What constitutes “observation” (/“measurement”)

[SanteriSatama]

I agree you need a kind of idealism, but there is no reason where it can’t be a platonic idealism where real numbers are an aspect of the foundation. Part of the reason the natural platonic understanding of mathematicians falls down so easily is they have their natural idealist/platonic sense of numbers confined to the world of maths, not as a wider metaphysics. So that “platonic realm” becomes a separate place “out there” rather than “in here”. Once you do that, then pi, 0.5, Cos 50, i, etc are all an expression of ‘real numbers’…

Algebraic numbers are a fascinating challenge for a coherent foundational theory. But that's not what real numbers mean. Practically all real numbers are infinite sets of non-demonstrable and non-computable pseudotranscendentals without any finite generative algorithm. If any line segment would consist of infinity of real number points, it would take an infinity to move from a point to point. On the other hand, the truncated "approximations" of infinite real numbers can't form the claimed continuum.

The computation process that allows us to talk over Internet can't happen in idealist real-number time. It's empirically invalid theory that is falsified each moment, each duration of experiencing.

[AshvinP]

As we saw from the finger in front of your eye example, realizing you are a unique perspective of God does not inhibit your ability to function or know about the world. In fact, it gives you a much more harmonious understanding of the world you are functioning in. You go from, "I have two eyes redundantly showing me the same world" to "I have one eye providing me a perspective, and another eye providing another perspective, and they both integrate to give me a more whole perspective on the world." That is what we call 'physical' knowledge by way of the Spirit's illumination. There is no discontinuity between the two forms of knowledge, but there is also no possible way you could get from the first understanding to the second understanding from merely studying the physical components of the eye, without the Spirit's illumination (in this case our Reasoning activity).

What part of that is any different if I am a unique being, connected to and part of the cosmos, in the image of god?

That same logic applies to all physical processes. That is what your view is missing - the spiritual (Thinking) component. You are assuming there is an external world to you which is complete in itself and that your eyes-mind take that complete picture and tries to recreate it within you. That is the standard flawed assumption of nearly all post-Cartesian science and philosophy. We can dispel that assumption by reasoning through the nature of our thinking activity. All of that reasoning is provided by Steiner in his PoF and also Goethean Science. In a nutshell, our thinking activity takes incomplete percepts of the world and unites them with their proper concepts to form Unities of experience. That is why we can say we are truly co-creating the phenomenal world. Of course this will make little sense unless you actually go through the reasoning for yourself.

I don’t think the “external world is “complete in itself”. However it has a level of reality given to it by god, for a purpose. You cannot just turn the starving family you perceive in the house next door into teapots, and ignore them because you don’t fancy tea. Some cultures tend to treat animals very cruelly as they see them as not much different to tractors, does that make the reality they “co-create” real?

I know what your answer to this will be, but I actually see a danger in this because it makes the spiritual journey monotone. We are grounded and given spiritual food to sustain us by turning our hearts and mind to god, by connecting at the deepest level into the vine through the eucharist, and by finding some silence in the storms that can rage there. We are fulfilled by then turning that inward love from god outwards into the world, by helping in small ways the people/creatures/environment in their needs. We are improved by understanding and acknowledging or failings, our shadow, and putting effort into improving our thoughts, words and actions. And finally we have an opportunity to enjoy life, to appreciate and be thankful for the good things we have been given.

These are not things that happen just through a correct understanding of our perception. They are about choices, and a journey, and as someone who has spent a big chunk of his life being selfish and foolish, these are the things that are slowly turning the ship around so that it’s path now at least has a compass.

The part that is different is you do not acknowledge that the person Reasoning through the meaning of these underlying 'physical' processes is engaged in the shared essence of Spirit which illuminates the phenomenal world. You seem to think the human who does that without explicit declaration of faith in Christ is not engaged in anything we can rightly call spiritual activity. You use words like "hearts and minds", " understanding", "thoughts", "appreciate", "thankful", without acknowledging their true import for the essence of our spiritual (Thinking) activity as a co-creative force. Therefore, you ignore that our true knowledge of the ideal world is exactly what allows us to make proper choices on our spiritual journey. That is why you downgrade participatory Thinking to "understanding how the stage lights work".

You are making Reality two by claiming God's essence creates another essence when creating us (and presumably all other creatures).

Yes I am, it’s only when we are “born again in the spirit” that we take on participation in god’s spirit. This is how we become children rather than creations. He did not create us as his essence.

It is a very simple thing I am pointing out to you, so simple that it easily goes unnoticed. The thing is, I am not interested in convincing you my view is more "sacred" than yours. If you get a feeling of more sacredness by thinking of God as other than man, or by whatever mystical experience you have had in the context of your faith, then that is just the way it is and I cannot write anything to change that. But, ideally, that would be stated upfront - that the separation of God from man is based only on faith and/or mystical experience and not on reasoning - so that I do not assume you are looking for reasoned arguments.

It’s based on several ways of knowing, including experience, reason and faith. There must be a balance in these things to understand where things fit correctly.

Then you are holding to substance dualism in the exact same manner as the Cartesian-Kantian dualist, dividing Mind from matter and Essence from appearance (not merely distinguishing but dividing). Although now you add a new layer of confusion by saying when we are "born again" we do share the essence of God as his children. By thinking of it in this rigid dogmatic manner you rob death and rebirth of their true essence and relevance to our daily lives. I write about this topic some in my latest essay:

In what way besides Thinking could we approach such an invisible yet highly specified Reality? Thinking fulfills its essential role, then, through the integration of varied human souls - "I have not come to abolish the law or the prophets, but to fulfill them." It takes what presents to us as differentiated appearances of willing and feeling and weaves back together the ideal constellations which make sense of those appearances as a living whole. We often refer to this process when speaking of the "spirit" of a text, especially in common law traditions. The highly differentiated rules of court decisions and statutes can only be effective when they are born of the principle (spirit) underlying them. Old rules must continuously be reborn in that spirit to remain relevant and useful.

Such realities can be spoken of so casually in conversation that we look entirely past their essential meaning, so let us dwell on it some more. Our thinking, through its rebirth, takes the most varied notes and tones of the human soul provided by willing-feeling and synthesizes them into a harmony which sounds exceptionally pleasant to the eternal Spirit. We cannot understand these distinct essential roles of W-F-T in complete isolation from one other, because all experience always consists of all three qualities in Tri-Unity. And it is only that living Trinity which provides food for our thought; which provokes the most thought within us; which eternally calls upon us to Think.

If we continue to dwell within this problematic, then it will dawn on us why the λογος has always presented itself to ancient thought as the Sun-Being. Only through that Being's living activity is the whole phenomenal world we observe illuminated. This occurrence happened only once in human history through the Passion of Christ incarnate, yet it is not a one-time event any more than the day arising from the twilight and the dusk is a one-time event. The echoes of the Cross continue to reverberate in every human soul and can find their fulfillment in every human's Thinking. They now find their fulfillment in every moment of our existence while also seeking their fulfillment in our collective human destiny.

Your OP certainly gives the impression that you are looking for such reasoned arguments to discuss the essence of what occurs in the Universe, and the only place such questions could naturally go is to the essence of spiritual Reality. Perhaps you do not expect that because you hold spiritual Reality to exist in a completely different domain of inquiry (or non-inquiry) than the workings of the Universe, an expectation which I claim is an obvious artifice of Cartesian-Kantian dualisms. When we inevitably arrive at the spiritual Reality, then it becomes entirely a matter of feeling and faith for you. I would say the sacred feeling you get in the context of Catholic faith is actually intimation of the higher spiritual Reality I am speaking of, despite the rigid Church dogma, and it should prompt you towards seeking higher resolution of the spiritual workings behind the phenomenal world.

It’s fine to try to understand these things, but go back to the analogy of us being actors on a stage. By the time you work out how the writer of the play got the script to the director, how the director got the script to you, you summarised the key themes and decided the parts of the script you wanted to change, the play will be over. The reviews will say there was this one actor who just stood there staring at a bit of paper in his hand.

Right now it seems to me your position is summed up by Kant when he said, "I had to deny knowledge to make room for faith".

Kant was a protestant, so that’s not a surprise

Your sentiment above simply results from the lack of appreciation for the noble role of Thinking in our spiritual life. If you downgrade it to the mere intellectual activity, then of course you will miss entirely the import of what is actually occurring through that activity and dismiss it as some personal line of inquiry which is not essential to the play at large. But in reality, the play has no meaning to us or for us without the power of Thinking. Again, this is a very obvious thing I am pointing out - it is only our Thinking which provides ideal content (meaning) to any story of our lives. And I mention this critical relationship between thanking and Thinking at the beginning of Part 2 of TMT essay.

The entire question of "what is called Thinking?" for Heidegger revolves around the essence of Memory and Time, as we began to explore at the end of Part I. There is a connection between Thinking, Memory, and Time that he wants us to mine from the depths of his mature thought. He is eager to get 'underway' on the path into Thinking, because "we are still not yet Thinking". Heidegger draws our attention to the fact that "the Old English thencan, to think, and thancian, to thank, are closely related; the Old English noun for thought is thanc or thonc - a thought, a grateful thought, and the expression of such a thought" which "today survives in the plural thanks".

[Simon Adams]

Your sentiment above simply results from the lack of appreciation for the noble role of Thinking in our spiritual life. If you downgrade it to the mere intellectual activity, then of course you will miss entirely the import of what is actually occurring through that activity and dismiss it as some personal line of inquiry which is not essential to the play at large. But in reality, the play has no meaning to us or for us without the power of Thinking. Again, this is a very obvious thing I am pointing out - it is only our Thinking which provides ideal content (meaning) to any story of our lives. And I mention this critical relationship between thanking and Thinking at the beginning of Part 2 of TMT essay.

I think we have to just agree to disagree. In order to express what I disagree with in your view, I end up appearing to be even further away. God created the whole of the garden of paradise, and the wilderness outside it. He walks in it, but is not it. Nonetheless he transcends and sustains all of it, all things come from him and return to him. When Moses goes up the mountain, god extends from heaven and meets him. In mass, god extends down into the host, and again heaven touches earth. God stands at the door knocking, but unless you respond, your only connection to him is the same as all other things in creation, through the sustaining of being.

Thoughts are an expression of our reality, and can shape our reality, but you can love without thought, you can feel sadness without thought, sometimes truth is just silence.

[AshvinP]

Your sentiment above simply results from the lack of appreciation for the noble role of Thinking in our spiritual life. If you downgrade it to the mere intellectual activity, then of course you will miss entirely the import of what is actually occurring through that activity and dismiss it as some personal line of inquiry which is not essential to the play at large. But in reality, the play has no meaning to us or for us without the power of Thinking. Again, this is a very obvious thing I am pointing out - it is only our Thinking which provides ideal content (meaning) to any story of our lives. And I mention this critical relationship between thanking and Thinking at the beginning of Part 2 of TMT essay.

I think we have to just agree to disagree. In order to express what I disagree with in your view, I end up appearing to be even further away. God created the whole of the garden of paradise, and the wilderness outside it. He walks in it, but is not it. Nonetheless he transcends and sustains all of it, all things come from him and return to him. When Moses goes up the mountain, god extends from heaven and meets him. In mass, god extends down into the host, and again heaven touches earth. God stands at the door knocking, but unless you respond, your only connection to him is the same as all other things in creation, through the sustaining of being.

Thoughts are an expression of our reality, and can shape our reality, but you can love without thought, you can feel sadness without thought, sometimes truth is just silence.

But there is only ideal content (meaning) of love, sadness, etc. through the spiritual activity of Thinking. This is so basic of a principle we fly right past it in thoughtful dialogues such as this one - it is implicit in everything we write but we fail to account for it in our intellectual arguments. Let's see if what we are discussing recently can be related back to your OP.

First off, what do we mean by physical properties? If two meteors hit each other in space, there is an impact. We know that this is just fields repelling each other, but equally this is something that would normally fall under the description of a physical event. The material properties play a critical role in determining the outcome of the collision. Is the suggestion that this event would be in any way different if it happened in a part of the universe that is further than 4 billion light years away from any planet that has life? If so, in what way would it be different?

You view this as a meaningful question precisely because you do not have to account for the ideal content of "physical properties" of meteors colliding with each other in space. I am arguing that the actual Reality of what happens in such events is to be found only in the ideal activity-content (which is essentially the same position as the philosophical realism of the Scholastics). You are imagining an event occurring independently of all living and conscious observation-participation because it allows a perspective where the ideal content does not have to be accounted for - that is also what the physicalists do when attempting to understand the essence of Reality.

These are the Cartesian-Kantian divides always operating in the background of our intellectual thought. The interior meaning of physical events is always made secondary and inferior to the exterior appearance of such events by those background assumptions. They claim our thinking is merely personal to each individual, so each individual is simply trying to recreate the "external" Reality in their personal thoughts. Those flawed assumptions are exactly why the claim of our co-creation in the phenomenal world sounds so strange to our modern ears. At first it seems remarkable to me that the things I am writing about in the essays are immediately expressed by someone on this forum, but then I remember it all stems from those divides which are endemic to all philosophy and religion in the West.

[SanteriSatama]

I think we have to just agree to disagree. In order to express what I disagree with in your view, I end up appearing to be even further away. God created the whole of the garden of paradise, and the wilderness outside it. He walks in it, but is not it. Nonetheless he transcends and sustains all of it, all things come from him and return to him. When Moses goes up the mountain, god extends from heaven and meets him. In mass, god extends down into the host, and again heaven touches earth. God stands at the door knocking, but unless you respond, your only connection to him is the same as all other things in creation, through the sustaining of being.

Sounds like a good combo of transcendence and immanence, which stays open to process philosophy.

[Ben Iscatus]

Ah yes, transcendence and immanence - my favourite cake, the one you can eat and still have.

[AshvinP]

Ah yes, transcendence and immanence - my favourite cake, the one you can eat it and still have.

Yep and "immanent" in name only. All that important and high resolution knowledge of God belongs to his transcendent aspect forever beyond our reach!

[Simon Adams]

Algebraic numbers are a fascinating challenge for a coherent foundational theory. But that's not what real numbers mean. Practically all real numbers are infinite sets of non-demonstrable and non-computable pseudotranscendentals without any finite generative algorithm. If any line segment would consist of infinity of real number points, it would take an infinity to move from a point to point. On the other hand, the truncated "approximations" of infinite real numbers can't form the claimed continuum.

The computation process that allows us to talk over Internet can't happen in idealist real-number time. It's empirically invalid theory that is falsified each moment, each duration of experiencing.

I don’t really see that as a problem. It seems there are layers of reality, a hierarchy if you like, with the essence of maths at the top. Plato seems to just have “forms”, whether they are universals or a particulars. I think the universal forms of maths are with it’s essence as ‘divine ideas’, along with the symmetry that makes equations work etc. There are no real numbers at this level, more like principles but difficult to imagine in any concrete way. However the particulars of numbers are the abstraction, like a fractal expansion of the ideas, and that’s where the real numbers sit. I guess you could say that algebra is like an in between level.

My philosophy of maths is very primitive (I don’t really know what you mean by a pseudotranscendental), but it seems intuitively natural to see it like this. The idea that maths is just a human invention, like a created tool rather something discovered, makes no sense to me at all.

[Simon Adams]

But there is only ideal content (meaning) of love, sadness, etc. through the spiritual activity of Thinking. This is so basic of a principle we fly right past it in thoughtful dialogues such as this one - it is implicit in everything we write but we fail to account for it in our intellectual arguments. Let's see if what we are discussing recently can be related back to your OP.

First off, what do we mean by physical properties? If two meteors hit each other in space, there is an impact. We know that this is just fields repelling each other, but equally this is something that would normally fall under the description of a physical event. The material properties play a critical role in determining the outcome of the collision. Is the suggestion that this event would be in any way different if it happened in a part of the universe that is further than 4 billion light years away from any planet that has life? If so, in what way would it be different?

You view this as a meaningful question precisely because you do not have to account for the ideal content of "physical properties" of meteors colliding with each other in space. I am arguing that the actual Reality of what happens in such events is to be found only in the ideal activity-content (which is essentially the same position as the philosophical realism of the Scholastics). You are imagining an event occurring independently of all living and conscious observation-participation because it allows a perspective where the ideal content does not have to be accounted for - that is also what the physicalists do when attempting to understand the essence of Reality.

So do you think this had no history before it arrived in this solar system? What was it before it arrived here?

[SanteriSatama]

Algebraic numbers are a fascinating challenge for a coherent foundational theory. But that's not what real numbers mean. Practically all real numbers are infinite sets of non-demonstrable and non-computable pseudotranscendentals without any finite generative algorithm. If any line segment would consist of infinity of real number points, it would take an infinity to move from a point to point. On the other hand, the truncated "approximations" of infinite real numbers can't form the claimed continuum.

The computation process that allows us to talk over Internet can't happen in idealist real-number time. It's empirically invalid theory that is falsified each moment, each duration of experiencing.

I don’t really see that as a problem. It seems there are layers of reality, a hierarchy if you like, with the essence of maths at the top. Plato seems to just have “forms”, whether they are universals or a particulars. I think the universal forms of maths are with it’s essence as ‘divine ideas’, along with the symmetry that makes equations work etc. There are no real numbers at this level, more like principles but difficult to imagine in any concrete way. However the particulars of numbers are the abstraction, like a fractal expansion of the ideas, and that’s where the real numbers sit. I guess you could say that algebra is like an in between level.

My philosophy of maths is very primitive (I don’t really know what you mean by a pseudotranscendental), but it seems intuitively natural to see it like this. The idea that maths is just a human invention, like a created tool rather something discovered, makes no sense to me at all.

"Pseudotranscendental" is not my word, just how the non-computable fairy dust of real numbers is sometimes called. To separate them from "genuine" transcendentals with some proof of a certain quality of very few finite algorithms or algorithm-families referred as pi, e and couple others.

Whether we find or invent mathematics, the answer is not either-or but bit of both. I think of human mathematicians as heuristic sub routines in general evolution of heavently-earthly mathematics.

Yes, algebra in general is bridge building, mostly between geometry and arithmetics, which means between continuous and discrete. I consider real numbers gloriously failed attempt of bridge engineering, harmoniously wobbly and collapsing bridge. Funny you should mention fractals. I'm starting to realize that they are im-pansions or implosions, instead of ex-.

You can think of real numbers as sort of a Indra's Net, which is a beautiful thought-form. But it's all static. Math is seeking gnothi seauton as a process, not just as a flower reflection for a narcissist math god to admire.