Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"
Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2017 3:04 pm
But whether we create them in the mind-mill or they exist separately from ourselves, the question of their existence does not go away. You are just committing yourself to their existence 'in your head' rather than 'in the sky.' And if you admit that others have the same concepts as you - of a triangle, for instance - doesn't Plato's problem become your problem? If person A conceives 'triangle' and person B conceives 'triangle' and they conceive the same concept, then there must be an independent concept 'Triangle' of which they both conceive - where does it come from, what does it consist of, how is it possible? People like to make fun of Plato for his supposed mysticism of Forms, but aren't you committed to some sort of mystic dualism of 'mind-stuff'?Londoner wrote:If we follow Kant then we think that in order to make sense of empirical experience we have to have the notion of extension. But if we are to think of the world in terms of shapes, then we have to ignore that notion. Instead of thinking of the things I see as existing relative to me, such that my perception of them will change when I move, I have to imagine the world is on a flat plane, like a painting. Only then can I separate one bit of that world out and mark a single line that separates it from the other things in the picture, i.e. its outline.raw_thought wrote:It is interesting listening to scientifically minded posters advocate a Platonic version of reality. They contradict their core beliefs by advocating that first forms exist and only then can we be aware of them. In other words , we DO NOT first empirically experience ( qualia ) a form ( triangle, or whatever) and then arbitrarily put it into a category. The scientifically minded posters at this site , do not believe ( if they are consistent in their beliefs) that triangles exist before we have a concept of what a triangle is!!!
Then, thinking only about these outlines, I have to simplify the parts and the wholes of these outlines. That bit is nearly a straight line, that is a sort of curve, that is a rough circle. Then using only these simplifications in my mind I can use rules to construct outlines of purely mental objects, like triangles. At that stage, the shape no longer corresponds in any respect to an empirical experience; a triangle is not identified as a triangle because it resembles a Christmas tree.
I think it is the same with numbers. We first have to simplify experience to exclude everything except quantity, then create a new world that consists purely of the abstraction: quantity. At that point, numbers have lost all connection to things. The number '2' is not attached to any object; 2+2 doesn't equal 4 because there are four apples in my fruit bowl.
So I do not think triangles already exist in some Platonic sense and that we become aware of them, nor do I think we ever experience triangles. I think abstractions are just that, things we create in the mind-mill, for our purposes.