It sounds like you are assuming exactly the sort of dualism Kant and others did - that the "perceptible reality" arrives to us in a complete form and human thinking is about making an ideal copy within ourselves that approximates the Reality 'outside' of us. I hope the next part of my essay will clear this major misconception up. For now, let me ask you this - why do humans need to use abstractions like mathematical models and physicalist language when describing the ideal Reality they are investigating? Is there some scientific rule which says noumenon must be described with re-representations even if we can directly perceive the ideal relations? Or is it a fundamental limit baked into the structure of Reality which prevents us from such direct perception and forces us re-represent everything we encounter?Simon Adams wrote: ↑Thu May 06, 2021 8:49 pmAshvinP wrote: ↑Thu May 06, 2021 2:07 pm
Think about it this way - Hoffman claims science so far has been about studying the dynamics of our user interfaces, for no other reason than it implicitly assumes flawed physicalist starting points. Does he stop there? No, he goes on to change the assumptions which then allows him to start with conscious activity and build mathematical models to be tested against experience and other well-established mathematical models. Under your view above, he is not actually getting any closer to the noumenal structure of Reality, just viewing it from a different abstract perspective, and moreover he can never, in principle, get any closer. Same goes for the entire progression of science from its inception to current day.
No that’s not my view. We get abstractions that are indeed closer and closer depictions of the perceptible aspects of reality. But they will always be abstractions. Just imagine Hoffman comes up with his ‘final equation’, and then Wolfram finds a formulation of his model which predicts Hoffmans equation as well as, SR, GR, QM etc. So we end up with a single model out of which all the phenomena and behaviour of the world can be derived. Then what? All you have is a very, very useful blueprint of how nature behaves. Ignoring whether this will ever explain anything at all about experience, will etc, it’s still just an equation. It’s a description of what nature does, not what nature is. Even if it describes how all agents interact, it will never actually be a relationship, be an interaction etc. Maybe it will lead to new ways to understand consciousness, maybe it won’t. It seems likely there is only so much you can establish when working on the representation, just like there is only so much you can tell about a person from a photo of them (smaller and smaller pixels don’t help!).
This is a leap that makes no sense to me at all. You would have to explain what you mean here by science, as you seem to have jumped to meditation because science has got to a certain point.Ashvin wrote:Under the spiritual scientific view, however, he might be capturing the structure more accurately with his models and perhaps it will lead him naturally towards the tools of higher cognition, where abstract models are abandoned altogether for direct experience.
Hoffman, as you know, would likely say it is due to natural selection processes in evolution. But, again, he does not stop there and say, "since evolution has wired us to only perceive user interfaces we must admit defeat be satisfied that we can never scientifically examine the underlying Reality". He goes on to start building various models of the underlying Reality we are encountering using most recent mathematical tools and make predictions with those models. Do you think he is still examining smaller and smaller pixels of a photo, a photo which does not resemble the noumenon whatsoever, with those models? And do you then think it is impossible, in principle, to stop examining the pixels and start examining what the photo is representing to us?
Right, well, there is nothing wrong with trying to work things out ourselves, but there is something wrong with assuming anyone who disagrees with what we have worked out should be dismissed out of hand. For starters, scholastic philosophers-theologians completely disagree that thinking is a "self reflective loop in [personal] awareness". Rather, they viewed it is a means for penetrating the Divine order of the world in a very real way. Not the Kantian way of creating an internal copy to resemble the outer reality, because such a hard dualist notion still did not exist at their time, but the spiritual scientific way of viewing spiritual activity (thinking activity in a broad sense) as that which truly connects us into the spiritual realm of ideal-beings/content, because we all emanate from the same Spirit.Simon wrote:To go into high speculation mode, I can imagine a reality where time and space are emergent from a substrate that itself has dimensionality of a sort, and maybe this is a realm in which our individual minds move, and in which they are connected to all that represents as matter. Maybe we could find “tools” that can somehow probe this realm directly, to that which is the source of the representations. But all such tools will tell you is again, how it behaves. We may be able to infer things from this which could improve our philosophy and poetry, but I can’t see how science could possibly draw out the essence. No more than I can have a glass of wine and a chat with the Mona Lisa.
Simon wrote: Woa … I think I disagree with every word there . From what I have been able to work out, thinking seems to be a kind of emanation from something I call “I”, which then echos around some kind of ego ‘chamber’. It’s like a self reflective loop in awareness, which is filtered, merged and fed back via various instinctual structures represented by different parts of the body, mostly the brain. Poor description I admit but thinking is a process, not an organ.
I don’t believe they are at odds in any way whatsoever.Ashvin wrote: there is no reason why our perception must be limited to a "physical" world as opposed to a "spiritual" one, which, under idealism, are in essence one and the same world. Under this view, we come to a realization that the rigorous scholastic theologians were not merely living in a world of detached abstract thoughts about God, but they already sensed that the world of reasoned thoughts can reveal a good deal about the spiritual realm that we do not perceive with our normal senses. When viewed in that light, we see reason and science are not at odds with spiritual belief and Divine revelation.