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Posted by jpbrooks:
I used quotes because what I'm saying about sense data that are associated with objects in the world might also be true for our "internal sense data" or "inner experiences" associated with the information that is stored in our brains, some of which may not be a part of our brain's conscious content. But a more detailed elaboration on the latter type of experiences would take us into Psychology and outside the scope of the present discussion.
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Does psychology take us outside the scope of the present discussion? It seems to me highly relevant, especially if you're referencing the collective unconscious as a possible source of information. Isn't this a valid concept? Aren't psychology and philosophy intimately related?
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Well, if I'm not mistaken, Plato provides an argument (from "imperfection", I think) for the existence of "Forms" in his Phaedo work that is similar to the one that I used above concerning illusion. Paraphrasing his argument, he points out that we cannot judge a thing to be "imperfect" unless we have the idea of "perfection" already in our minds. Thus, the pure "perfected" "Form" of the thing exists even when the "perfect" thing itself doesn't.
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I always thought Plato had it backward and I guess I'm curious whether anyone knows if there have been other philosophers who thought so as well. We derive a non-existent form by altering things we perceive through sensory experiences - and call that form perfected. Then there is a drive, philosophical or psychological, to achieve the perfected form. This has both positive and negative consequences - it drives human curiosity, and leads to ideas of right-ness and righteousness that lead to religious and idealogical conflicts.
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posted by Christopher13:
I don't mean to be cruel, but the terms you have used--subjectivity and objectivity--have assumed different meanings in modern times.
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I'm not sure why you think presenting an alternate definition is cruel. If these terms have modern versus ancient definitions, I'm glad to have that added to the discussion, and am particularly glad to know that it was specifically Aquinas. So thanks.
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The confusion arises from the popular reversal of these concepts so that one's private thoughts are subjective when really objective reality is solely intellectual with no reality of its own outside the mind.
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I must admit I much more often see the ancient ones understood and used by most people. On other, less philosophically oriented boards I have argued the point with people who seem very attached to the idea of an independent objective reality. I was looking for whether this had any basis in modern philosophy. The idea of this popularly understood 'objective reality' seems to me related to the problems I have with Plato's ideas of perfected forms - an artificial construct of the mind that seeks a simplicity, or 'final form'. This would seem to be a coping mechanism of the human mind for dealing with the complexity of the universe. Does anyone know if this idea has been elucidated by any philosophers?
Christopher - can you suggest any of Aquinas' modern commentators specifically? Ones who take on this problem?
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posted by ghiangelo:
still haven't seen or read the answer. ontologically, reality is a subjective experience. it's existence is totally dependant on the experience of an independant agent holding or generating the reality experience. determining 'true' objective existences OUTSIDE of the experience of reality is a difficult one.
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Is this the same idea Christopher was referencing? That is - from Aquinas and his modern commentators? Has it been significantly influenced by quantum mechanics, or does it predate these discoveries? It seems remarkably similar to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle experiment.
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posted by jpbrooks:
But since it is certainly not the case that the "self" is always the subject of its own experiences, that raises the question of how it could have ever come to be the subject of its own experiences, when in order to have any experiences at all, it must first be a real entity.
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I'm not sure I follow all this. Why isn't the self always the subject of its own experiences? Are you familiar with the book "The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness" by Antonio Damasio? It's been a while and I didn't absorb the entire book terribly well, but Damasio is a neurologist who describes how the brain constructs the self as a neurological entity. I bring this up because it seems that the physicality of a person is provable enough, and this physicality includes the brain which perceives the self.
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posted by Ol' Vic:
Some are able to ignore the dissonance and barge right ahead. We call those people adolescents, psychopaths, ideologues, idiots, and President of the United States of America.
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Heh! There's just not enough humor in philosophy in my opinion. I'll take a look at you fancily named theoretical construct just because you made me laugh.
04-02-2003, 09:56 AM
