What constitutes a property? Existence is not a property, but a fact of reality. All else are properties which rely upon things to be instances of properties.
In sum, there are things, and properties of things.
Tag: materialism
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A corpus is a snapshot of language frozen in time. A POC is also a snapshot of the ontologically existent things at a certain time.
An atom could be a part of this body but belong to another body years later. So it is important to specify when (the snapshot) we are talking about.
This is what I mean by keeping track of the particulars.
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Referent is what goes on in the physical world. Concept is what goes on in the head. Symbol is what goes on in language. Both concept and symbol go on in physical world as processes.
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I argue that the external experience is prime over the internal one.
While I never have full access to the external world (I am always learning something more about it) what I have is enough information and knowledge to navigate it.
The interplay of beings navigating the world with indirect and incomplete perception is the richness and challenge of living in harmony.
If any internal subjective world is taken to be prime we have conflict, because we are not all trying to navigate the external world in a cooperative manner.
Even then we may not be successful but we try to make the world a better place for all that share the space, the external world.
It is the external world that we share, not the internal one. Even so, the internal world (as I see it) is part of the external world by virtue of being housed (located) in the body with a brain. This we namely call the mind. So it is not wrong to say we share the internal worlds as well, but only as external world objects or entities.
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Interesting and insightful that Descartes leaves material as the last to be understood in his meditations.
Indeed, there is nothing a priori about experience. We have to go through it (experience it) to reach a conclusion about what thinking is or what does thinking. For Descartes he decided by the second meditation that it was the mind. I also had thought it was the mind. Jeffrey Kaplan thought we have inherited this belief from Descartes and have continued to run with it as common sense. But common sense it is not.
Some time later I have come to believe this is wrong, that I am not a mind, but a body with mind processes (thinking). The thinking thing is not the mind but the body.
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The body causes the mind.
Without the body there is no underlying mind action. The process of thinking is like any bodily process such as walking, sitting, sleeping.
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My mind is tethered to the body. I have never had experienced my mind apart from my body. Not have observed minds apart from bodies. The only conclusion I can draw is that all that exists is material, and that I am my body.
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I have observed 1) bodies with minds, 2) bodies without minds, 3) minds with bodies, but 4) never minds without bodies.
The evidence suggests that bodies are prime. Bodies exist without minds, even if it means in state of brain death, vegetative state, or death. Minds are instantiated as body processes. Minds, whatever they are, rely on the biological substrate. Without bodies, there are no minds (again, whatever minds are, if they are anything at all).
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I am at a loss as to what to call my theory that humans are not exempt from evolution, that their development is a natural course of evolution itself, and therefore our characteristic behavior of believing that we stand outside of evolution is an evolutionary mechanism. Everything we do, everything we think is a product of Darwinian evolution, and can be explained by Darwinism.
To call it pan-naturalism is to point out that human beings are part of the natural selection process. Pan-Darwinism (think The Descent of Man) is to highlight man is an animal.
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1.
Imagine you are in a reality in which there are no objects. Even you do not exist as an object. Of course, this is impossible. But it is possible to imagine. We have the ability to do this somehow.Imagine now that you are moving through this reality. But how would you know you are moving? You would have no reference points.
Perhaps you are body, the only body in the reality, like a perfect unchanging sphere. Your spinning and turning would not give you reference points. And if say you are not a perfect sphere but you are unchanging then you still would not have reference points. No amount of rotation will tell you which direction you are facing or where you have moved to.
So let us say you are now you are an irregularly shaped object and you are now flexible. Your changing shape has now given you distance and duration. With this you have an understanding of space and time.
What is required of reality are objects, space and time. But space and time can never be observed directly. Space and time are only inferred from the relationships of objects and the change of the relationship of objects in inferred space, respectively.
2.
Objects mark positions in space and in time.A position in space is never simultaneously (at the same time) be occupied by two objects . Nor is it occupied by an object or space at once. I can only guess that a position is not occupied by two spaces at once.
What I can say is, a position is either object or space.
So space must be a special kind of object.
3.
Time is sequential and equal.An object moving with reference to another object shows this.
4.
There are no objects without there being space and time. Thingsspacetime is the fundamental characteristic of reality. This is the reality we exist in. This is the reality we should worry about.
theoria 