From Philosophy Matters.
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None of us have the experience of knowledge of the absolute reality, if there is indeed such a reality at all. It is speculation, and nothing more, speculation in the normal sense of the word.
And when we do speculate about such a place, the question of why we require the known physical reality never seems to come up. That the “mundane” reality is not worth considering, like its namesake – ordinary, not interesting or exciting.
How is it that the ordinary is uninteresting or unexciting a given?
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Buddhism states there are six senses. But strictly speaking there are six facilities – five senses (sight, sound, smell, taste,and touch) and one faculty (mind).
The senses are to experience the reality. The mind faculty is to make sense of the reality.
In other words the mind is not an organ to sense directly the environment. It is a secondary faculty when compared to the other senses.
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When I said object-space-time is a system I mean they are not found separately. Except for in the mind as a concept objects can be separated out from space and time. This is true true of space and time as well – for only in the mind as concepts can this be done. In reality itself this is impossible.
Try removing something you dislike from the reality, and you will find that ignoring it is not the same thing as it doesn’t exist in this reality.
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Space is not empty. It is known that in order to truly make space empty, a quantum vacuum, a large amount of energy is needed to do so. In other words, to dismantle space in the same way we dismantle or make atoms (nuclear fission and fission) requires similar expenditure of, if not more, energy. While we have no observable experience of space as we do of objects we can infer from the behavior of objects in space to know about space and time. Space seems to be a special kind of object.
But to speculate on this though is futile. We do not need to know everything about an object to understand it. The car is an example. I can drive it without knowing how the engine or steering work. All I need to know is a car will go forward if I step on the accelerator, and that it will turn left if I turn the steering wheel anti-clockwise.
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Spatiotemporal continuity is the property of well-behaved objects in space and time, that they do not ‘jump’, or in other words if a body exists at one time and a later time, then it exists throughout the interval, and if it is in one place at a time and a different place at a later time, then it traced a path through space from the one place to another.
I would note that what is well-behaved are not only objects but space and time as well.
We can infer from objects and space the characteristics of time, from object and time the characteristics of space, and from space and time the characteristics of objects.
No place can be occupied by multiple objects. Nor can place be occupied by multiple spaces. And no place can be occupied by multiple times.
Any abstraction is necessarily the removal of one of these entities within the mind, the representation.
In other words, objects-space-time is a single system. It is reality. It is what exists. Abstracted objects do not exist (they cannot be properly called “objects”) but an object that makes abstractions may exist (a universe without an abstracting conscious object is entirely possible but not likely).
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The perception of one object by ten people does not make for ten objects. Ten conceptions of one object in ten conceiving objects, yes. Thus, in this instance we can count one perceived object and ten perceiving objects.
Keeping track the number of objects (not the number of perceptions) is the task at hand.
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Iterability, a term used by Derrida, describes the necessary repeatable-ness of any statement.
The moment you read this sentence you have performed an act of iterability. I wrote it. You read it. It may seem like it is one sentence but it has been repeated already once there is a speaker and listener.
The speaker or author assumes there is a listener or listeners.
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The observer/speaker is usually hidden in any statement we make. Take the following statement:
There are things.
While the speaker is pointing out objects in space, the use of ‘there’ hides the fact that the speaker is ‘here’ observing the objects that are ‘there’. In other words, there are not only the things observed but also the observer/speaker as a thing as well, only it is made invisible by the form of the statement.
Admiringly, it is difficult to avoid, for this is the characteristic of language. So it is imperative that we point this out, be aware of this fact of language that is not a fact of reality.
Every statement, whether this fact is hidden or not, includes the speaker and the listener.
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I reject mind-only monism, monadology, and mind-body dualism, and accept only material monism as philosophically feasible.
I am not eliminative of the mind (I believe there is usefulness in talking about something called the mind) but I am explanatory of it through the physical but see a danger in conceiving it as an object like the body (a Rylean categorical mistake).
We must explore the possibility that language and subsequently language-based concepts play a large role in determining or influencing how we think about things and, more importantly, non-things.
theoria 