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What's the objective world made of?

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What's the objective world made of?

micha
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Posted 04/21/03 - 10:37 AM:	#21
Unknowable. While I am no fan of Berkley's denial of the existance of an "objective world", I do agree that all we can know for sure about it is that it causes perceptions. There are things in it that I can know: myself (Des Cartes' "cogito"), God, aesthetic and other values... But not all of it. As for "energy and matter"... According to General Relativity, these are curvatures of space-time, making space-time more primary.

Paul
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Posted 04/21/03 - 03:59 PM:	#22
Originally posted by Jason I don't believe there is an ontological distinction between the objective and subjective, only an epistemic distinction. That is, there isn't an ontological gap, only an epistemic gap. It's very odd that you then go on to say that what's really there is what you can only have access to when mediated by the thing you're rejecting. Though objectivity gives the epistemological impression of moving away from the self, this should not be applied to metaphysics and it's clear enough metaphysically that the self is all we can rationally claim experience of. This consciousness simply happens to contain data of the relations of other stuff, but certainly any substance involved is neccesarily the consciousness itself since it is what is being experienced. If I were to try to claim that there can be a true ontological claim of 'stuff' (instead of empty relations) then I would have to call it concsiousness, or a background continuous with the nature of consciousness for which consciousness is the known instance. The interpreted nature of the mind makes this itself be suspect, but certainly it will always be less suspect that claims of physical object, since those neccesarily rest on impressions within that consciouness.

darl
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Posted 04/21/03 - 07:30 PM:	#23
Paul - no, it is convenient in interpreting perceptions to think of time and space as being related, with time a fourth dimension, but the extensions of space are qualitatively different from time, and to join them, even conceptually, is to put to big a load on the word dimension.

Tobias
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Posted 04/22/03 - 01:01 AM:	#24
Paul, there is still a question bugging me, namely the fact that for us the world is knowable as a set of relations, implies a knowing subject. Now as that subject is itself a set, a knot of relations it is necessary that these relations which constitute a knowing subject are themselves reflective. Now according to you, are all relations reflective, are some reflective, and should these reflective relations somehow be prioritised? futhermore, when you posit a world as an infinite set of relations, no sense of space or time, no substratum and not fixed neither changing, and not uninportant, no 'outside', what kind of a world did you create? In part the answer will depend on your idea of the reflectivety of these relations. If you say these relations are irreflective, we end up with a world without a knowing subject, defeating the idea If they are reflective you will get a kind of system in which the reflective relations need to be prioritised and this will make the 'objective' universe again 'fall' back into consciousness, and we revisit idealism. regards Tobi
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Paul
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Posted 04/23/03 - 12:28 AM:	#25
Space-time is the very same relations I speak of. Space and time as separate entities exist only to observers. The kind of world this creates is by definition nothing we can imagine as such, with the exception of our own little part which we can't really imagine as such either but do experience as such. (But objectively, the self's part does not distinguish itself.) We can validly speak of relations becuase we can derive the preconditions of our experience... this is all the relations are, they're the preconditions for the experiences we have of things. Perhaps I might say, like Eddington, that the so-called substance of the relations is of a nature continuious with -- but not the same as -- the background of consciousness. Yet since I can't even describe the background of consiousness (all I can describe are the thoughts, not the consciousness they're in) then this seems useless and only leads to confusion and to people mistaking the foreground as the background in order to support idealism. I'm not clear on what you mean by reflective and irreflective. darl -- It's been working just fine for the last 95 years, so personally I'll stick with Einstein and Minkowski. You're very mistaken to say that joining them puts a big load on the word 'dimension' -- actually it eliminates the entire load from the word. 'Dimension' no longer need mean anything more than math, now that it's safely freed from the relative creations of space and time in the minds of observers. Perhaps your problem is that you imagine space-time as containing space and time... it doesn't, it simply consists of the absolute nature which is split into those two separate concepts by observers.

ScaryClown
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Posted 04/23/03 - 02:32 PM:	#26
I voted for space. Our intuition tells us that the world consists of many substances, which of course move through the background of space and time. But I must reject the classic atomist vision, and deny that space and matter are seperate. As some philosophers of the past like Descartes have argued that space itself must be made of some substance, I take the opposite approach and say that even matter is mere space. Matter is different from what we perceive as empty space in terms of geometry. The more matter in a region of space, the more curvature that space will have. While curved space cannot be visualized, the proposition may seem odd. But that is only because we've evolved to believe in our perceptions of the flat space of Euclid. However it has been shown that the geometry of our world is not Euclidean, and curved space is very much a reality. This non Euclidean space is neither flat nor the silent stage for events to take place our we've imagined. As curved space is wherever mass is present, and because nothing is ever at complete rest, space then is a dynamic ever evolving medium. This evolving geometry is thus not seperate from time. Hence, space-time. In modern physics, space-time and the gravitational field are equivalent. The concept of a field is applied to define the amount of curvature at any given point in space, and the relations between points is what gives rise to our perceived complex world. This gravitational field is the universe, but it is not made of any substance. Rather, the relations here give us the illusion that substances exist in the first place. Even in modern TOE attempts, substances are absent. In string theory, the strings are not made of some substance. No, they are fundemental and their spatial extent is exactly that - pure space. The same goes for Loop Quantum Gravity, Supergravity, M theory, and others. In such cases, geometric relations create the complex world we live in, complete with quarks, electrons, stars, galaxies, people and art.

Paul
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Posted 04/27/03 - 04:39 PM:	#27
So, ScaryClown, how why do you vote for space when as you say "space-time and the gravitational field are equivalent" and modern science has for 100 years basically rejected the concept of what we call space as being a relative conception of the mind from part of the data of the actuality of space-time? You say "Hence, space-time." And then you say space, which stands in direct contradiction to the space-time which eliminated space from objective status. My vote for relations is also a vote for space-time, since there is no other meaning to space-time than relations.

ScaryClown
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Posted 04/27/03 - 07:04 PM:	#28
Space-time is mere geometry in motion. That is to say, the universe (the gravitational field) is not made up of substances, but is made of pure geometry. I'm sure you've heard of the old marble vs. wood debate. If you were to empty all of the mass of this universe, you would still have an empty space-time. The field would still exist, which by it's nature is relational. But the point is that geometric extent of this field is not made of any substances, but is pure geometry (space). Yes, you can't have space without time in the real world, so space-time is a more appropriate word. I'm just being sloppy with the english language here.

halcyonicity
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Posted 04/28/03 - 06:18 AM:	#29
I voted for 'things or material objects' - I would have said 'matter' if I was asked but that wasn't in the list. But if you look at the components of matter there is probably a lot of space within the molecules and atoms. And the atoms and molecules are kept together by relations such as the strong force. So I'm not sure that those things are all that different from each other.

micha
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Posted 04/28/03 - 07:57 AM:	#30
I recently had to look up something by Berkley, and I realized: Berkley did not do what he thought he did. He did not eliminate the notion of objective reality. Rather he relabled it "God's Perception". He uses God as a prefered frame of reference.

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