Reality has a definite structure. Being conscious of reality has nothing to do with its definite-ness or structure.
Reality exists independently of it being perceived.
Reality is.
Tag: physicalism
-
I have always been in two minds about materialism and physicalism, about which is the better or correct term.
R had persuaded me that the mind is not another “substance” as such but that it can be described as a physical mind. To be “physical” is to be matter or energy. In the case of mind it is physical because it is energy. To be precise, it is a certain configuration of energy. Mind is organized energy.
-
Let me call thrownness “situatedness”.
There is always a time and place for which something exists. If something is without time and place, it does not exist.
-
I do not need to know every detail of a car in order to utilize it. As long as I know it needs petrol, steering, acceleration, and braking controls, I can use it.
This applies to everything else, including the body I inhabit. It may well be a mistake (I tend to think it is) to say inhabit as though there are separate objects – a body and a mind. The mind may be a very good illusion.
-
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.
-
While it is possible to account for everything in reality at any one (synchronic) time, it is not feasible. As a thought experiment, it is worthwhile.
Since mass-energy in reality is finite and constant all particulars can be accounted for with a kind of synchronic snapshot. Let us say that some particulars while everything else unaccounted for are lumped into a category of “other”. In this way we still have a complete inventory of reality. This is important because it takes into consideration the context for which a particular belongs. Logic ignores context, that is, logic de-contextualizes the particulars.
But that is the nature of universals. To generalize is to remove context, to think of the concept without particulars. As such, universals are useful mental “objects” but literally useless as physical objects.
The mistake often is to forget that mental “objects” only “exists” as long as conceptualizing physical objects exist. And for this reason we should keep an inventory of particulars before we keep an inventory of universals.
-
No thing or being is outside of the time and place for which they exist. I am situated with preconditions beyond my control. And it is in these conditions that I am to live with and exist in.
-
Pay attention to the particulars. Because it is always the particulars which affect you, and not the universals.
-
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.
-
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.
theoria 