Totalitarianist

Objective idealism maintains that ideas are objective and subjective. According to objective idealism, knowing and being form the same reality. This tree is an object within thought itself. The objective idealists use "material" in a completely different sense.

As far as I know, we cannot even deduce the material world. At least objective idealism does not start from ideas (from which idealists and materialists alike must necessarily start) to matter outside mind. Materialism jumps from ideas to material, i.e. gets one from the another, by adding something from without. in logical deduction, however, we cannot add anything from without. Premise and conclusion refer to one another; they contain each other. To add something from without is a logical fallacy. When deducing B from A we cannot add anything from without. I wonder how the materialists deduce material from ideas.

excreationist

Doesn't that involve making some assumptions - that other minds exist and so do universal truths (objective ideas)? Materialists assume that matter exists outside of the mind, as you said.

But what are people capable of "knowing"? i.e. What can they have 100.0000% certain and justified knowledge about? Do you need to "know" something in order for it to be (exist in reality)?

Well to avoid confusion I think they should use a different word.

Please excuse my lack of knowledge about philosophy, but are you saying that objective idealists don't believe that matter exists outside of the mind? Is it just an illusion? (i.e. things only exist while they are being observed) BTW, this might be a common question about idealism, but what about when people have false beliefs or hallucinations? I guess you could say that there subjective ideas are just different to objective ideas... and I'd say the reason for that involves a physical explanation.

I don't understand what you mean by "adding anything from without" or "adding something from without". (from without what?)
It may seem simpler at first to think that reality is just made up of minds and subjective and objective ideas (or whatever objective idealists believe)... but I don't think it explains how things (like ideas, minds, and living horses) interact as well as physicalism does.

the_cave

Sure, I can try. It seems to me that all one has to do to come up with a thing-in-itself is come up with something that we can deduce exists, but that we can't empirically know. The entire cosmos--all that is, including us, and our knowledge of everything that we know--must exist, surely, obviously. Yet we can never know all these details simultaneously--even though they all exist simultaneously.

Totalitarianist

"Unknowable" does not mean something on the other side of the universe which we will most likely never know about. An "unknowable" thing is that thing which the composition of our minds cannot comprehend. This thing is called the thing-in-itself. If we can have no knowledge of things-in-themselves, we cannot say that they exist. The thing-in-itself is by definition what we cannot know. The cosmos can be known, we have knowledge of it, we know it exists. For the cosmos is a collection of things. These things taken individually can be known. We may never know about everything in the cosmos, but our minds are capable of comprehending each thing. Our minds are capable of comprehending two things simultaneously. Three things, ten things, one hundred things, one billion things. A single man probably could never know everything; perhaps mankind will never know everything; but "mind" in general can know the entire cosmos simultaneously. Whether one man or all manind will know the entire cosmos or not is irrelevant. I think the composition of mind permits comprehension of everything individually and therefore simultaneously.

the_cave

I think that it's very different for one mind to know two facts, than for two minds to know two facts. Let me put it this way; imagine two minds, each of which knows one different fact. Now imagine two minds, both knowing both facts. Those are two different universes.

I can imagine a universe in which one mind knows all facts. I can also imagine a universe in which several minds each knows some set of facts, and all facts are known by at least one mind (but not by all). In fact, in this second universe, no mind can know all facts. This is not the same universe as the one where one mind knows all facts.

Even in this universe, although I know many things, I do not hold them in my consciousness simultaneously. Sure, I can manage holding a _lot_ of them simultaneously, but surely not _all_ of them at once. So I can never know what it is like for all the facts of the universe to be true at once. But they _are_ all true at once.

Furthermore, I think that things-in-themselves can be known in _some_ way, and still be things-in-themselves (I admit this might be a different idea from Kant.) Kant certainly believes we know things about objects--but it _could_ be (I'm not saying Kant makes this argument, or makes it very well) that there are aspects of the object that we cannot "know" in a _complete_ way. Imagine a black box, the insides of which we can never observe. We observe the behavior of the box. We can come up with hypotheses about the inside of the box--so in once sense, we can indeed "know" what's inside, and at any rate we can know the effects of what's inside--yet in another sense, we can't "know" it for _sure_; we can't "know" all that the box _is_. I think it's only in the latter sense that Kant means we can't know things-in-themselves (at any rate, it's the only sense that makes any sense, whether Kant believed it or not.)

Clivedurdle

"Unknowable" does not mean something on the other side of the universe which we will most likely never know about. An "unknowable" thing is that thing which the composition of our minds cannot comprehend. This thing is called the thing-in-itself. If we can have no knowledge of things-in-themselves, we cannot say that they exist.

Theoretically I agree with this.

Practically I doubt unknowable things exist.

It seems even the classic example from Quantum Mechanics - Schrodingers Cat - is it dead or is it alive - by observing you force one or other state - is being eaten away at by indirect soft statistical methods.

This discussion has lots of terms that have not been defined and are definitely debatable! "Mind" 'matter" for example!

Postulating an "unknowable" splits the universe into two - knowable and unknowable. Isn't this black and white thinking?

It is necessary to do this - that is one of the bases of the scientific method - but it is not sufficient. Studying a dead butterfly does not give the same information as studying a living one.

So you need both approaches - materialist and idealist - in some form of co-operation. They are both theoretical and practical approaches to how we find ourselves. Maybe a synthesis is required.

Totalitarianist

Then what they are knowing is not a fact. 1+1 is a fact. Everyone knows this. If we all died, it would still be a fact. If we never existed to begin with, it would still be a fact. The two different "facts" which you are speaking of are not facts at all. A fact is not affected by one's willingness to acknowledge it as fact, nor by one's interpretation of that fact. If they know the same fact differently, then they are distorting the fact in some way -- it is a half-fact, which is no fact at all. They are in the same universe, perceiving the same objects; at least one of them is wrong, entirely or partially. The possibility of being wrong about something does not mean that there is a barrier which renders us incapable of fully comprehending things, i.e. fully comprehending so-called things-in-themselves.

How is it not the same universe? They are just interpreting things differently; they are not in different universes.

Why would you have to know them all at once? They are in your mind; therefore you know them. For example, I know that Stalin at some point in time existed; this is a fact, but it is not on my mind all the time and I do not have to be entirely conscious thereabout each second of my life to possess knowledge thereabout. The thing-in-itself is about possessing knowledge of that thing and not about being conscious of it at all times.

Are you sure that it is not something else?

Break the object down into its simplest elements (not material -- concepts). Can you of each element individually?

If there is a pink feather on the other side of the planet which will never be known by anyone -- this is not a thing-in-itself. Likewise, whatever is in that box is not a thing-in-itself. Again, the composition of mind is such that it is capapble of comprehending the pink feather if only it were before one. Likewise, whatever is in that box is not a thing-in-itself because it can be comprehended if only one could perceive it.

Totalitarianist

excreationist -
Mind and matter are correlatives, like positive and negative. You cannot have one without the other. They explicitly refer to one another.

Totalitarianist

Not necessary. All previous philosophies, including materialist philosophies, are contained in the idealist philosopher of Hegel.

excreationist

What happened before humans (and other creatures with minds) evolved...? Do you think there was a time when no minds existed, when only matter existed? Or did the mind of the universe or the mind of God exist? If God doesn't exist, did the time before human minds existed exist at all? If it didn't exist, how did it cause human minds to come into existence?