Philosophy Now Forum

Obvious Leo wrote:

Impenitent wrote: except the conceptual abstraction of the mental state itself? must be a pineal gland...

The pineal gland was certainly the theory of Descartes but it is an unloved hypothesis in modern biology. Cognitive neuroscience acknowledges no such concept as the physical "seat of consciousness" implicit in the dualist narrative but instead defines consciousness purely as an embodied PROCESS. All processes are only definable in terms of events occurring in time and the spatial orientation of such events are regarded as nothing more than a convenient heuristic.

no physical seat of consciousness...

Obvious Leo wrote:"Although a mental state is of physical origin this doesn't mean that the conceptual abstraction which such a cognitive activity can bring forth is itself physical."

-Imp

Someone said:

All facts are present.

If Henry VIII and his life is a fact too, in what way is this fact present ?

duszek wrote:Someone said:

All facts are present.

If Henry VIII and his life is a fact too, in what way is this fact present ?

The life of Henry VIII happened in the present of his life....he was present in his own life, no one else was being his life, only him.

There is only the present - in the present all lives appear and disappear from the present back to the present.

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift, which is why we call it the present.”

Mr Don´t ask me:

you say that Henry VIII was present (simple past tense).

Forgive my asking you:
shall we deduce from this that he is not present now ?

Does his past presence reappear in a way when we watch Richard Burton on TV playing him ?

duszek wrote:Mr Don´t ask me:

you say that Henry VIII was present (simple past tense).

Forgive my asking you:
shall we deduce from this that he is not present now ?

Does his past presence reappear in a way when we watch Richard Burton on TV playing him ?

Henry VIII is an idea. No one has ever known or seen Henry VIII except as an image or idea of conscious perception.

The present is the vast void or present infinite space in which everything arises and disappears. No one lives here, it is void, emptiness, and yet full of potential. Everything that happens, only happens now in the void of now...which is pure awareness...within which all things including people flash in and out of existence.

The void is real enough, since it is that fundamental ground upon which all things appear and disappear, or in which all the action happens...the actions come and go leaving no trace, so they are only ever fictions...not real, the space in which it all happens is the only real...and yet even that is only real when there is something there superimposed over it, defining it....otherwise it has no way of being there or known.

Henry VIII will always be present as a conscious memory. He can be present in a tv image or a photograph.

Things only exist as imaged on the screen of awareness, or memorised by a thought arising from awareness, or as a superimposed image upon a piece of photographic paper, objective form.....or as a voice recorded on a CD, objective form once again....objective reality is an illusion created by the reappearance of things from past...appearing to be happening now....nothing happens now until there is a perception/thought appearing as something.

As for the ACTUAL Henry VIII ...he has never existed at all.... except as the above ideas.

There was never any actual physical body existing called Henry VIII ....Henry VIII was put there by a subjective thought of him. The physical body has no idea it is there or that it exists.

All physicality is put there by thought only.....bodies do not know anything, they are the known. A thought cannot arise without the body, but a thought is not the body, the body is the thought...the body is the vehicle for intangible thought, perception, belief, emotion, senses etc etc...

Never ?

How about Ann Boylen who was able to shake hands with him back in ... (a historian can tell you) ?

He must have physically existed for her back then.

duszek wrote:Never ?

How about Ann Boylen who was able to shake hands with him back in ... (a historian can tell you) ?

He must have physically existed for her back then.

We can shake hands with people in a nightly dream....it feels and looks real, where does this image, sensation, feeling arise, but from within the dreamer which is consciousness or awareness.

It's exactly the same for the waking dream, it's exactly the same thing going on....except the waking dream is perceived as a more dense, gross sensation..not subtle like a nightly dream.

This video is well worth watching and will explain it better, but it's always up to you to believe what feels right for you when it comes to understanding you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6yTtCaiZbU

duszek wrote:And if not:

Did it exist ?

And if so: where does it exist ? or where did it exist ?

Are you intentionally writing utterly stupid stuff?`!?!

Yes, the past exists. It does not dissipate immediately to make way for a brand new shiny "now", but the past directly influences the present. So while it is physically not present it is definitely informationally present.

HexHammer wrote:Are you intentionally writing utterly stupid stuff?`!?!

Direct and unambiguous, two of the qualities essential in a good question.

Greta wrote:Yes, the past exists. It does not dissipate immediately to make way for a brand new shiny "now", but the past directly influences the present. So while it is physically not present it is definitely informationally present.

I agree with your intended point but I also think that the distinction between that which physically exists and that which doesn't is what the titular question is exploring, Greta. Undoubtedly Caesar crossed the Rubicon and thereby determined the course of European history but this doesn't change the fact that this is an event which exists no longer, even though in principle we could observe it happening in our own moment Now from a referential vantage point 2100 "light-years" away. The fact remains inescapable that any events which we can observe are events which physically exist no longer and this fundamental truth is scale invariant because the speed of light is finite.

duszek wrote:And if not:

Did it exist ?

And if so: where does it exist ? or where did it exist ?

It only existed when I was the present.
Shit happens; then you die. History: one fucking thing after another.
DO you really think this is a meaningful question.

Obvious Leo wrote:

Greta wrote:Yes, the past exists. It does not dissipate immediately to make way for a brand new shiny "now", but the past directly influences the present. So while it is physically not present it is definitely informationally present.

I agree with your intended point but I also think that the distinction between that which physically exists and that which doesn't is what the titular question is exploring, Greta. Undoubtedly Caesar crossed the Rubicon and thereby determined the course of European history but this doesn't change the fact that this is an event which exists no longer, even though in principle we could observe it happening in our own moment Now from a referential vantage point 2100 "light-years" away. The fact remains inescapable that any events which we can observe are events which physically exist no longer and this fundamental truth is scale invariant because the speed of light is finite.

Yes, the event of Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon appears to be gone forever unless technologically enabled future historians recreate it in what is probably one of the great cosmo-geek wet dreams:)

However, in terms of information, the effects of that event still profoundly reverberate today, no doubt in numerous ways we don't know. Further, there are are numerous accounts of the event, allowing the information's potential influence to persist. Dawkins's memes are remarkably akin to genes in their ability to persist over many generations.

The past is not gone but it lives on in its reverberations over time as an informational influence. In fact, the past is all we have, given the impossibility of engaging the absolute present moment due to the limitations of light speed and our speed of processing. That last microsecond that we observed has been physically replaced by the next, but its information lives on.

Greta wrote:That last microsecond that we observed has been physically replaced by the next, but its information lives on

Precisely. That information is immortal is perfectly consistent with both classical metaphysics as well as its modern counterpart, the branch of applied mathematics sometimes erroneously labelled as the "science" of physics. Information remains immortal because it is information from the past which acts as the causal dynamic for the events of the present and the information of the present which informs the events of the future. It is this continuous self-determining cascade of causality which thus defines our true physical reality by defining the future as quite literally unknowable. Because it sets the observer of reality external to the object of his observation it is precisely this dynamic quality which the Newtonian paradigm is utterly unable to model.

Caesar crossing the Rubicon.

When did this event exist exactly ?

When he put one foot into the water ? When he was in the middle of the river ? When he stepped out on the other shore ?

Did this event exist as long as his sandals were still wet ?