, moving our focus from there, to there, triangle to coins, coin to circle.) - either way, triangles are as ontologically real as their parts are individually real, and parts and wholes each are arising together, at once.
A lot of surface scratching, but I’ll stop there.
No.
In one sense, this is an arrogant answer, because just because the reality of gestalts lands differentiated objects (normally thought to be physical/mind independent) squarely in your head, there is no requirement to claim mind stuff isn’t phenomenologically going to behave exactly as described by scientists who thought they were traveling great distances and peering at tiny particles when they never left their perceptions. So in other words, we have to construct a line between the physical and the immaterial, to then put some objects of science in the physical and other objects of science (triangles, laws) with the immaterial.
But I think all of that wanders off into questions of theories of mind, dual substances, and complications that might not be necessary.
The reason the answer is no, is because of the word “purely”. I am fine seeing physical objects, and gestalt wholes for mental perception as separate types of things, but that is the easy answer that is unsatisfactory. But if dualism was the case, a purely physicalist ontology won’t work. However, the way I see it, the gestalt wholes are always present and bound up in the physical as one moment lived by me, (as there is always some underlying substrate, some coins, that exists, and participates in the generation of the gestalt subjective experience). This is more of a unitary type substance, just as to the senses, and differently as to the mind (more Aristotlean). But again, a purely physicalist ontology wouldn’t ever consider the subjective participation in the generation of gestalt wholes. Physics itself is a gestalt whole that the entire physical world doesn’t know without minds in it.
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This is only my view expressed vividly for clarity, and I also need to start with what may feel like a weird detour.
I think dualism obscures the deep insight of Heraclitus and ( my reading of ) Plato’s unwritten doctrine.
Reality just is subjective.
But reality is not “internal mind stuff.”
The subject is “pure point of view” which is “out there in the way the object is there.”
I see the coin as…the coin. I see the coin as an enduring object that is also there for others, and there for others in a different way than it is there for me.
For instance, I hold up a coin between us. You see heads as I see tails. But we both see the coin.
We can thematize the sides of the coin if we want. Then they become the “unified shared object.” My “telescope/moon” thread is about this shifting thematization.
So what is it for there to be the coin in the world we all share ?
No speculation. Speculation is forbidden.
Only excavation. How do I already live the sharing of the coin with others in the world ?
You saw this particular coin yesterday. I see it now. Bill will see it tomorrow.
No speculation. Forget the “truth” or “falsity” of this belief. How do we in fact live ? Let us see what we tacitly believe.
The same object can be “there” for different people in different ways at different times.
Traditionally, a “true coin” is projected beyond experience. Then the “way” that I see the coin now is called an “inside-stuff perception icon.”
Basically philosophers weren’t comfortable with objects showing different “faces” to different subjects. In their demand for a final truth to chase, they assumed that the coin had a “true” face. So all of the ways of the coin’s “being there” for subjects had to become “inside stuff.” They insisted on a “truth” for the object, reducing its depth.
The world had to “actually be” one way rather than another. An “ideal subject” was tacitly postulated to whom the coin shows its “true” face. This “philosopher’s god” sees…the-coin-in-itself.
But we don’t live the shared coin as inside our heads. This is reason enough for me to seek an alternative to dualism. I can’t live the belief as non-verbal conduct, where or not I call it “true” in a theoretical game.
The coin is there “immediately” as shared with others but also as “hiding from me” the way it might be there for others.
In this example, a fixed specific coin is the temporal synthesis of all the ways it is there for different people at different times.
In “anti-dualistic” terms, Joe’s “consciousness” is understood as the “it is there” of the coin now “for Joe.” This is equivalent to the denial of “inside stuff” altogether. Experience is “immediately” shared world. But it is also “from-a-POV.”
Instead of a “true objective reality” beyond all experience, we have a shared reality that is “splintered” into perspectival fragments.
This makes shared objects intensely real. “Consciousness” as the “being” of shared objects “fuses” subject and object. As “consciousness,” I am the “moments” of objects. As flesh-and-blood person, I am one more object in the world.
Object centered splintered ontology.
Great stuff ! I connect this to the telescope/moon thing. We need not postulate a “truth” of the matter that is outside of time.
For instance, a statement is at its “most powerful” (as functioning tool ) when it “is” what it describes to hearer of the statement.
“Your shoes are untied” functions for me as my untied shoes. I react to this saying as if I saw with my own eyes that my shoes were untied. So is “your shoes are untied” just four words or my untied shows ? Neither, both. It’s a matter of time and perspective.
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First, thanks for your thought-provoking and insightful post. Much food for thought here so forgive the length of what follows.
I think there’s something important in what you’re saying about Gestalt, particularly the idea that we shouldn’t impose a hierarchy of being between parts and wholes. But I wonder whether there’s still a subtle mind–world dualism at work here. It seems that we’re still faced with the alternatives of things either existing ‘out there’ as material objects — I suspect this is what you mean by ‘ontologically real’ — or being constituted in and by the mind as subjective projections. But is that really the choice? Perhaps the question is whether the distinction between what is perceived and the perceiving of it can be made as cleanly as that in the first place. I’m inclined to think that the issue isn’t so much whether the triangle is objectively real or subjectively constructed, but what we mean by it being real when we make that distinction. Again it suggests to me “a real idea”— something which is real but which transcends any specific example of its kind.
I think this connects with something in Eric Perl’s book on metaphysics about the concordance of thinking and being. When we genuinely grasp something, we don’t merely construct a mental representation of it; we grasp what it is. The act of understanding isn’t simply an internal operation that happens to correspond to something external. Nor does it follow that what we understand is merely a projection of our own minds. There is a sense in which, in understanding something, we apprehend its intelligibility. That is classical metaphyics.
Take the triangle. We needn’t suppose either that the triangle exists somewhere independently of its instances, or that the mind imposes triangularity upon three otherwise unrelated objects. We perceive the coins as forming a triangle. The form isn’t another physical object alongside the coins, but neither is it necessarily an arbitrary mental addition. Perhaps the question is whether the distinction between the perceiving of a form and the form as perceived is as straightforward as we tend to assume.
I should add a caveat here, because I don’t want to attribute to Charles Pinter a position he doesn’t actually advance in the book that this OP is about (“Mind and the Cosmic Order”). I’m aware that his account of Gestalt is primarily concerned with perception and cognition, and that he doesn’t present Gestalts as anything like Platonic ideas nor does he discuss the idea of universals. Those connections are mine, and I acknowledge that to really make them requires further argument. But I think it is a defensible philosophical extension of the question his work raises.
Perhaps this is also where the notion of Gestalt has an implication that goes beyond psychology. You suggest that parts and wholes arise together, and that we shouldn’t assign one a greater degree of being than the other. I find that an interesting thought. But might we take it a step further? Rather than flipping the ontology, as you put it, between the material and the subjective, perhaps we should question the assumption that these are two independently intelligible domains that somehow have to be brought into relation.
This doesn’t mean denying a reality independent of any particular act of perception. It means questioning whether we can meaningfully describe that reality as it supposedly is without doing so in terms of the gestalts which are the ‘coin of the realm’ so to speak, They are cognitive units, as it were. The alternative to saying that the world exists fully formed ‘out there’ isn’t necessarily to say that the mind manufactures it. Perhaps the opposition between an independently existing object and a subjective mental operation is itself part of what needs examining.
So I think your emphasis on Gestalt is suggestive, particularly your insistence that parts and wholes arise together. My inclination is to see this as pointing towards a more fundamental question about the relationship between knowing and being. When we grasp something, we don’t simply create a Gestalt that exists alongside the thing grasped. We understand what it is. This is also very near to Schopenhauer’s ‘world as idea’. The question is whether that act of understanding can be adequately conceived in terms of a distinction between an independently existing object and a subjective mental operation. That introduces the subtle dualism again.
Anyway, in sum, very pleased you have taken an interest in the topic, it’s of perennial interest to me, and glad to be able to discuss it.
I’ll admit right off the bat: before your post today, my knowledge of Gestalt amounted to little more than having “heard something about it.” I’ve started exploring this almost from scratch. I’ve made some progress and have a few ideas, though I might refine my answer later on.
I have reached a provisional conclusion that a coin is not equivalent to a triangle: a coin is a first-order gestalt, whereas a triangle is a second-order gestalt. This makes sense, as coins form a triangle, not the other way around. This is an important distinction.
In my initial response to this topic, I advised against rushing to view coins as a substance; after all, they only exist as coins within a network of relationships—which is why they haven’t simply evaporated.
I agree with the idea that we do not perceive a coin atom by atom, but rather grasp it as a whole from the start. But here’s the catch: is grasping a coin as a coin the result of an innate brain structure, or is it the result of the brain having learned to do so? (The same question arises regarding the triangle, as we shall see.) Is the coin merely a spatial hypothesis put forward by a trained brain based on a physical substrate?
I am likely not the first to ask this question. There is a fascinating article on the subject:
“if a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes, could he, if given the ability to see, distinguish those objects by sight alone, in reference to the tactile schemata he already possessed?”
Modern experiments have established the following:
Although subjects could visually distinguish objects almost as effectively as they could by touch after regaining their sight, they were unable to establish a connection between an object perceived through two different senses. The correlation was only slightly better than chance. They lacked the innate ability to transfer their tactile knowledge of shape to the visual domain.
Are our coin and triangle truly “a priori”? I do not think so. After all, a Gestalt is not simply handed to us “automatically” from the fabric of reality. For three coins to “snap” into the shape of a triangle, an infant’s brain must undergo months of bodily-motor experience—dropping objects, feeling out boundaries, and moving through space.
The universe itself is not structured by our “figures” and “backgrounds.” The Gestalt concept may well do a decent job of describing how our minds are structured—a structure partly driven by the need for resource efficiency—but that is where it ends. Indeed, as it stands, the Gestalt concept strikes me as an unnecessary construct pushed by theorists; one can perfectly well describe reality without it.
That said, I acknowledge that I am not an expert in these fields and do not claim my opinion is definitive. I am not even sure if I will feel the same way about all this tomorrow.
A sample of what Charles Pinter says about gestalts in his book Mind and the Cosmic Order:
Everything you see, hear and think comes to you in structured wholes: When you read, you’re seeing a whole page even when you focus on one word or sentence. When someone speaks, you hear whole words and phrases, not individual bursts of sound. When you listen to music, you hear an ongoing melody, not just the note that is currently being played. Ongoing events enter your awareness as Gestalts, for the Gestalt is the natural unit of mental life. …
…life plays out in whole events, and the objects with which every animal interacts are complete things. A deer must instantly recognize the form of a cougar (and vice-versa), a squirrel must see the separate branches on a tree, a honeybee must know different kinds of flowers each having a distinctive design. Birds must tell the difference between nourishing and poisonous butterflies by subtle differences in wing design and markings. The habitat of every living thing is multiple and complex, and survival depends on the power to learn and recognize its intricacies. Even single-celled animals respond differentially to complex configurations.
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So ‘the universe itself’ is precisely what we don’t know. What we know is how it appears to us.
I offer some friendly pushback.
Is the brain not a gestalt or “ideal interpersonal focus” like a coin ? Where are its “exact” “physical” boundaries ?
If the coin is a “spatial hypothesis,” would not the perceived empirical brain also be one ?
How does the sign-chain “physical substrate” relate to its “referent” ? How does “referent” refer ?
“I bring not Truth but a sword.” In other words, the ground is an abyss, at least for all-destroying theory. Yet we calmly enjoy it. What do we get from that ?
I find chains of signs that seem “helpful” but not “true.” Sometimes the helpfulness is well enough described as true-ness, but only if we don’t have time to “shift from moon to telescope.”
“Nothing stays true.”
If you understand our better descriptions of reality in terms of physics, for instance, then I have to push back here too.
A particular ink shape is there as another “9.” To read that sentence you had to “idealize” or react to “stupid black shapes” as repetitions of “ideal” symbols.
Or perhaps I measure some event in the world. I “foreground” this or that object as other than its context and also as belonging to a type. In general, we study the general, especially if one understands knowledge as future directed. I don’t care about this particular creature or feature. I care about the oncoming repetitions of entities that are “close enough” to this one ( of its “type” ) so that this one is worth studying.
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The situation is much simpler. Most likely, I failed to grasp the idea of "Gestalt" or oversimplified it based on my other experiences. That explains it all. From a cursory look today, I didn’t pick up on anything in the concept that I actually needed. Hence the subsequent errors. Perhaps I rushed things.
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I very much respect that response.
FWIW, I didn’t see myself as pointing out “errors” but only pushing back.
I am trying to find words at the moment for my sense of the helplessness and perishability of words, which definitely includes my own words. Yet I love words, and I think it’s good to keep throwing darts, even if they never stick.