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A Refutation of Non-Transcendental Idealism

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A Refutation of Non-Transcendental Idealism

Prince_James
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Posted 08/19/05 - 10:12 PM: Subject: A Refutation of Non-Transcendental Idealism	#1
Sensory preception and inferrence from sensory preception form the foundation for all thought. This much is evident from easily demonstratable facts, amongst these: 1. It is impossible to imagine a totally different colour. That is to say, not a shade of a prior colour, such as beige, mauve, or forest, but rather, a totally new colour. Let's call this blorge or...nixto. In essence, an extension of the visible spectrum of light to include a whole new rung on the rainbow. 2. Those sensory-impaired from birth cannot imagine the sense they lack. Those with five-senses cannot imagine a sixth (barring psychic phenomenon known colloquially as a sixth sense). 3. All thoughts consist of sensory rememberance (mostly audio or visual for those who have such capacities) or inferrence from that rememberance to create new things. An example of the latter would be of imaging a centaur, which would involve one merging an image of a man's torso and head with the body of a horse and thus creating a creature that one has never seen, but can infer from that which exists. One can make all sorts of crazy monsters, creatures, shapes, and other such things, by simply having knowledge of certain basic things, given to one through the senses. 4. Due to the third proof, a being who from birth has no senses, could neither know itself, formulate thoughts, or in anyway be conscious. In essence, I posit a theory of knowledge equivalent to that of which the school of thought known as Empiricism would have one believe. Now, in those theories of idealism which place the Mind belonging to the Self as the sole source of existence and creator of all, we immediatly have a problem. How could this mind have any knowledge of anything in order to create this existence? If it simply came into being and created this univerrse through its power, as Idealists would have us believe, then it had no external-stimuli to give it the very foundation of knowledge it would need to have in order to formulate anything. Without first sensing space, how can one think of space? Nothingness would prevail if the Mind were to create an Idealist Reality. In those theories which do not place the Self, but rather, God as the source of mental creation, we run into the same problems. The very nature of knowledge is as described above, and thus we can assume - unless such can be demonstrated otherwise? - that God would have the same type of knowledge as we. Now, however, it is often argued that God has a quality which we lack: Omniscience. This omniscience is also often postulated to exist backwards-and-forwards in time. That is to say, omniscience is full knowledge of past, present, and future, and due to God's perfection, perfectly right. Now, would this capacity of God allow him to create anything through his mind? Nay! For we come to a paradox in such an argument! If God is the creator, yet cannot create due to a lack of knowledge, then God could not have knowledge of a time where any creation of his existed. Since creation would be contingent on God's mind creating it, and if God's mind is incapable of it, then creation would be incapable of being created, and thus God could never gain knowledge of it. Ontop of this, we even now can see that God is impotent to be a creator at all, for even if his creation is not dependent on his mind sponteneously creating things in a reality which exists in his imagination, God still would be incapable of knowledge if there were not already things there for him to perceive. Thus God -cannot- be a creator of -ANY- sort and thus the argument for Idealism on the basis of God, and for God being a creator at all, is baseless, illogical, and of course, wrong. The rammifications of this are clear: Non-Transcendental Idealism is manifestly false. This then leaves us with Transcendental Idealism, all flavours of Materialism, and Dualism as metaphysical possibilities.

MrJiveBoJingles
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Posted 08/20/05 - 07:33 AM:	#2
More sophisticated varieties of idealism don't say anything about whether the mind has "created" the perceptible world. They contend only that it isn't meaningful to speak of a reality beyond the bounds of possible experience (or that there is no verifiable reality beyond experience).

Timothy
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Posted 08/20/05 - 09:37 AM:	#3
Prince James wrote: Sensory preception and inferrence from sensory preception form the foundation for all thought "There's nothing on the Understanding that hasn't come from the sensations" - John Locke "Except Understanding itself" - G.W Leibniz I think that this Leibniz incredibly shocking rsponse was one of Kant's main influences, when he stablished the Trascendental Categories by analizing the Understanding itself on the Critique of Pure Reason.
"Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic." P.F. Strawson

Monroe
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Posted 08/21/05 - 02:58 PM:	#4
Problems with argument structure aside, one of your premises has actually been found to be empirically false. There is a remarkable case discussed by Ramachandran in his book "A Brief tour of Human Consciousness" of a man who has both color blindness and synesthesia. Synesthesia is a mental phenomenon in which people, for example, always see certain numbers in certain colors. They might see 2's as always green and 5's as always red. According to Ramachandran's work, this is due to a cross-wiring of different processing areas of the brain (in this case, number sense and color visuals). This man did not have the ability to perceive certain colors because of the normal reason for color blindness: a defect in the eyes themselves. But, due to his synesthesia, he sometimes actually saw these colors when confronted with particular visual sensations. This provides one example in which the mind can create new color representations without sensing them. But now that I think about it, the colors given to this man were not consciously willed, so not a creation of his conscious mind. Hence, they were, on one view of the self, given perceptions like any other. But even if the conscious mind cannot create completely novel representations, this evidence shows that they could come into being from a pre-conscious or sub-conscious mental power. Of course, the premise itself is highly controversial anyway. What about music composers? How can you say that they are all just recombining sounds they remember, especially with such obvious novelty out there? I remember reading about early 20th century composers who imagined sounds a certain way but were not able to create them (physically). But with the advent of electronic music their dreams were realized. Plus, what are the rules of composition for creating new ideas like the minotaur example? What are we retricted to? If you say that we have the ideas of space and the ideas of points in space, then we can create absolutely any geometric idea from this, at least mathematically. But we would create things like we've never seen before. So what restrictions are there for composition? Idea-empiricism seems to be a vague proposition.

north
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Posted 08/21/05 - 07:17 PM:	#5
MrJiveBoJingles wrote: More sophisticated varieties of idealism don't say anything about whether the mind has "created" the perceptible world. They contend only that it isn't meaningful to speak of a reality beyond the bounds of possible experience (or that there is no verifiable reality beyond experience). ahhh but there is a reality beyond experience. that which is BEFORE experience. the formation of our solar system.

Tobias
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Posted 08/22/05 - 12:51 AM:	#6
All thoughts consist of sensory rememberance (mostly audio or visual for those who have such capacities) or inferrence from that rememberance to create new things. An example of the latter would be of imaging a centaur, which would involve one merging an image of a man's torso and head with the body of a horse and thus creating a creature that one has never seen, but can infer from that which exists. One can make all sorts of crazy monsters, creatures, shapes, and other such things, by simply having knowledge of certain basic things, given to one through the senses. This is simply wrong. We have attained all kinds of concepts without having experienced them in reality. Such as infinity, zero, the idea of the atom (which was thought up before being discovered), negative numbers, even here and now have not as such been experienced empirically. Actually it seem to me that all evedence points out that reason can transcend that which is immediately given in experience and abstract from that laws and deduct concepts not experienced. No idealism I know of says that the human mind created all reality. Fichte comes closest with his idea of nature as non-I, but even he departed from Kantian notions. His idea is simply that all dualisms in the world are a product of our understanding and that the activity of that understanding determines how we judge about the world. Now I don't thnk Fichtean idealism works, and that is on the same grounds as you suggested actually: Due to the third proof, a being who from birth has no senses, could neither know itself, formulate thoughts, or in anyway be conscious. I agree, but that is a rather large objection against transcendental idealism, which postulates a dualism between our sensibility and our understanding. Both Fichtean and Kantian idealism are acording to me excessively formal. It is not clear what relation our sensibility and our understanding have in Kantian idealism. To me it seems they must both be embedded in a unity. Our understanding is conditioned by our bodilyness, but so is our understanding of ourselves as body a type of understanding. There cannot be an insurmountable difference. That is why I am rather charmed by Hegelian idealism, called absolute idealism. Last but not least I do not see how an empirical worlview excludes any type of idealism. Realism does that, but any strict empiricist will find a Berkeleyan idealism a hard nut to crack. regard Tobi
"The Power of Kant compels you" "The Power of Kant compels you" "The Power of Kant compels you"

Tobias
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Posted 08/22/05 - 12:54 AM:	#7
ahhh but there is a reality beyond experience. that which is BEFORE experience. the formation of our solar system. That reality is deduced based on experiences of the present (scientific experiement).
"The Power of Kant compels you" "The Power of Kant compels you" "The Power of Kant compels you"

180 Proof
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Posted 08/22/05 - 10:52 AM:	#8
Tobias wrote: ahhh but there is a reality beyond experience. that which is BEFORE experience. the formation of our solar system. That reality is deduced based on experiences of the present (scientific experiement). yes, but the reality of the past is not experienced itself, and that's the point. the consequences of past events are inferred, like causal relations (pace hume); the present, itself merely an abstraction, is where experiences happen, but is not experienced as such. we don't experience the present but call our on-going experiences "present" yet they are not themselves presences, only re-presentations. our experiences are always only ex post facto, hardly immediate, present-at-hand. we apprehend the world (and ourselves) principally thru our (working) memories, which are quite unreliable because they are essentially physical.
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?]]]

Tobias
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Posted 08/23/05 - 12:03 PM:	#9
Agreed, my 'we experience the present' is callous. We do however experience in what we call the present (our frame to to denote indeed our current expeirencing) and from that infer a past. From these experiences we even infer a past beyond our own existence. The relation to the past is as you noted problematic. We experience conditioned by memory. Can I say it like this, our present experiences constitute themselves against the backdrop of history? No remarks here that express disagreement, quite the opposite, I agree with your remarks completely. regards Tobi
"The Power of Kant compels you" "The Power of Kant compels you" "The Power of Kant compels you"

yffer
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Posted 08/24/05 - 11:01 AM:	#10
180 Proof ; the present, itself merely an abstraction, is where experiences happen, but is not experienced as such. we don't experience the present but call our on-going experiences "present" yet they are not themselves presences, only re-presentations. our experiences are always only ex post facto, hardly immediate, present-at-hand. we apprehend the world (and ourselves) principally thru our (working) memories, which are quite unreliable because they are essentially physical. What we call the present is all there is; there is no where else to be, no options. Like all observations; perceptions, mental phenomena etc., memories are immediate experiences, (though we (often) assume otherwise). Like causal relations, representaions are inferrences. Just to note; if the 'we' in your above, (or I or self), is an aspect of experience; is an experience, then that which has the experience transends them, though that transcending doesn't imply an absence, except as anything observable, i.e. self or what appears as self (that which observes) infinitely regresses, even though there is no 'where' to regress to. It's just not this not that.

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