Maybe I am just not understanding you but

A lot of these arguments sound to me like:

The human notion of the moon did not exist prior to humans perceiving the moon, therefore the "moon" did not exist prior to it being perceived by man.
This is certainly true but it fairly misses the point, I think:

What ever there is in external independent reality which gives rise to the human conception, perception or notion of the "moon" certainly did exist prior to being perceived by man.

So yes the human perception of the "moon" requires humans, obviously.

Human perception does not create the external reality which gives rise to the human perception of the "moon".

It is true that all we can ever know about the external reality which gives rise to the "moon" are perceptions that gives rise to the human conception "moon" and that these do not correspond perfectly to the "thing in itself" (Kant). Kant did not deny the truth of an independent "external reality" only our ability to know it perfectly or even our ability to know how closely it corresponds to "external reality" or how complete our knowledge of the "external reality" moon" is.

Having said that, we have good reason to think our objective scientific view of the world corresponds pretty closely to those aspects of reality which we can measure. The predictive and manipulative power of science can not be denied.

You know, I do not converse with young earth creationists because the scientific and perceptual gap is just too large to be bridged. Science clearly shows the approximate age of the universe, the earth, the moon and the appearance of the first hominids. The "reality" which gives rise to the human perceptual object we call the "moon" existed long before humans existed to perceive it.

I am going to depend on science for this. The existence of ultimate reality, external reality, independent reality (whose existence I do not doubt) does not depend on human perception or human minds to "be". The only thing that depends on human minds is the human concept or perception of the "moon" and there are two moons the one humans perceive (the perceptual moon)and the one (the real moon)that gives rise to that human perception. (pure Kant).

Under your definition of "exist" and "real", this would seem to be an oxymoron but please feel free to clarify how this corresponds or correlates with your other views. If there is no existence independent of human perception then man clearly would be the "measure of all things" in fact the "creator of all things" as well.

prothero
It is true that all we can ever know about the external reality which gives rise to the "moon" are perceptions that gives rise to the human conception "moon" and that these do not correspond perfectly to the "thing in itself" (Kant). Kant did not deny the truth of an independent "external reality" only our ability to know it perfectly or even our ability to know how closely it corresponds to "external reality" or how complete our knowledge of the "external reality" moon" is.

Having said that, we have good reason to think our objective scientific view of the world corresponds pretty closely to those aspects of reality which we can measure. The predictive and manipulative power of science can not be denied.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pythagorean
But if we are to accept that science exists only in human minds then you can not prove that the moon existed before people existed out side of human minds. .

I'll have a chicken leg with mine, thanks.



The existence of final cause or teleology

I recommend a brief perusal of From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again by Etienne Gilson.


Personally, I think the idea that evolution proceeds 'without cause' is quite absurd. I believe that life exhibits purposeful behavious on every level from its inception

Question: if evolution were, or were not, directed towards an outcome, how would it be possible to frame a testable hypothesis?

Answer: compare the process of evolution on this planet with the process of evolution on various other planets and see if there are any similarities.

Obviously this is not possible. In the absence of this data, any hypotheses for or against final causes is speculative.

Within naive realism the objective belief in something can be provided by experiential memory, not rationality.

And similarly for spiritual beliefs too.

Plotinus wishes to speak of a thinking that is not discursive but intuitive, i.e. that it is knowing and what it is knowing are immediately evident to it. There is no gap then between thinking and what is thought--they come together in the same moment, which is no longer a moment among other consecutive moments, one following upon the other. Rather, the moment in which such a thinking takes place is immediately present and without difference from any other moment, i.e. its thought is no longer chronological but eternal. To even use names, words, to think about such a thinking is already to implicate oneself in a time of separated and consecutive moments (i.e. chronological) and to have already forgotten what it is one wishes to think, namely thinking and what is thought intuitively together.

The overreaching of many scientists into fields beyond their competence is perhaps explained in part by the loss of an important idea in modern thinking-final causality or purpose. Scientists understandably bracket the idea out of their scientific thinking because they seek natural explanations and other kinds of causes. Yet many of them wrongly conclude from their selective study of the world that final causes do not exist at all and that they have no place in the rational study of life. Likewise, many erroneously assume that philosophy cannot draw upon scientific findings, in light of final causality, to better understand the world and man.

Efficient and Final Causes

Aristotle held that there are four distinct kinds of causes or explanations (aitia), namely, material, formal, efficient, and final. The first two - material and formal - refer to what we would call the substance and the description of a thing, respectively, whereas the last two denote concepts closer to what we would consider as "causes" in the modern sense of the word. Efficient causes, according to Aristotle, are prior conditions, entities, or events considered to have caused the thing in question. Final causes are future conditions, entities, or events regarded as the cause of the thing in question. These categories persisted in Western thought until the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, when philosophers such Spinoza and Descartes rejected final (teleological) causes and argued that efficient causes are necessary and sufficient to account for the workings of the world.

Newton's mathematical approach to natural philosophy is sometimes seen as having shifted the focus of science from causal explanation to pure description. For example, he offered no hypothesis as to the cause of gravitation (in the modern sense of the word "cause"), but simply identified the phenomena of gravity and described them with mathematical precision. In this sense, it might be said that Newton adopted the formal causes of Aristotle as the only true objects of science. However, in the interpretation and application of the laws of motion, Newton and his successors almost invariably thought in terms of efficient causes. For example, although the relation F = ma does not explicitly identify cause and effect, it came to be understood as signifying that a force F applied to a mass m is the efficient cause of an acceleration a = F/m.

Thus, beginning in the seventeenth century, the idea of causation became linked with the concept of a temporally asymmetric sequence of events, in which causes invariably precede their effects in time. We might describe this idea by saying that events are invariably pushed from the past into the future. According to this view, the only real causes are efficient causes, and Aristotle's "final causes" are just fictions or semantic constructions if not outright misunderstandings. The idea that events could be caused by conditions in the future, i.e., that events might be pulled by the future from the past, came to be regarded as non-sensical. The success of Newtonian mechanics seemed to imply that causality acts in only one direction in time, and Aristotle's notion of teleology was discarded.

However, an interesting feature of Newton's laws of motion - as well as of the laws of electromagnetism developed in the nineteenth century - is that they are inherently symmetrical with respect to time. In fact, all the fundamental processes of physics (with the possible exception of kaon decay, which is not relevant to most phenomena) are temporally symmetrical. Given the positions and velocities of a set of perfectly elastic particles, we can apply the ordinary laws of mechanics to extrapolate from the present conditions into the future, but we can just as well extrapolate from the present conditions into the past. Despite this symmetry, we almost invariably conceive of the flow of causality proceeding from the present into the future, rather than into the past. As Aristotle would say, we think in terms of efficient causes and not in terms of final causes.

There is, of course, one very important "law" of classical physics that distinguishes sharply between the two directions of time, namely, the second law of thermodynamics. However, the temporal asymmetry of this "law" is an artifact of the aggregation of many distinct microstates into one macrostate. For example, if all the molecules of a gas are initially clustered in one corner of a box, we expect them to expand (as time advances) to fill up the box, rather than contracting still further. This statement doesn't distinguish between the many different ways in which the molecules could be initially "clustered in one corner of the box". It's true that nearly all the configurations that we would put in this category are such that, when extrapolated forward in time, they will expand, but there are some (very few) microstates in this category that would contract. The sense of paradox comes from confusion between state symmetry and process symmetry.

Let s2 = P(s1, Dt) denote the microstate produced by extrapolating from the microstate s1 through a time interval Dt. The temporal symmetry of physical laws implies that s1 = P(s2, -Dt), but of course it does not imply that s1 = P(s2, Dt). In other words, temporal symmetry of the physical laws does not imply that the state should reverse direction in phase space, i.e., we should not expect the microstate to immediately re-trace its steps in the next increment of time. On the other hand, there does exist a microstate s3 in the same macrostate as s2 but such that P(s3, Dt) equals s1. Furthermore, there are microstates in the same macrostate as s2 that extrapolate under an increment Dt to a microstate in the same macrostate as s1. Thus, when we predict how the macrostate of a system will evolve, we are making a statistical prediction based on the distribution of microstates in each of the macrostates. The reason we can predict the macrostates of a gas (for example) so reliably is that the statistics are hugely weighted in a certain direction. It's possible that a free cloud of gas might spontaneously contract, but the number of microstates of a "free cloud" that lead to contraction is negligibly small compared with the number of microstates that lead to expansion, so when we see an arbitrarily-prepared "free cloud" of gas, it is virtually certain to expand as time increases. To put it simply, there are far more large clouds than small clouds, so a cloud of gas is almost certain to expand.

Not withstanding the statistical nature of descriptions of events in terms of macrostates, the fact remains that the fundamental processes of nature - at least in classical physics - are temporally symmetrical, so our choice of a direction for causality is conventional. Indeed Laplace explicitly recognized this when he wrote about determinism within the Newtonian framework, claiming that if the present conditions were known completely and with perfect precision, then the entire history of the universe, both past and future, would be known. According to Laplace's view, the concept of causality is not even applicable, at least not in the sense of something that flows from the past into the future. Instead, he envisaged a "block universe", complete and whole for its entire history. He certainly would have denied the necessity of restricting our notions of causality to what Aristotle called efficient causes, but it still seems to have been assumed that efficient causes are sufficient to give a complete and coherent account of physical processes.

However, beginning in the 20th century, scientists identified a variety of fundamental processes that seem to defy explanation if we restrict ourselves to just efficient causes. The best known of these processes are those involving quantum entanglement. The results of spacelike-separated measurements on entangled particles exhibit correlations that depend on what measurements are made. It can be shown that no explanation in terms of efficient causes is consistent with the empirical results of such measurements, but the results are quite easy to explain in terms of final causes, i.e., if we allow for the possibility that the emission of a quantum particle may be conditioned to some extent by the circumstances of its absorption. Thus the abandoned notion of "final causes" discussed by Aristotle may turn out to be useful after all. It seems appropriate that the word aitia is a palindrome, since, like the laws of physics, it doesn't distinguish between the forward and backward directions.

Incidentally, we sometimes imagine the advance of science and culture as increasing the level of sophistication and subtlety, giving a fuller recognition of the range of possibilities, and yet there are many example of concepts being winnowed down and categories eliminated (at least temporarily) as science and culture have progressed. The reduction of Aristotle's four types of causation (aitia) to the single type (efficient) recognized by modern science is an example of this. This was not done by unifying or consolidating the four original types; three of the four were simply discarded. Another example concerns the modes of musical composition, of which during the middle ages there were seven, namely, the Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolien, and Locrian. Today almost all music is written in either the Ionian or the Aeolian modes, which we call Major and Minor keys, respectively. The other five modes have simply been discarded. Still another example is the different ways in which a set of numbers can be represented by a single number, called the mean. The ancient Greeks enunciated ten distinct kinds of means, but of these ten only three (the arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic means) remain in common use.

i agree with both of you. In that to believe in the 'objective' existence of the moon is a sensible belief .... but it cannot be proved if by proved you mean a jump from inside the mind to outside the mind. It can be proved within science. The key point being what you mean by proved. Proved rationally within science ..... or 'convincing enough to believe in something' independent of science through scientific inquiry.

And it isn't just science that can do this. Within naive realism the objective belief in something can be provided by experiential memory, not rationality.

And similarly for spiritual beliefs too.

Time direction is only important as Cause in an open ended non-deterministic system...

Reality depends on how you measure it..

When I try to imagine an object that exists outside of my current perceptions and outside of any mind, I always imagine what it would look like in an ultimate sense. I would need to know its relationship to other objects within vast expanses of time, I would need to know it's atomic structure down to the number and kind of atoms, I would need to know what it would look like from all possible sensual perceptions - in which case I would need an inventory of all possible sensory inputs in order to construct a all-sensing subject - I would also need to know its ultimate cause and its ultimate destination. These are all ideas derived from a possible scientific account of cosmos.

How can we say what some object really is in itself, apart from perception, apart from mind or a subject?

Reality depends on how you measure it..

When I try to imagine an object that exists outside of my current perceptions and outside of any mind, I always imagine what it would look like in an ultimate sense. I would need to know its relationship to other objects within vast expanses of time, I would need to know it's atomic structure down to the number and kind of atoms, I would need to know what it would look like from all possible sensual perceptions - in which case I would need an inventory of all possible sensory inputs in order to construct a all-sensing subject - I would also need to know its ultimate cause and its ultimate destination. These are all ideas derived from a possible scientific account of cosmos.

How can we say what some object really is in itself, apart from perception, apart from mind or a subject?

Reality depends on how you measure it..

When I try to imagine an object that exists outside of my current perceptions and outside of any mind, I always imagine what it would look like in an ultimate sense. I would need to know its relationship to other objects within vast expanses of time, I would need to know it's atomic structure down to the number and kind of atoms, I would need to know what it would look like from all possible sensual perceptions - in which case I would need an inventory of all possible sensory inputs in order to construct a all-sensing subject - I would also need to know its ultimate cause and its ultimate destination. These are all ideas derived from a possible scientific account of cosmos.

How can we say what some object really is in itself, apart from perception, apart from mind or a subject?

The only Truth (empirically speaking) is the Entirety, entirely understood. Therefore science is "truth" no matter how useful...

...you can jump from mind to ONE...

Are you sure it isn't truth too? Or Truth?

---------- Post added 03-01-2010 at 10:59 PM ----------


It's over your head or beneath your arrogance? I think this requires a synthesis....

Only a question. You spelled the word three different ways. I wanted to know whether that was significant.

Let's see. Let me try to imagine a Martian. He has tentacles, and a very large head, with large bulbous eyes. Am I imagining him in "an ultimate sense". How can I tell?

I've been thinking on this. To contemplate the unity requires consciousness, an outside view. But this outside view is....

What has this all to do with the transcendental intuition of space? We can think of pure number/unity apart from space, but can we not think of space? It doesn't matter if this imagined space is empty.

---------- Post added 03-01-2010 at 10:59 PM ----------


It's over your head or beneath your arrogance? I think this requires a synthesis....

I know this might seem strange to you, but to put quotes on the word "truth" is equivalent of imposing Kant's concept of noumena to appearance.

A basic feature of human thought is the drawing of distinctions. Distinctions are drawn by negation. To conceive of a horse is simultaneously to conceive of all that is not-horse.

To generate a more abstract word from less abstract words is only the simultaneously association of these words and the negation of their differences. Essence and accident.