> On 21 Oct 2019, at 14:12, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Probably the single big confusion that lead to the creation of materialism is > the confusion between ontological states and their epistemic content. People > experienced the ontological state with epistemic content of "chair outside > me" and they took the epistemic content as representing an ontological state > of the world, so they thought there really is a "chair outside me", when the > real ontological state was that of a state of consciousness. Therefore, it > appears that in order to get rid of materialism is to stop making this > confusion. The problem that arises is that no matter how hard we would try to > do that, any retreat from the epistemic content of an ontological state will > only gives us just another ontological state with the only difference being a > different epistemic content. No matter what, we cannot escape epistemic > contents. Is idealism therefore fundamentally unthinkable ? > > I opened this topic after reading about process philosophy. They say that the > solution to understanding the world is to not think in terms of "substances", > but in terms of "events". The problem is that "events" is also an epistemic > content, in the sense that the concept of "event" is extrapolated from the > subjective feeling of passage of time. But the "passage of time" is just a > quality/an epistemic state of consciousness. To take it as revealing to us a > deep character of the world is to do the same mistake materialism is doing. > So, in order to avoid the mistake of materialism is to recognize this fact, > and thus to reject that "event" can be anything ontologically meaningful. Is > there any way to escape this vicious circle of confusions between ontological > states and epistemic contents and get to an idealistic conception of the > world, or is idealism fundamentally unthinkable ?
It is thinkable, but when we assume Mechanism, The appearance of matter must be explained from the assumption of the existence of a universal machinery (in the sense of Turing, Church). The natural numbers with addition and multiplication is such a universal machinery so we can start from that. It can be proved that we cannot explain (or prove the existence) of a universal machinery without assuming one, so we cannot do better. Then physics and psychology/theology can be extracted, constructively, so we can test Mechanism (and upon to now, thanks to QM, it fits very well). Is it idealism? If you consider the numbers as God’s idea, it is idealism. If not, it is “only” immaterialism. It is a neutral monism (neither mind nor matter) explaining well both the appearance of mind and the appearance of matter. The universal machine/number have a very rich neoplatonic-like type of theology, close to Moderatus of Gades (first century) and Plotinus and its followers, like Proclus notably. Bruno > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/b30ad355-dc71-4657-9b44-0e194b7234bf%40googlegroups.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/b30ad355-dc71-4657-9b44-0e194b7234bf%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/9E3EB473-4C6C-475D-825B-679AF550C97C%40ulb.ac.be.
