Philosophy Now Forum

Nothingness. A complete absence of everything. I am not sure this is a good example becuase one understands absence and there for attempt to conceptualize a complete absence. Non-existence per say.

I might add that anything one can expierence causes at least the ability to imagine the absence of said expierence. So if exclude any absence and any expierence then you leave nothing. I assume you are looking for a priori knowledge. If this is the case I would say that I am not of any help since I cannot myself determine what I new before I expierenced it. I think the closest I can get is self awareness. I was conscious before I was conscious of my own consciousness.

No. Those concepts are again based on something one has experienced before, they are just derivative, a recombination of experiences. Infinity or void are useful concepts because they cannot be experienced, although they may be just extrapolations from things we have experienced, like a road that vanishes into the distance or an empty container. Perhaps the act of extrapolation that far is proof enough that mind has some non-experiential conceptual ability and so is in some part distinct from biology.

I think that we are likely to always compare concepts to experiences, regardless of how well they fit. However, that does not disprove non-experiential / a priori concepts. I am hopeful that a priori concepts will one day be seen to exist before any experience from which they could be derived. Perhaps by brain scans that look for signatures of concepts that are not based on any new brain structures created prior to the concept. If a related brain structure were to come into existence after the first use of a concept, this would also be good evidence that mind is independent of brain.

Yes myownend, that is one question, is void derivative? Can we say that the extrapolation itself is beyond experience, not just a recombination of experiences, and therefore proof of a mind with a capacity distinct from experience?

I enjoy your reasoning, but how can you know you were conscious before you knew you were conscious? Are the two not the same?

If we cannot prove that concepts are distinct from biology, then does this not imply that some concepts are simply beyond our current biology, that great new concepts will emerge once the human brain has evolved enough to express them? Is that how we are making progress? Assuming we think we are.

Toward the end of an interesting blog post (link below) the author discusses evidence for a spatial and temporal basis for some memory:

“The regions from which neuronal activity was recorded overlaps extensively with brain areas known to be involved in encoding and retrieval of autobiographical memory. This provides some insight into the neural basis of this type of memory; it suggests that the brain may use information about both time and space when encoding life events.”

Here is a link to the blog post:
http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2010/01/human_grid_cells_tile_the_environment.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ResearchBloggingNeuroscienceEnglish+%28Research+Blogging+-+English+-+Neuroscience%29

This takes me back to an earlier point, can we conceive of anything that is not based on the concepts of space and time, and as time is measured by change in spatial features, can we conceive of anything that is not spatial?

Perhaps as I was suggesting in my last post, new concepts are a function of new brain structures. This may explain why some concepts, like evolution, are so difficult to see until after someone else has laboriously developed them, then they appear to be obvious because the minimum necessary structures have been found. The developer of the concept must create and explore larger than necessary structures.

This observation does not deny the possibility of non-experiential concepts, but the expression of a priori concepts may require the formation of necessary brain structures.

The concept of non-existence also seems to derive from experience.

There is an apple on the table.
I eat the apple.
There is no apple on the table.

And how about a piece of music ?
A composer may create something that comes from his soul. That he has never heard anywhere in the outside world.
Is this not a concept that comes from the inner self of the composer ?

Let us assume?? These are both concepts which we have experienced mathematically in the case of infinity and temporally in the case of the void of space. Prior to this people thought that the galaxy we are in had an end and that space was filled with ether. So lets assume then that Rreedduuccttiioo aadd aabbssuurrdduumm is still a valid comment here.

Quite, to imagine nothing there must be something to compare it to. Even if we cannot experience void, it can only be understood as a concept by reference to another concept that does exist. This would seem to make it derivative. Good point. We can exclude void as a non-experiential concept.
We can utilise the same logic to deny infinity as well. To conceive of infinity must one first know that which is not infinite? Seems reasonable to me. So we must also exclude infinity as a non-experiential concept.

Could one imagine music if one has never heard any? It makes me think of experiments with birds that were raised from eggs in isolation, some of them deaf, so they never heard a bird song. The essence of the result was that the first bird made a horrible noise, but it had some tonal elements. When more birds were added they gradually developed a song of their own by mimicking and adapting. This improved the song. The deaf birds also developed song, but it was much cruder. There was a sort of feedback loop. Ok, birds are not people, but if we could extrapolate from them to us for a moment, it would seem that we could create some kind of music not based on experience. That raises a question: Is the feedback providing experience, even though it is not of song, perhaps through chance tonal qualities? If so, can other concepts emerge in a similar way?

Thanks Grim

A mathematical representation of infinity is just that, a representaion of something else, it is not the article itself, therefore the mathematical representaion is derivative.
Current popular theory suggests most of an atom is void, with a few tiny sub-particles in it. The trouble is, as duszek points out, that the void can only be understood to be so by the presence of other than void, in the case of the atom its sub-particles. Prior models explained the atom as one thing containing no void, hence the name.

As far as birds are concerned even better than singing is their ability to build a nest. No one teaches them and they know how to do it. The concept of building a nest must be in their genes.

Something similar in humans is the ability of a baby to suck his mother´s breast. But I am not sure if it deserves to be called a concept. Scientists usually call it "reflexive behaviour".

When composing a piece of music the composer creates something new but he gets inspired by the external world, in one way or another. The Brahms´s symphony "La pastorale" may have been inspired by the view of pieceful sheep on a meadow on a quiet summer day, but can we say that Brahms derived this symphony from this experience ?
I think this experience is not direct enough.

Interestingly enough I was involved in a Second Life discussion on this very topic earlier today.

Basically:

Mathematical fact occur within theories, they are fixed by the way things are in a given mathematical theory in relation to linguistic entities (the demand for a non-linguistic experience, causal or intuitive, does not apply to mathematical knowledge) however there is no gap in mathematical discourse between language and reality (The point being that mathematical reality is contained within, as opposed to merely constrained by the language of mathematical discourse.) Interesting conflicts occur where mathematics as a descriptive science & Mathematics as a descriptive discourse become confused. Remember that physical facts occur in reality, their constituents are ontological entities, reworded I think that mathematically a physical object is not a linguistic entity it is an ontological one.

Also interesting is the non-formalist approach toward a rejection of the counterintuitive denial that mathematical theorems express truths while still avoiding ontological commitment to a realm of abstract objects.

Thanks Grim
I feel the need to declare now that I am not a mathematician, such should be obvious to a mathematician and probably to everyone.
Certainly terminology follows understanding for me. I occasionally have to define my own terminology for original ideas I develop, which indicates to me that some part of my mental activity is not what I would describe as part of my consciousness, and operates without a language that I am aware of. Its nature is most likely a chaotic electrochemical system, unless we do have an independent mind that is somehow connected to and perhaps modulated by the brain, which is what we are pursuing here. The terminology task of my epiphenomenal consciousness is to associate morphemes with that electrochemical activity, regardless of if it is purely biological or not. Even if we are using some mathematical axioms to assemble a concept, they themselves must be assembled from a deeper system of electrochemical activity. Would mathematical truths exist independently of mind, or are they abstractions we project onto the universe which are some function of the form of the brain or brain-mind symbiosis? Projection would explain why mathematics does not always describe observations. We could say that the correct mathematics has not yet been discovered if we believe mathematics to be fundamental, but we could instead say that an abstraction has not been successfully constructed that is consistent with the system of maths developed so far and observation. We need also to remember that the ability to describe is not the same as the ability to construct. So please explain why you assert that “the demand for a non-linguistic experience, causal or intuitive, does not apply to mathematical knowledge”. Are you suggesting that some elements of mathematics cannot be represented in morphemes? The fact that some may not be is not that same as they cannot be.

According to Wittgenstein:

A mental picture of facts is a thought.

I like this "definition" of a thought because it does not pre-suppose language. You can have a mental picture of a situation or of a problem or a of complex or ... and you do not have to use words in order to know that you know.
You need words when you want to explain what you know to someone else.

Or you can sometimes make a drawing to illustrate the particular picture of facts in your mind.

I don't imagine that one would need to be.

There may be a critique suggesting that for maths to be ontologically precise one would have to free it from what may be argued are the constrictions of symbols and verbal descriptions. I am suggesting that there is no other way but the symbol or the verbal.