I would have thought that the sciences often show us that we are often mistaken (I would not say that there was a deception going on, for who would be doing the deceiving?) about surface appearances. Earth does not go round the Sun as it appears. Earth is not flat. Commonsense objects are actually composed of very small particles, atoms, electrons, and the like. And so on. So, don't the sciences tell us that "things are seldom what they seem. Skim milk often masquerades as cream."? (W.S. Gilbert).

Kenneth, when I used the term 'might we be deceived regarding the true nature of reality' I was borrowing the name from Descartes who posited a 'demon' that might be deceiving him. I guess it sounds confusing out of context.

Anyway, after reading your thoughts the next logical question it seems to me is, in light of the types of realities that science discovers and shows to us, what then is reality and nature truly like? How would you propose that someone who is looking for such a truth go about his search?


--Pyth

Reality is hardly an illusion, but more of a Chinese puzzle box, one inside the other, indefinity. It is what it is with another is within. So, we decieve ourselves with notions of truth and frustrate ourselves with our desire for certainty, when what we often have is exactly what we really need, and this is meaning.

Thus what the ancient Platonists have observed is very true, and is very worthy of being considered, that the existence of intelligible things and particularly of the Ego which thinks and which is called spirit or soul, is incomparably more sure than the existence of sensible things; and that thus it would not be impossible, speaking with metaphysical rigor, that there should be at botton only these intelligible substances, and that sensible things should be but appearances. While on the other hand our lack of attention makes us take sensible things for the only true things.

You may be referring to what John Locke called occult qualities. These 'qualities' were widely accepted by the 'schoolmen' whose teaching Descartes and Locke were struggling against, and who treated the notions of what we now call physics as 'meanings' and whose Aristotelian philosophy was overthrown by the likes of Descartes, Locke and Leibniz. In their respective 'new' philosophies they replaced 'human meanings' regarding nature with concepts of quantifiable measurement and generalized methods of mathematical deduction.

In his letter Leibniz does mention the possibility of 'abstracting' the whole of nature which would leave a man alone in the universe and if we are to believe Descartes, the man would have not even a body. This is the power of the philosophy of pure reason; that it can abstract all save the intelligible foundations in nature.

I do not argue against regarding nature with concepts of quantifiable measurement and generalized methods of mathematical deduction, but rather argue for them, and at the end understand even them as meanings of a more exacting and rigorous nature.

No concept is exactly true to the reality it attempts to concieve. Each concept exists as a hypothetical statement of what is perceived in reality. Ultimately we only conceive of what we can perceive and what we percieve as having meaning; and we give our greatest attention and detail to that which holds for us the greatest significance, that is meaning. When we think of a thing in reality or try to communicate the thing in reality we cannot think of the whole thing, as this is beyond our grasp, and we cannot give in the form of communication what we cannot grasp, but only what we do grasp, which is the meaning we gather from what is perceived, that is, What we find significant about it.

And I must ask of Locke, having read little of Locke; what he does in the way of measuring concepts of intangibles which are purely of meaning, and to which each person gives their meaning at will?

Do we not already do enough of what Descartes described? Is this not our fate, to so abstract reality that we can no longer live in it? Think of the stupid clown killing those people in the mall: dead and famous. Does fame have a meaning to the dead? Does anything have a meaning to the dead?To think abstraction does not carry a meaning is silly. Its meaning is the meaning all things have; and that is the meaning living people give to them. To try to abstract reality beyond meaning is to value the corpse more than the person. First, this total abstraction cannot be done, but the meaning of anyone trying to do so is frightning. Life is the essential quality in all we see. We see the meaning of ourselves, and of our lives reflected back from all we see of existence. We cannot possibly give to any thing in reality any more meaning than our lives possess.

Fido, it is always a pleasure to read your writing, but I think you are personalizing or associating social meanings with what is essentially a quest for the foundations of the universe. You make it like a Greek drama, maybe a tragedy, when it is a journey of discovery of the real at the expense of what is not real or true.

If, as you state, no concept can correspond exactly to the reality which we attempt to convey then what about the success of the physical sciences? It seems that there can be mathematical certainties in respect to the rigorous concepts of the scientist and the realities which he completely and utterly manipulates to the point of reinvention and even mass-marketing. It seems that when science and physics conceives of things it does in fact conceive of whole things and can communicate those things in ultimate and physical terms. What we should, I believe, find significant about what the sciences do is the fact that it is reason that is used in the processes of discovery, invention, and manufacturing etc.

I think Locke would immediately point to the fact that most people live in a kind of fog and go through life blinded by emotions and phantoms. He would think it important to seperate that which is real and upon which we can construct true propositions from that which is unfounded dogma or illusory or meaningless. As far as the existential meaning given to states of affairs by individuals file that under religion or poetry or philosophical analysis of beauty (fragments of participation in the metaphysical Forms or Ideas) or political philosophy.

The component that seems to be missing here is the historical one. For example, in the not so distant past human beings lived in complete misery and abject poverty and disease. If we witness a massacre today it is still only a hint of what our forefathers lived through on a daily basis. The formulations of the early modern philosophes are in part the reasons that we today live in such modern comfort. Remember it was the ideas of Locke helped shape the Constitution of the United States as well as its Enlightenement heritage.

We are merely too comfortable, in my opinion, to have the ambition to discover higher truths today; but without that sense of enterprise that our forefathers posessed where would we be?

To sum it up I don't think we should be so 'human' as to forego the ultimate quest for the foundations of the universe through science or philosophy or even through political pacts and religious schools. I guess I believe that it is the human mission to learn and that without the drive to ultimate knowledge, then those things which are so meaningful that you point to would not be capable of actuality for us. Without the search for ultimate foundations those meanings wouldn't, couldn't ever take place. I think those types of meanings are dependent upon the necessity of this search for ultimate reality.

Please, GridLoK, come on in and participate in the discussion.

Great thread Pythagorean!!

Fido,

It seems Fido would have humanity justify its curiousity to some imagined moral code, which could not even be possiable in the absence of the missing pieces of knowledge curiousity demands. I think this is a different question altogether, and speaks out of fear. If it were possiable to obtain knowledge that was not of objects relations to our own biology, but simply about object, we would be looking at our own divinity. Those who are to fearful to look over the garden wall, perhaps contemplating the great abyss, can claim to themselves nothing but the abyss, the quest is not really a choice of humanity, rather an expression of its nature, as the consciousness of earth.

If you think I am fearful of the possible anti-human uses technology and knowledge can be put to; well yes. Technology has not made us less slave or more master of our passions. Is it ever going to be complete until it does? Since we cannot find truth in any single instance of looking, and cannot ever discover the thing in itself, the best we can do is do no harm. We want to explain our world, and understand our world. In that we already know enough to rule this planet. What we need is to explain ourselves, and understand humanity. Because one half of philosophy has an easy task does not mean it should leave the other to toil. Scientist should be turned to the moral, rather than the physical problems they attack. As it stands, the need for war, and for advantage in war drives a great deal of scientific research. Does anyone presume that the unmet moral and psychological needs of humanity will not drive more to war? Look at the example of the primitive Native American. Was he not driven into a balance with his environment because of his lack of technology? Why do we presume a technological answer awaits to justify our imbalance with our environment when it is precisely our technology that is driving our environmental imbalance?

The moral science has not kept pace with the physical science. That should be clear. Now, is the answer more energy into the physical sciences? It had a down hill run. Give it a break. I want something other than the obvious victory we can hand to science. I want justice, understanding, freedom, and equality to flow out of the well of science. Is that too much to ask? If it is not good for all it is not good.

I would just like to add some perspective here and hope that I can do so clearly:

Philosophers who believe in a priori knowledge generally do not insist upon the technical transformation of reality. They do not necessarily call for the creation of virtual realiy environments from which we may correctly or absolutely interpret the natural world from.

What they tend to believe in is what is called philsophical/metaphysical realism. That is simply belief in universals. And the belief that universals are the ultimate constituents of reality and that what we take to be reality in its empirical everyday manifestation is in part an illusion of particularity.

They say that reality consists of intelligible forms or principles and that it is by these principles that we come to know things.

For example, a particular object that we encounter must be classified into an orderly and knowable category if we are to posess knowledge of it. So that knowledge is logically prior to the empirical things. And things can be classified into universals and we can know of universals without having to encounter every single particular of its kind. This is what is meant by realism, that universals exist independently and somehow prior to this world.

In this way terms such as virtue or moral aspects of human life can also be fitted into a metaphysical scheme. As Plato has hypothesized: there can be a term "piety" for example, of which all individual pious actions take part in.

The important things to note here, I think, is that the universals are not hard empirical objects, but are known only by intellectual means; they are considered "intelligible" and not physical in nature.

Fido, Boagie,

It seems to me that a large portion of humanity may not be innately capable of understanding the nature of 'the good'. If told that such a quality existed and was worthwhile to pursue and to understand they would just stare at you and blink uncomprehendingly. They would even tell you that whatever evil they were engaged in was itself 'the good' as they see it. So we need to torture these people in order to get them to conform to the real 'good', right? The lowest common denominator seems to win in the long run. The only way to control human morality is to win over their emotions with a sad story or some other form of fiction such as supernatural intervention and revelation. Like bribing a child to be good so that he will get good gifts on Christmas morning or giving him money for studying his catechisms.

Human nature is largely mired in the shroud of its savage animal ancestry, which is blinded by emotions and instincts and cannot overcome them to reach a point of reasoning that could discern good behaviour from wickedness. Only in the minds of the reasonable can emotions and impulses become objectified to some extent and ordered into some kind of harmony.

But passion always rules over reason and poetry becomes once again the legislator of human kind. And philosophy becomes relegated again to its confines while the physical sciences is exploited by the greedy and those seeking political power. This is already a very old story.

Wow, fellas, words are flowing thick and fast here! Don't know if I'll be able to get back and read all of the preceding posts - so please excuse me if I traipse over old ground without realising.

Maybe I could start by considering, as best I can, what appear to me as some fundamental issues (and hopefully avoid 'fundamentalist' statements in the process!).

Plato, as I recall, suggested that we think of our knowledge of the Forms (the idealised Esse or Truth of existences), as being akin to shadows cast on a wall at the back of a cave, by objects moving across the mouth of the cave, illuminated by the divine light from beyond the cave. Humanity, confined to the depths of the cave, and unable to observe directly these 'true forms' or 'universals', is constrained to trying to derive their understanding from the imprecise and flawed exemplars of which they are sensible. It is a limited analogy, and I am not sufficiently familiar with the full extent of Plato's writing to venture any detailed commentary. However Pythagorean is, as I recall, correct in pointing out that Plato held that, the 'universals' while inaccessible to human senses, were 'intelligible' - that is to say appreciable to the human intellect. Further, that knowledge of the universals existed, a priori, in the human mind and that, this could be demonstrated by the Socratic elenchic: A process by which an interlocutor could, through carefully framed questions, lead a subject to awareness of principles and elements of knowledge (particularly in logic,philosophy & mathematics), that they had not previously had, and of which they were not directly instructed.

Put very bluntly, the Platonic premises do not, I think, withstand close scrutiny in the light of current awareness. Consider: Plato, in the Meno, has Socrates asserting that " all learning is recollection. He bases this on the idea that the human soul is immortal and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the higher world, has knowledge of everything." <http://www.hermes-press.com/dialogues_teach.htm>. There are a number of premises adopted in the construction by Plato, of this (and the other) dialogues:

• The existence and nature of the human 'soul'

• the soul's relationship to hypotheses about a postulated afterlife

• the process whereby the human organism develops - specifically the relationship between the biological and behavioural aspects

and so I could go on, about matters seminal to consideration of the overt aspects of Plato's platitudes.

Yet I agree with Norman D. Livergood: Through Plato's genius for constructing dialogues,"we gain an understanding of fundamental concepts by bringing [them] into dialectical juxtaposition". But the elenchus of Socrates requires that allIt is for this reason that I urge the pursuit of Philantilipsy (philos - to love or be a friend of; antilipsis - understanding)over Philosophy.