A3

Hello everyone,

After a back injury I have just been given permission to sit up

So many viewpoints!! Right of the bat, I have no education involving philosophy but subscribe to what Swedenborg (see profile) wrote from 1749 - 1772.
If you judge things only by their year, like Excreationist: Well it looks like Husserl died in 1938 and Brentano died in 1917!! this whole post could well be skipped. (Next time I’ll look what you wrote on page two about the Mind/body border.)
BTW S. described the functions of the left and right brain even before those years, at a time the cutting edge in the medical world involved the use of leaches.

Would it be too simple to say that everything that is physical or concrete (same thing, right?) can be sensed and/or measured and everything else is mental or abstract (same thing)?

The part, however, in this thread that really interests me is about us, our human makeup.
The will was mentioned and the intellect. Swedenborg has a lot to say about both, translated as will and understanding. These two make the very person and could be considered the essence of our mind and thus our life. I suppose mental health is the result of a well balanced unity of both. This relationship is also often referred to as a marriage. The will relates to good and the understanding to truth or conversely to evil and falsity.

As I understand it, our will is an accumulation or a hotchpotch of the loves we have. Motivators maybe? Part hereditary and choice. Our will is what we love and we want what we love, and we want it foremost because it gives us delight. And because of all this, even if it is bad, we call it good. One of his often quoted sayings is “Love is the life of man.”
Sometimes we can make ourselves do something we don’t really want to. In a case like that we do it but get no pleasure out of it. We might calculate it will probably be for the best in the long run, something good will come out of it (for us or for somebody we love).

It seems to me that some are confusing ‘abstract’ with symbolism, like the symbol 2.
I think love is abstract, but I would not classify it as any kind of an entity. S. defines it as a spiritual substance. My wife says it is a state of insanity.
Can we sense our mind? I think we are doing that when we examen our motives. Can we measure our mind? No, and that’s why some think we just have one brain and that’s it.

Some have taken me up on my offer of “The Human Mind,” this quote about the search for truth is from there.

In other words, our ‘proprium,’ with all its unanalyzed desires, its preconceived notions and self-conscious embarrassments, makes us reluctant to face all the facts or unwilling to draw the right conclusions. “Not to want to understand the truth is the same as not to be able to do so” (AR 765). Above all the laws of “logic” there stands the love of truth which must be greater than the love of self, of the world, or of fame. Behind all the errors of reasoning which every text book on Logic seeks to systematize and confute, lies the unconscious urge of our proprium to defend its self-interest and self-satisfaction against any truth which threatens to disturb it. We beg the question - confuse the issue with trivialities. At last we shift the ground of our position without admitting it, so as not to appear to have been wrong. And when convinced against our will we are of the same opinion still. Especially is this so where our personal advantage is at stake. It takes a special effort to overcome the silent premises which we build up in a logic-proof compartment of the mind - that our opinion is right, our needs greater than those of the neighbor. We make assumptions and proceed to confirm them. We are apt to think from fear, from panic. We strike out blindly against the most harmless ideas - on the chance that they might injure our cause. Suspicion blinds us. We jump to conclusions. We draw the most unwarranted meanings out of a set of facts or circumstances. We become accusative and unfair in our thoughts. If we are ever to become rational, the first thing that we must ‘abstract’ from our thought is the pride and prejudice of SELF, or “proprium.” Still, our natural affections do not always concern ourselves. We have friends and kinsmen. We have people whom we regard as authorities in their specific fields. We are inclined to think from friendship or social loyalty, or from personal bias, and can be misled by unconscious aversions or by pity or by personal admiration for others.
. . .[but] common experience testifies that the deepest understanding comes from sympathy and love for others. But our charity must be rational. It should be charged with the love of truth.

Regards
Adriaan (formerly Adrian, A3)

excreationist

A3:
Well people can get ideas from dead philosophers, but in some areas, such as this one, the latest scientific research can solve a lot of the problems they thought existed, or go against their assumptions, etc - this means that their conclusions need to be re-examined in light of new evidence.

I disagree. Love is a word that is physical. Here it is typed. You can also speak it. Like all other words, it is a symbol. We associate it with the emotions we feel when we feel a deep attraction to things. I would say that this is my "connectedness" or "resonance" emotion. So the word triggers memories of having that emotion. So it refers to that emotion.
BTW, "God" is also a symbol. It refers to a combination of physical experiences such as power and possibly love, etc.

So what does Swedenborg mean when he says love is a "spiritual substance"? Does he believe in God and souls as well? Well the "Origin of the Species" was only published in 1859 so I guess he did.

As far as the search for truth goes, I think it is motivated by the theoretical connectedness/resonance drive.

owleye

John...

"The number 2 represents a quantity of two - a countable set of two whatevers. The number 2 on its own is a meaningless symbol."

I gather this means you don't believe two is an abstract entity. In any case, I will assume your view about numbers is similar to Kant's who has it that numbers are "mere magnitudes." I may hope that your theory has as much value as his. That you misuse the term 'abstract', however, does not bode well. Moreover, since Kant is an empirical realist, and you apparently are not, I suspect there will be a major breakdown in your system. (This is merely a guess, however, since I don't yet understand your theory.)

"Should I use Johnson's example? Surely a physical example is appropriate to demonstrate existential meaning."

The problem is that the example does not refute Berkeley's Idealism which has it that matter does not exist and that reality is no more than ideas of the mind. Johnson can only rely on his own experiences, all of which are, according to Berkeley, ideas of the mind.


"No, its the difference between concrete and physical I was struggling with, to understand why you introduced it."

I introduced 'concrete' into the picture because you used the term 'abstract' in order to describe what a mind is. While a mind can deal with abstract ideas (like numbers and cats and deities), this doesn't mean it it is prevented from dealing with concrete things like individual cats that are presented to it. A cat, considered abstractly, represents a set of rules (or a structure) (or a concept) that characterizes what is (allegedly) common to all cats.

Physical reality is that which is supposedly subject to physical laws.

"Sorry, but how is it we can know physical entities directly?"

Well, this is tricky, isn't it? Kant's refutation of Idealism (and Descartes' representational realism), has more in common with Aristotle's direct realism. However, Kant's genius is that he was able to notice that we cannot determine our own temporal order (our own permanence in time) unless there exists something external to us that changes. That is, though time itself is the form of inner sense and space is the form of outer sense, we cannot understand the idea of a succession of states except in a context in which the states change in an orderly way. Thus, if you follow what Kant tells us, he being a Newtonian, in order to measure time we must rely on its being understood as a line (a one-dimensional space) quantified by the existence of an object moving in accordance with Newton's laws of motions, free of external forces, over a given distance. Thus, we recognize that there is an external world because without it we would have no way of determining our own existence in time. (Note that time can only be measured by a clock, which is essentially a state machine which must change from a given state (the clock tick) and then restore that state periodically (the clock interval).)

owleye

John Page

Sounds like he's describing objectivity (love of truth?) as a virtue. I read the paper, Adriaan, and concluded that where the guy didn't have facts he goes of into some mystical spirit kind of explanation with occasional references to a god. I don't think this helped me.

More relevant was your observation on abstract - which I guess I'm trying to de-mistify. owl mentioned what is probably its traditional opposite, concrete. On the other hand abstract painting has a different sense - its a representation but not a literal one, and then there's the literary abstract which is more of a precis. So I need to be careful with this word.

I'm still left with three questions:
1. What noun might I use to refer to the "contents of the mind" past the sense layer? 2. Is it reasonably clear to describe their quality as abstract?
3. Is the expression "abstraction levels" meaningfully descriptive of the layering of concepts (dependency between?) that I suppose occurs? - e.g. that numbers are at a higher level of abstraction (in the mind) than the quantities they represent.

Cheers, John

John Page

Ah! No, that's not what I believe at all. To be countable by the process of the mind, the two "whatevers" must exist in the mind. (Magnitude == Quantity BTW for your Kant comparison).

Consider the "whatevers" as processed images (from external reality) that are detected by the mind to be similar enough to fall in the the same set (i.e. category "whatever").

In short, there's nothing "out there" with a name tag on it. Its undifferentiated stuff. Our mind learns to differentiate this stuff, as represented though the senses, apart from itself. The mind applies labels (tags, tokens, identities or whatever you want to call them) and descriptions to things and instances of things.

The descriptions, however, are also things in the mind - templates, or axiomatic concepts as I like to call them. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that most of what we talk about in philosophy is in the mind. Abstract.

This is precisely why I had an example observing the physical effect from a third party perspective. All I'm claiming is a common external reality through common experience - same stone, different foot if you will.

How do I differentiate physical laws from mental laws to know what is physical?

I have no issue with your response but maybe my question wasn't clear. To recap, I said:

"I agree we cannot consciously know physical entities directly, only through our senses and all the other manipulations that our mind/brain performs."

To which you responded: "I'm not sure why you suggest we are in agreement here. Indeed, if you do believe this, I would say we are in complete disagreement. I'm rather an empirical realist. I gather you aren't. But it really doesn't matter what I believe. It is your theory that is being tested here."

I took your repsonse to say we cannot know physical entities directly - please let me know if I'm wrong and have misunderstood your empirical realism.

Many Thanks, Cheers, John

John Page

IMO nobody tells it, no little man steering your brain, its a learned, automatic response. The complexity of the mind makes these response difficult to predict and, therefore, to us human observers we posit an unknown unseen "will" for what we do not fully understand.

Cheers, John

Synaesthesia

John Page,

A useful fiction, but so compelling that it is proving to be an impediment to the philosophy of mind.

excreationist

Why is that a fiction?

excreationist

owleye:
I wrote you a post a bit earlier, maybe you could respond to this one...

Well I don't like using the term "abstract" at all... anyway, it is a spoken or written symbol that we have associated with patterns in our experience - the pattern of two-ness. "Abstract" implies lots of things I think, like the possible existence of an eternal realm of ideas, etc.

The individual cat is still processed as a symbol or signal! I mean the physical cat isn't grabbed and put inside your head! It wouldn't fit! I prefer the terms "specific instances" and "generalized classes". They involve information, not physical objects that are put inside your head!

Well I believe that change must exist for the "will" to exist since it involves activities like seeking or avoiding things. It looks like you agree that an external physical world probably exists.

John Page

Syn:
What, specifically, is the fiction for you? I don't claim to have all the answers and that fiction participates in reality creates problems.

Cheers, John