"David Nyman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Bruno Marchal wrote: > >> If grandmother asks for recalling the main difference between Plato and Aristotle's theories of matter, I would just say that in Plato, the visible (observable, measurable) realm is taken as appearances or shadows related to a deeper unknown reality.
BTW Plato followed Heraclitus, who was already onto this. Surely Plato's view more astute model to assemble an understanding of the natural world than the assumption of Aristotlian/atomism thinking... that the universe is made of chunky bits of stuff that literally are the appearances we get and our descriptions of it....furthemore The arisotlian view is clearly anatomically untenable anyway! If the universe was literally made of appearances then when we opened up a brain we would see them. We do not. What we see is the brain in the act of delivering appearances. No 'appearance' of a brain is in any direct relation to the appearances it delivers to us in the 1st person. Ergo the structure and the appearances are not the same thing or at least are validly explored on that basis. This is empirical proof that at least in this small piece of thought Plato's position was correct and Aristotle is just plain wrong. And Kant too. The noumenon is most definitely real and scientifically tractible.(see below) The practical upshot of this is that the universe does not, for example, have atoms in it. It is made of some underlying structure behaving "atomly" within our appearances. It is only us that insist on making it a 'thing'. That structure also behaves 'neutrino-ly' outside the scope of our direct perceptions (qualia). The appearances (qualia) are likewise delivered as behaviour of the very same structure. Plato's position unifies matter and qualia as different behaviours of the same underlying structure. So simple and obvious and practical and fits the evidence. > > A question from grandma: > > Since this deeper, unknown reality must forever be inaccessible to our direct probing, I agree when you suggest that this may better be thought of as theology, or at least metaphysics. Juicy stuff here: "Since this deeper, unknown reality must forever be inaccessible to our direct probing" The words 'direct probing' assume that indeed we are at some point "directly probing". If you can justify any account that we directly probe (whatever that means!) anything I'd like to see it! I would hold that the 'apprearances' we have and the 'underlying structure' are on an _equal_ epistemological footing in that a) Depictions of regularity in appearances b) Depictions of structure of a putative underlying natural world both have equal access to qualia as evidence. It is the underlying structure that delivers qualia into the brain. The two descriptive realms: appearances and structure are on an equal footing and qualia unifies them into a consistent set. The 'evidence', qualia, is evidence for BOTH domains. Whatever the structure is, it must simultaneously a) deliver qualia and all the rest of the structure in the universe and b) deliver the contents of qualia (appearances) that result in our correlations of appearances that we think of as empirical laws. Therefore we have not one but 2 scientifically accessible realms of scientific description of the natural world: 1) Statistics that are correlation of appearances 2) Statistics that are depictions of structure Qualia are produced by 1) and enable 2) and tie both descriptions intimately together as a consistent set. Currently we call 1) science and slag off at 2) as 'mere metaphysics' or theology. This is just soooo wrong! Indeed at least in a linguistic sense 2) is physics and 1) is meta-physics (about it)! :-) So... "Since this deeper, unknown reality must forever be inaccessible to our direct probing" ...is quite correct, but that does not stop us doing valid science on the structure! Put another way this limitation in access does not justify calling attempts to formulate theories of the structure as non-science. Can you see how riddled with historical baggage our thinking is, how biased our language is? This crazy situation has been going on for 2500 years. enough already! cheers colin hales --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---