To me, there is no doubt that the mind is product of the physical brain that is of the physical world. Without the physical world there is no mind. By extension all concepts are therefore a product of the physical world by way of the physical brain. Once every living sentient thing disappears (if that is at all possible) from the physical universe then all concepts disappear. What remains is a physical universe without sentient being. That is quite possible because there is no law that says there must be sentient beings. In fact at the very beginning after the Big Bang it was quite possible that the universe did not contain a single sentient entity whatsoever. This being the case then it is possible that there can be a time in the future without sentient beings as well.
Tag: philosophy
I love Kant, the later Wittgenstein, Derrida, post structualism, postmodernism and the philosophy of language.
The Existential problem
I am happy with the concept though not with the term of the absurd. The definition that everything is meaningless is perhaps better rephrased as “without intrinsic meaning”. This is better captured in the term “without essence”. There is only existence. At first glance this sentence seems to indicate that existentialists are a kind of realist, materialist or physicalist. But the concerns of existentialists are how to live with freedom of choice. In other words, existentialists are concerned more with the mind than the real. The so-called freedom of choice, then, is seemingly complete freedom. Existentialists ignore the physical limitations that we are bound to, opting to place priority to the mind.
Religion, philosophy and science have the same aim
Looking beyond the surface of religion, philosophy and science they essentially have the same aim – to explain what the world is and how we should live in it. For this reason I find it does not matter what religion or belief you have as long as you are trying to be the best person possible you are heading in the right direction. But once you try to impose your own values on others then we lose our way and we lose respect for other people to have their beliefs.
Stasis of form
The physical stasis of the form of the word creates the illusion of the stasis of the thing.
Conceptual Stasis
The problem with concepts are that they create illusions of stasis when none are there. Plato fell into the trap, as did Aristotle. This way of thinking held sway until the 19 century. Even Peter Abelard had lost out (probably due to his love for his Heloise). Would we have the novel (and more widely, literature) if it were not for the understanding of the fictive mind?
Stasis or Kinesis
“The world is in a state of flux,” said Heraclitus. His contemporary Parmenides said the exact opposite – “everything is unitary and static”.
While it is easy to show that something that looks stable is in fact changing it is hard to show that it is not. One can say that both are illusions, only that one eventually does show itself to be the case (kinesis). Over time an object in rest gradually changes its form. What Parmenides was arguing for was that this was all an illusion and that really everything is the same. In other words, he was a kind of rationalist.
In some ways Christians are rationalists, that sense empirical data is imperfect and should be ignored.
Priority and preference is given to the thinking mind rather than to the physical reality. Rationalists will argue that all that is necessary is the mind and its reason.
But if that is the case why have we not evolved to be rid of sensory faculties. Clearly, the senses do matter, and it is to sense the changes in the environment, not its staticity. Stasis is a controlled look at all things. There is something abstract about stasis, it’s removal of movement of reality, like a photographic still or a painting of a scene.
One Consciousness
There is a belief that as long as there is one consciousness that exists in the world that the world will exist. So even if all corporeal life disappears from the universe there is still God to watch over it all.
I am not so sure.
To me, that amounts to cheating. It is not only deception but more importantly self-deception. The problem with self-deception, though, is that it is so good at it that you do not even notice that you are being deceived. And the concept of God does not help either. It only perpetuates and “substantiates” the self-deception.
One system?
The other day a fatal accident occurred on a highway in Japan where the car somehow skidded and launched itself into the air jumping the median strip and ramming into an oncoming bus. The all passengers on the bus, including the bus driver, survived. This is a prime example of our understanding of objects. Objects never occupy the same space as another object. Any attempt to do so will end in tragedy.
Objects “occupy” space in predictable manner. Something that I do not believe anyone has pointed out is that a point in space can either be space or object, never both. So in reality, an object in space and time are predictable. There is only one space and one time. There is no reverse. And there is no fast forward. Time is steady and predictable as well.
There is inherent stability and predictability to object, space and time. If this never changes, then can we conclude that object, space and time are one thing, or at least one system?
Space, object and time
Space, object and time must be one complete system, for the existence of objects infers the existence of both space and time. Space, objects and time are not independent of each other.
It is possible to think (imagine) that they are separate “things”, just as we can think of the front and back of a piece of paper as discrete sides, but they are never separate from each other as such (even though with great skill, ingenuity and difficulty we can do it but they will always remain from the original one piece of paper).
Space, time and perception
There is no reason for space and time to cease to exist simply because of the end of perception. Any one birth or death does not change space/time. There being necessarily a time in which nothing sentient existed to perceive space/time must mean that perception of it does not define it.
Therefore, space/time is independent of perception.
signature103 