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What's the objective world made of?

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What's the objective world made of?

Bluenose
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Posted 04/28/03 - 03:35 PM:	#31
It's all leptons, quarks, photons, gluons etc ie the basic physical stuff of matter [mass] and energy, immortalized in the E=Mc2. SO, I voted for "other" altho "things" works too if we are thinking of chemistry, biology and the other sciences as well as physics or particle cosmology.
Space/Time Matter/Energy in 4d Gravity, EMR, Weak and Strong Only 4 Forces That's all there is. Period

micha
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Posted 04/29/03 - 04:08 AM:	#32
energy and matter are (is) a measure of curvature of spacetime. we're all composed of geometry. forms. how platonic!

ScaryClown
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Posted 04/30/03 - 04:36 PM:	#33
Well I'm not sure all forms are included there. Where are the eternal truths?

180 Proof
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Posted 05/01/03 - 12:55 AM:	#34
objective world? the world we can grasp that also resists our grasp? that halo of fathomless ignorance around the humanly knowable "world"? the objective world is nothing other than the limit of (human) intelligibility. the farthest limit. relations? possibilities? how about pure "uncertainty" -- an endless seething vacillation back and forth along some sublime continuum of imperfect symmetries ... Panta rhei ... old heraclitus was probably closer to it than we'll ever get ... "all is flux". schopenhauer said "will" but seeming meant chaos or energy. that brings us right back to einstein's equation and heisenberg's principle and everett's interpretation ... heraclitus all over again! shouldn't we ask instead: what is real? i have a deep suspicion only this question is ...
The question isn't "Which explanations do I believe?" but rather "Which explanations do I least disbelieve?" Absence of evidence THAT MUST BE THERE (i.e. implied by any claim, concept, or (its) predicates, that affects changes in/to the world) entails evidence of absence. [What cannot be done?[What cannot be hoped?[What cannot be known?]]]

njalbertini
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Posted 05/15/03 - 10:33 AM:	#35
Space-time and hyperspace. Nick

Psychodelirium
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Posted 05/20/03 - 06:35 AM:	#36
To be honest, I am skeptical of the whole notion of “the objective world”, since it presupposes a couple of rather dubious and unwarranted distinctions based on the whole “subjective/objective” dichotomy. The first distinction is between the world as we humans “subjectively” conceive of it and “the world proper”, the things in themselves, or whatever. I am not, as you might expect, especially fond of this distinction, since I seem uniquely incapable of making any heads or tails of this notion of “the world proper”. Whenever I think of the world, I think of it in terms of familiar things and concepts, such as water, trees, light, people, intentions, and so on, and – of course – the relationships, causal and otherwise, between these. I am really completely in the dark as to how one would think of the world as just relations. Relations are only relations when they relate various things, and, indeed, the world is just a bunch of relations between a bunch of different things (things such as trees, intentions, subatomic particles, etc.). I have no problems understanding “the objective world” in this context. Unfortunately, many people seem to have something very different in mind. They seem to want to talk about “the objective world” as though it were some kind of undifferentiated manifold of something that we language users carve up into the familiar things and concepts by means of our “conceptual scheme”, or some similar apparatus. I have no idea what it means to talk of “the objective world” in this context. I think this whole notion of “the objective world” borders on the incomprehensible (unless it’s incomprehensible by definition, but that’s not much better). The second distinction is the one that cleaves the world into “public” and “private” parts, where the latter are subjective mental states and affairs, and the former, I guess, are everything else. People, not unlike myself, who deny any such distinction are promptly branded with various terms of abuse, like “eliminative materialist” and “behaviorist”, and so on. However, to deny the distinction is not to deny that there are in fact subjective mental states and affairs. It is to claim only that these stand in relations (causal and otherwise) to all the other things and events in the world, distinctly “public” things and events, like human doings and sayings, and that they are subject to our standard practice of inquiry. That is to say, we obtain knowledge of mental states and affairs in the same way that we obtain knowledge of anything else, knowledge of rocks or trees or subatomic particles, or what have you. If this should mean that our knowledge of mental states – including our own – is subject to the vagaries of interpretation (and I think it does), the only people who need worry are those that retain the doomed Cartesian belief in the fundamental “givenness” of experience. Now, the point of all this is not that there is no difference between subjective and objective things – we all know there is, and I needn’t belabor the obvious explaining why – but since this is a philosophy board, and the question is of a philosophical nature, ordinary and familiar words (like “subjective” and “objective”) are suspect of taking on new and perverse meanings. The “objective world” I take to be the world within which we all live and interact, as opposed to, say, the fantasy world of the deluded fellow (inhabited, perhaps, by faeries and unicorns) or the literary world of an author (inhabited, perhaps, by Sherlock Holmes). As such, what the objective world consists of, broadly speaking, is a complex relationship between living organisms and their environment. But this is not what many philosophers have in mind when they start talking about the “objective world”. What they want to say is that the objective world is in some sense entirely independent of the ideas and practices of the organisms – like ourselves – who have to deal with it. To treat “objectivity” this way is to raise it to an imagined Archimedean point that we have no hope of reaching, to invite global skepticism, and to render the whole notion of the “objective world” entirely unintelligible.

heusdens
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Posted 06/02/03 - 12:25 AM:	#37
In primary instance I would say that reality is made up of matter in eternal motion, and the most correct way of describing the laws of motions are dialectical laws. Consciousness, thoughts, etc, are not primary things, but are capabilities found in material forms (i.e. human beings). The best guess is therefore I think: 1. Things and material objects better stated as: matter in eternal motion which are best described in terms of dialectical laws The other options and why they are wrong. 2. Space Well, space is just the mode of existence of matter. Space would not exist without matter. 3. Facts. Facts are only facts when there are consciouss beings considering those facts. The world however also existed before there were human beings. 4. Ideas, thoughts, consciousness The world is however bigger as my head alone, and also existed before I, or any other human being existed. 5. God There is no need for a creator or an actor outside time and space for the world to exist, since the world is in eternal motion, without begin or end. 6. Sense data This would be a very limited world. The source of the data, the objective world, and the awareness of the sensory data, don't exist? 7. Platonic forms Refers to the Absolute Idea also of Hegel. In primary instance the world would just be a fundamental principle or absolute idea. Marx brought this idea upside down, and turned Hegel's dialectics on a material foundation. 8. Relations How can relation between things exist, if the things themselves do not exist? Or do relations only relate to other relations, ad infinitum? This is by itself not much different as the idea of a fundamental principle or absolute idea. 9. Both material and consciousness We do not doubt that consciousness exist, but matter already includes the possibility of the existence of consciousness. We don't need to specify that (neither as that also stars, planets, atoms, photons, living organisms, etc exist, since they are all forms of matter).

steveb
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Posted 06/02/03 - 05:45 AM:	#38
ideas/thoughts/consciousness; God came up with this new invention called "is". So don't say he is.

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