Lou Gold wrote: ↑Tue Dec 14, 2021 9:55 pm
OK, there seem to be lots this-or-that options... ontology-or-no-ontology, physicalism-or-idealism, different kinds of science, reality-or-imagination, read-the-book-or-not, know-the-author-or-not, etc. How would folks apply their favorite option (and with what consequences) to
this recent reading of the book? Please keep it simple: what difference would your preferred model make?
I would try hard to abandon the notion of "model" altogether. This is one thing we keep mentioning here but is rarely understood. It's not hard to understand - no philosophy degree or even familiarity with analytic idealism is needed. Only some minimal thinking effort and good will.
What is implicit in all "models" is the "
correspondence theory of truth". It is really exactly what is sounds like, and it lives as a tempting force within all of us. That is key to remember - what we call it doesn't matter so much as how it actually
functions in our experience. It is our default way of perceiving and thinking of the world content. We assume that Nature is there with her appearances, and it is our task to fashion inner concepts which model her independent behavior external to us. If we were snuffed out of existence in the next moment, we assume that her behavior would continue exactly the same as it always had. When we return to existence, we assume it is our task to fashion a historical model of what happened when we were gone (which are really things we no longer
remember, because we are never actually snuffed out of existence). Whenever we speak of ideas being "right" or "wrong", we have already adopted this view. This happens every day and every lifetime for everyone. We
never overcome this default mode by rearranging concepts and calling ourselves "idealist", "monist", "phenomenologist", "participatory cognitionist", and what not. We only set out on a path to mitigate its influence when we seek to deeply know it, to even Love and appreciate it, as it lives within us. Here I mean "Love" which
wants the best for it, whatever it is, not "love" which wants it to remain exactly as it is. Love which deeply desires for it to reach its full potential, just as we can deeply desire to reach our own.
All of this has great practical relevance for your question and link. The correspodence view sees these natural phenomena and
subconsciously thinks, "how do I rearrange the concepts that
I already have to make sense of these things happening in the world out there". A "particpatory" view of thinking, again remembering it is not the outer label which matters but the inner meaning of what it is pointing to as a symbol, sees these natural phenomena as question marks. They are the punctuation at the end of questions we have not thought to ask Nature yet, perhaps because we don't know how to even formulate it, or we are anxious about popping the question. These natural questions invite our Thinking into them so we may discover
new concepts - more
holistic ideas - which explain why and how they appear to us. Notice we have not made any metaphysical judgments whatsoever at this point - we don't know what the natural phenomena are "made of". The natural phenomena are like clues on a treasure hunt which will naturally lead our concrete Thinking activity towards constellating their deeper meanings. So, the short answer to your question above is, we need to treat Nature more seriously than some object to which we "apply our favorite option". We cannot rush to impose our preferred intellectual "solutions" on her. She is not going to react favorably to that treament, and that is perfectly understandable. She deserves much more deep Thinking attention than most people are willing to give her today.