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The thing as it may be in itself

wraith
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Posted 10/30/02 - 03:03 AM:	#21
Stating "matter doesn't exist" implies that consciousness creates matter? Eh? Nothing really creates matter, I was very clear about that, because there's no such thing as matter except in your imagination. Youre made of matter So am I So I really dont exist, but only in your mind? Sounds like solipsism. Your subconscious mind is generating the world around you, then your conscious mind perceives it. I reject any possibility of a god or of anything "supernatural", and that makes me an atheist. The universe is entirely natural -- it's just not what you'd think it is if you're a naive realist believing that your perceptions have external "substantial" reality in the sense that you imagine them in. Who said that the belief in God has to be supernatural. Can you create something more conscious than yourself? Consciousness is nothing special. The background texture consciousness (usually called sentience) is everywhere, just as much for a rock as for a person. The type of consciousness that matters (usually called access consciousness) is the pattern which the previous type is formed into in the localized area. We usually understand this by brain patterns, but the actual substance of it is simply the monistic background. I dont quite follow here. Are you saying that we are no different to a rock? In a way youre right, and in another youre dead wrong No. Since you're new here obviously you haven't read my many posts on the nature of mind, so I guess that's why you're leaping to that conclusion. I agree with the position of physicist Arthur Eddington, which you can read here: http:// forums.philosophyforums.com/read.php?TID=428 (My only significant disagreement with Eddinton is how he uses the term "spiritual" so commonly... but he does define spiritual in other spots so that in a way that isn't theistic, just an atypical usage of the word.) As Eddington explains, the so called substantiality drops away and with it goes the mind-brain problem -- and very importantly, monism proves victorious over dualism. Note how it leaves the mind to a functionalist interpretation -- and it's also important to note that Kant is considered a functionalist about the mind. Also see http://forums.philosophyforums.com/read.php?TID=581 Ultimately, there is only two scenarios. Matter creates consciousness or consciousness creates matter. There is no way around it. It makes no sense for someone to call themself an atheist and not believe that matter creates consciousness. Kant would be quite frustrated with your question because he's already answered it. In coming up the the system he's already shown that matter is only empirical -- matter is an aspect of the relation between your mind and the actual world. What you call "this other reality" is the only reality, really, when you get right down to it... matter is just a conceptual representation of it which has gone though many alterations in both perception and the mind. Your thinking seems to be stuck in the rut of approaching from the traditional direction, which is so much into experience that it treats the experience as more real than the experiencer. This is a very mistaken approach, which is why Kant calls his reversed approach his "Copernican revolution". again, this sounds like solipsism Sorry, Bishop Berkeley, but it ain't that way -- Berkeley has to resort to god because he literally has only minds in the universe, nothing in between them, no causes of perception. I say that minds are only a very tiny part of the natural universe... a mind is simply an odd pattern in the universe that has the strange situation of having some sense of representation of other things within it and having interactive abilities within itself which we call thought (which can be described in terms of neural networks, even though the actual instantiation in reality is simply thought itself). The real universe simply exists (and it's a very simplistic thing), and your empirical universe is the relation of the patterns of your mind to it (again, best understood through the physical lingo of brain-talk, but which in itself is just itself). All the complexity arises from your position as a relation to other parts of the universe. so your saying that matter creates consciousness? Of course there's no such thing as soul. Soul is the ghost in the machine, dualistic nonsense. Someone who rejects the mind, however, plays right into the hand of religion by handing over something which many people see as obvious... this rejection of an interpretation of reality encourages a dualistic reaction, and dualism fuels religion. I take the mind and show it properly as an entirely natural thing and eliminate the dualistic nonsense that lets people imagine a physical/non-physical reality split from which they can find a use for god. again, youre saying that matter creates consciousness...I am not a dualist, and the evidence suggests that there is a Higher Power. The laws of physics does not negate the existence of God. Read Bertrand Russell. His position isn't quite the same, but it is neutral monism, which is essentially my position except that I note that self-experience is the only sample we have of what sort of consistence the monistic background may be made of. (But clearly Russell is right that the universe is not mental, because we need to have patterns going on which we call thoughts before we'd want to call something mental. This only happens is localized areas known as minds.) And Russell, of course, is strongly atheistic as well. youre saying that matter creates consciousness!

Brad
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Posted 10/31/02 - 08:20 PM:	#22
I want to jump back a bit and address the distinction between conceptual formulation and representation. My main problem with representation is, as the hackneyed hyphenization approach shows, re-presentation. But what exactly are we re-presenting? Why the 'things-in-themselves' of course. But that makes no sense because we have no outside ability to know what those things-in-themselves actually are. No doubt, Kant's use of spatial terms are intended metaphorically but it's precisely these metaphors that I think are limiting. As you point out, he argues that the mind is something we can know more than anything else, but this presupposes a hierarchy of knowledge. Besides the fact that there are some studies that show just the opposite, that we don't know ourselves as well as we think we do, it seems to beg the question of how we can know ourselves better than other things except through proximity. This presupposes internal/external appearance/reality dichotomies that, I think, already presuppose an emotive response. Kant may not have used the term (and I've only had time to briefly reread him), but everything he says seems to beg for that response. Our thoughts are representations, but some of our representations are better than others. But how do we know that? By using the term conceptual formulation instead of representation, I want to get away from any relationship other than a causal one in our dealings with the mind-independent world. It simply doesn't matter if we're getting things right, that we are getting some things righter than others, it only matters if it helps us deal with the world. This is a much cleaner fit with a Darwinian framework of our orgins than the one Kant depicts. In terms of evolution, when exactly did we acquire this ability to represent things? If we dispense with the term, we don't have to worry about that magic moment. Furthermore, we can also get rid of those spatial metaphors. We are in the world, we deal with the world, and knowing that I think thoughts is no more important than that I know a chair is a chair. So, if we can dispense with the hierarchy we don't have to dispense with exhaustiveness. No description of anything is exhaustive of anything because any description presupposes a context and a purpose. No purpose, no context, no description. To me, the 'thing-in-itself' is the attempt at a purposeless or contextless description, it is a description after all, and I think that's a contradiction in terms. For Kant, of course, this is no contradiction because he presupposes God. If there were a God, then Kant makes a lot of sense. If not, however, I just don't see how you can easily fit in this special gift of representation or a priori intuitions within the Darwinian framework. It is certainly no criticism of Kant to say that he should have read Darwin unless you honestly think there is an a-temporal philosophy that we can get to and that he got there. With all that said, Kant's move from the descriptive to the prescriptive is a key moment in the history of philosophy. Without it, we would not be where we are today, but that doesn't mean we can read Kant and stop there.

Paul
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Posted 10/31/02 - 11:00 PM:	#23
Originally posted by wraith Youre made of matter So am I For the billionth time, that's a naieve misconception. I'm describable in terms of matter, an imperfect description, but matter is our only means of describing external things. The actuality of what we describe as matter is so-called "mind-stuff" (that's Eddington's way of putting it), called that not because it's all mind (only a specific pattern is mind) but simply because it's of a background nature of which our only sample to speculate from is mind. Your perception of me takes the descriptive form of matter, but this says nothing about what I am in myself. My internal insight covers that just a bit better to demonstrate that your concept of matter is interpretive rather than actual. Sounds like solipsism. Your subconscious mind is generating the world around you, then your conscious mind perceives it. I can only imagine you picked that out of thin air, since it has nothing to do with anything I ever said. It is a simple brute fact of existence that consciousness is of the mind, and it is the mind in turn which containse sense perceptions of the external world. The word subconscious has no reason to appear anywhere, nor is anything being generated. You're clearly the solipsist if you think matter and the entire world exists in your mind where you can directly encounter the nature of it in itself, which is apparently your thesis since you're so confident in saying there's this stuff called matter which you know to be of a nature entirely different from the stuff which constructs the mental world. Ultimately, there is only two scenarios. Matter creates consciousness or consciousness creates matter. There is no way around it. Descriptions don't create actualities, nor do actualities strictly speaking create descriptions. You're obviously a dualistic thinker. "The stuff of the world may be called physical or mental or both or neither, as we please; in fact, the words serve no purpose." - Bertrand Russell He puts it well enough -- there's only one background stuff, and there's nothing else to compare it to. The only sample we have of it in itself is mind. We have what amounts to relative descriptions (using the word losely) of it which we call matter. Originally posted by Brad My main problem with representation is, as the hackneyed hyphenization approach shows, re-presentation. But what exactly are we re-presenting? Why the 'things-in-themselves' of course. No, I'm sorry but that's simply not what Kant says. Kant does make careful mention of presentations and representations and distinguishes the representations from the presentations. The representations are what you have after filtering through the a priori forms of intuition. The presentations are the undifferentiated manifold of experience... or as some (such as my professor) like to call it, the booming buzzing confusion. The presentations are sensory experience, they're not things in themselves -- Kant is explicitly clear about this. As you point out, he argues that the mind is something we can know more than anything else, but this presupposes a hierarchy of knowledge. Besides the fact that there are some studies that show just the opposite, that we don't know ourselves as well as we think we do, it seems to beg the question of how we can know ourselves better than other things except through proximity. This presupposes internal/external appearance/reality dichotomies that, I think, already presuppose an emotive response. It's quite easy to observe that when I hit you over the head with a large rock, you cease to have experience. If you choose to deny this hierarchy of awareness, then we can repeat the experiment if you like. Every time it will reveal the existence of an internal nature of consciousness by the brute fact of continued existence of other things being impossible to be aware of when the particular thing called the mind/brain is knocked out of comission. Clearly the awareness you have is of your mind/brain. But yes, I do suppose this rock experiment would also involve an emotive response. We are in the world, we deal with the world, and knowing that I think thoughts is no more important than that I know a chair is a chair. Do I need the rock again? You aren't going to know a chair is a chair after you cease awareness of thought. As Kant would say, the cognition is of the chair and the empirical chair is a relation of cognition to actual chair -- take away the cognition and the chair in itself will still exist (your only objection here can be a solipsist one) but you will no longer have any idea of a chair. There is an alternative option which someone not familiar with the nature of the human sensory system might suggest -- the relation of the chair to the self could just so happen to be exactly the same as the chair itself. This is only ruled out empirically, from the observation that differnt cognizers report slightly different chairs, especially depending on their position. No description of anything is exhaustive of anything On that much I agree. I've never seen anything to indicate that Kant wouldn't also agree. It is, however, highly important to note that all descriptions are by their nature relative. A thing can only be described relative to another thing. You can explain As in terms of Bs and Bs in terms of Cs et cetera but every last description you make will be relative. The idea of a description of a thing in itself is, basically, nonsense. That's the actuality, not the description. To me, the 'thing-in-itself' is the attempt at a purposeless or contextless description, it is a description after all Kant is very explicit about the thing in itself not being a description. For a comparison, consider the Buddhist definition of Nirvana. They'll tell you what Nirvana isn't, they'll give negative descriptions, but they'll never describe what it is because it is not something of such a nature that it has description. Kant charactarizes the thing in itself in two ways: negatively, and through the trancendental method. The negative description is that it's not empirical, it's not apperances, and it's not anything the mind has cognitive possesion of. The trancendental description (note: not trancendent description as there is no such thing) is the derivation of the existence of the thing in itself. It's clear that billions of people on this planet, not to mention animals, experience appearances. These appearances have certain relational patterns in common. To give an account of how appearances are such, it becomes quite pragmatic to suppose some sort of commonality which is getting somewhat different interpretations from person to person. Thus we reject Berkeley and postulate relational existence. The other end of the relation needs a label for the purpose of philosophy, so we call it the thing in itself. We cannot describe it but we can point at the relation, say "imagine the other end" and then say "whatever you're imagining is wrong because if you can imagine it then it's in the form of your mind processing and not the thing itself, which is descriptionless." (If you're lucky enough to have further evidence of it like subjective self-existence, qualia and the like, then great. But that's my claim more than Kant's, I don't know what he'd say to it.) The trancendental method is a roundabout way of using relations to pidgen hole the indescribable. It would only be contradictory if Kant ever claimed trancendent knowledge which he never does -- only trancendental knowledge which as trancentental is relational... it's the finger pointing at the invisible other end of the tunnel, for the sake of having a metaphysically simplistic theory that will still explain the appearances of things. If you couldn't derive things in themselves then there would be no way to describe an external world and we'd be stuck with solipsism. Kant is no skeptic -- when he notices that appearances are all in the mind he's willing to make the assumption that there are other people with minds as well, who also have appearances, which seem to vary based on the construction of the persons mind but also by relative location. Thus it's established that the appearance in the heads of the people has a relational nature of some sort, the appearances being a relation of the cognizing structure to an unknown. We stipulate the label of the unknown as "the thing as it may be in itself". For Kant, of course, this is no contradiction because he presupposes God. Kant is also very explicit about not presupposing god for his metaphysics here. He only suggests god when he comes to ethics. He does flatly reject proofs of god, of course. If there were a God, then Kant makes a lot of sense. If not, however, I just don't see how you can easily fit in this special gift of representation or a priori intuitions within the Darwinian framework. God has nothing to do with it -- it's not a "special gift", nor does Kant ever present it as such, it's a pattern of processing. Kant is a functionalist. What he describes are functions of the mind. He doesn't intend to say what form they're made of -- perhaps because he feels it's impossible to describe that background "substance" since that would be a thing in itself. Thus he gives only descriptions of the functional nature of the mind. It is a very obvious fact that the brain does indeed translate things into spatial terms. (Time, I'll grant you, is less easily proven by science.) It's a fact of science that what travels up the optic nerve is electrical signals -- not little minature images. The brain must then translate that into a spatial represntation. It's thus well recognized that we have the a priori form of intuition known as space. The only other a priori form of intuition is time, and that's far too complicated to get into but suffice it to say many scientists would be eager to say that time is applied to objects by the brain rather than percieved -- plenty of people deny the objectivity of time. Do you seriously believe science contradicts the Darwinian framework? It's quite obviously a survival advantage to be able to represent things in space and time -- you don't find much food without that ability. And if you think the ability is "too complex", I don't think there's any evidence to make it seem more difficult than plenty of other things the brain does to alter sensory input. Now, there's a very easy spot would could pick on if you're just in the mood to show that there's something fishy about Kant: the categories. If you suggested that the categories needn't be as Kant has them, then I'd fully agree. Of course he does not say that God ordained the categories... more like Artistotle ordained them. And obviously, the fact that the categories are arbitrary doesn't invalidate everything. (I wonder how much it matters to a functionaist, as after all they only seek to describe the functional processes and not any sort of material structure.) that doesn't mean we can read Kant and stop there. Obviously. (There are many areas where I disagree with Kant, it's simply his formulation of what amounts to neutral monism that I defend.) We read Eddington and stop there... or maybe a bit of Quine... actually, read me and stop there.
"We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'." - Arthur Eddington

Brad
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Posted 11/02/02 - 04:39 AM:	#24
While you continue to hit me with a rock, "The Rock" slides into the ring, grabs that not-as-important chair and slams you on the head. So, which is more important? The awareness of your thoughts or the awareness of that chair? But, honestly, I think we're just using awareness differently here. When I said awareness of our thoughts, I meant something like, "Gee, I'm thinking right now." I do not see this as a particularly fundamental or primordial survival trick. Being aware of that chair in the arms of "The Rock" is. What exactly do you mean by awareness? More later.

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Posted 11/03/02 - 03:12 AM:	#25
So, which is more important? The awareness of your thoughts or the awareness of that chair? Obviously I'd like to have awareness of my thoughts of the chair. When I'm hit over the head, I'm prevented from have any future awareness of thoughts of the chair. And we can easily note that I cannot have any awareness of the chair after that either, which is a way of illustrating the hierarchy in that the awareness of chair only comes through the medium of thought -- smash the brain to take away the thought, and there's no medium through which to have awareness of the chair. I simply mean awareness that there is thought and everything "external" which I think about, I'm only aware of in the form of the thought. I've never been aware of anything that wasn't in my mind. If you have ESP, well, lucky you. For the rest of us, any study of the brain shows that awareness of things is always a pattern of internal connections. When sensory stimulus goes to the brain, no one reports awareness of it unless there's a pattern (access consciousness) by which it's formed into neuron firings. None of us without the ESP have ever been able to report awareness of objects without that step, and obviously from that it's not the objects themselves which we're aware of. Thus there's an obvious internal nature to experience, without which there can be no idea of an external nature. The idea of the external nature also existing is then derived from the assumption that there are other thinking beings, and noting that they seem to have different but related perspectives, such that apparently the appearances are all related to something since the minds report common relations, yet are all different than that something because the minds clearly don't report the same thing. Thus we suppose the mind must not be generating by itself and it has some sort of relation to something "out there". It's impossible to have an idea of the external if you don't have an internal -- not even for a millisecond. If you lose the external for a moment you're not going to like it, but you continue to exist. There's a clear hierarchy. The fact that objectively personal existence isn't important is irrelivent, seeing as how all people doing the philosophy are alive and philosophy is generally directed at studying the nature of life and experience.
"We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'." - Arthur Eddington

wraith
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Posted 11/04/02 - 04:43 AM:	#26
Originally posted by Paul For the billionth time, that's a naieve misconception. I'm describable in terms of matter, an imperfect description, but matter is our only means of describing external things. The actuality of what we describe as matter is so-called "mind-stuff" (that's Eddington's way of putting it), called that not because it's all mind (only a specific pattern is mind) but simply because it's of a background nature of which our only sample to speculate from is mind. Your perception of me takes the descriptive form of matter, but this says nothing about what I am in myself. My internal insight covers that just a bit better to demonstrate that your concept of matter is interpretive rather than actual. You do realise that youre saying that consciousness creates matter I can only imagine you picked that out of thin air, since it has nothing to do with anything I ever said. It is a simple brute fact of existence that consciousness is of the mind, and it is the mind in turn which containse sense perceptions of the external world. The word subconscious has no reason to appear anywhere, nor is anything being generated. You're clearly the solipsist if you think matter and the entire world exists in your mind where you can directly encounter the nature of it in itself, which is apparently your thesis since you're so confident in saying there's this stuff called matter which you know to be of a nature entirely different from the stuff which constructs the mental world. I dont quite understand your position. Are you denying matter, saying that it's just mental stuff? How do you know that Im not a figment of your imagination? Are your dreams real? Maybe this life is just a "more real" dream? Descriptions don't create actualities, nor do actualities strictly speaking create descriptions. You're obviously a dualistic thinker. Im not a dualist He puts it well enough -- there's only one background stuff, and there's nothing else to compare it to. The only sample we have of it in itself is mind. We have what amounts to relative descriptions (using the word losely) of it which we call matter. In reality, all that there is consciousness. Consciousness creates matter by necessity.

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Posted 11/06/02 - 04:37 AM:	#27
Are you denying matter, saying that it's just mental stuff? "Matter" is a mental description which represents an unknown actuality -- an actuality where the only guess we can make is based on what minds are like, since mind-stuff is our only sample of the actuality of the universe. How do you know that Im not a figment of your imagination? Are your dreams real? Maybe this life is just a "more real" dream? Dreams are a part of my actuality which doesn't represent anything external. You are a part which I'm supposing, based on some evidence, to represent something external. What you actually are I can only guess at by analogy with what I actually am, but after noting how similar the patterns of you represented in the physical descriptions are to the patterns of my physical descriptions, I can suppose that you are indeed much like me and probably have the experience I call thought. With a rock, on the other hand, I note that the physical descriptions of it aren't similar to the physical descriptions of me and so I suppose that it probably doesn't consist of what I'd call thought, but rather of some sort of pattern of being which I (being a thought-creature) really can't understand except in terms of the physical description. Rocks exist. The actual nature of them is something we can only guess at by analogy with our own consciousness, but they do exist outside the self. Matter can only make up the internal representations though, for all material descriptions are relative to observers. Matter is descriptive, just not actual. In reality, all that there is consciousness. Consciousness creates matter by necessity. The mind creates the conceptions of matter as a reaction to input. Matter is a relation between the actual external world and the (quite complicated, interpretive) mind. You cannot possibly make a good argument for everything being conscious if you mean the way people are conscious. Access consciousness is what matters, and it requires a specific pattern of interactions (speaking of it in terms or the physical descriptions) or relations (speaking of it in terms of the actuality). This is why it's best called neutral monism -- although mind-stuff does at least exist as an actuality, unlike material-stuff. You do realise that youre saying that consciousness creates matter Yet again, no, obviously I have a better idea of what I'm saying than you do. The mind does not create matter, it imagines matter as a co-author with external reality. The nature of the way matter is imagined is due to the mind, but the matter would not be imagined (in most cases) without the external thing in itself being there to prompt the sensation. The conscious mind is itself only a particular form/pattern of the monistic structure, differentiated by pattern, although it's continuous with the rest of the structure.
"We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'." - Arthur Eddington

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Posted 12/03/02 - 11:38 PM:	#28
I know this thread is a bit old but I was reading back and thought it was good. In response to the base question: We know the perceptual process is complex. We can guess that things outside our heads are not likely to be quite the same texture which they appear to us as. Or do we really know that there's something beyond the appearances... does perception justify speculation about things causing perception? (Berkeley would say no.) Why are the textures different than they appear? If I see a leather jacket, I'll bet that it's texture will be leathery - and the same with everything else. Honestly I just don't see what you mean because texture seems entirely dependant upon our perception - really, it's a uniquely human thing and our perceptions concerning it seem to be fairly consistent, at least in my experience Kant says there's a thing in itself beyond appearances. He also says it's unknowable. He believes we can know things about it, as interpreted from our perspective... we can have transcendental knowledge. What we can't have is transcendent knowledge -- we can't know what the thing really is in itself independent of our concepts. To me, I've always 'intuitively known' this. Quite frankly, having never read any Kant, I already knew this and it seemed fairly obvious to me. (So obviously, I agree). How I thought of it was admitedly more simplstic, but it basically means the same thing - just that there was an objective reality, but because our perceptions are ultimately unique and subjective, and just generally limited, we can't 'fully' know objective reality because of this simple inherent nature of perception. Patanjali (author of the Yoga-Sutra) also says there's a thing in itself beyond appearances, and he says that in normal situations it's unknowable. He, however, argues that it can be known through meditation with proper practice. Being a fan of meditation, contemplation and average everyday daydreaming, I would tend to agree with this also . It seems to me that Patanjali isn't so making so much of an absolutist statement about objective reality or 'things in themselves' but just pointing out that with focus and contemplation beyond the human norm our perception is vastly improved and we see things beyond the norm. The appearances which we're normally stuck with are a result of the subject/object distinction -- we only understand objects through the subject, the mind. Through meditating on an object we can remove the subject by quieting all thought. Once the thoughts are gone there's no subject, and the object as it is in itself becomes manifest in experience. This I'm more hesitatant to agree with, largely because I personally have trouble imagining or meditating and thinking 'nothing' - which basically equates to removing the subjective element inherent in perception. I tend to think that even with meditation and 'quieting our thoughts' when we think of something in this state we still think about it in a subjective state. I actually just thought of an example that could be used to test this - get two people in a meditative state to contemplate an 'object in itself' in the state that he suggests it is possible to - then just get the people to write or tell separately their simplistic description, and see if it matches exactly. This might not work because it would be hard to judge whether or not it was the description or the perception that separated the results, but I suspect that it would reveal that even in a deeply medetative state our perceptions our still subjected and tained by our own views, biases, and just general way of viewing things. In one way Kant faces a worse dilemma than Patanjali: Kant must assert the existence of something unknowable, making him at least on the surface seem vulnerable to Occam's razor. Occam's razor is valid in many contexts and situations, but I don't think it can necessarily be applied to everything. Just because Bohr's simplistic description of atoms and electrons works in many cases and is simplistic doesn't mean it is correct - Ockham's razor would tend to suggest otherwise, excepting the proof to the contrary, of course. But I think he'd appeal to personal existence to get out of that, the self-in-the-self being known (a move that Patanjali would challenge, or at least challenge Kant's conception of). I think he'd go like I did and challenge the applicability of Ockham's razor like I did, but... I could be wrong Can you know something in itself by removing the subject? Is knowing without mind a sensible notion? (Myself, I'm with Kant.) I'm with Kant, and Paul. -- One thing I have to say though is that I think it is possible to know some simplstic or more... how do I say - elemental or rudimentary to reality things 'in themselves'. Math, for example. I think that for people who have a good understanding of mathematical concepts - they can understand math 'in itself' without removing the subject - and our perspective, simply because of it's rudiemtnary nature. I suspect that this may be applicable to simplistic facets of reality - more to concepts than physical objects, but still. Now, I'm going to read the rest of the thread and see if everyone agreed with me -Distortion
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Posted 12/04/02 - 10:24 PM:	#29
Why are the textures different than they appear? If I see a leather jacket, I'll bet that it's texture will be leathery - and the same with everything else. Honestly I just don't see what you mean because texture seems entirely dependant upon our perception - really, it's a uniquely human thing and our perceptions concerning it seem to be fairly consistent, at least in my experience It believe all I meant was that textures simply are not things in themselves or applicable to things in themselves (since they're tactile sensations, obviously subjective/intersubjective/third person and not objective). How I thought of it was admitedly more simplstic, but it basically means the same thing - just that there was an objective reality, but because our perceptions are ultimately unique and subjective, and just generally limited, we can't 'fully' know objective reality because of this simple inherent nature of perception. It's supposed to be an intuitive concept to that extent, but the key point is that it's not just the we can't fully know the objective, it's that we can't know anything about the objective except that it's that which has a disposition to create certain sensations when related through our sensory and mental apparatus. For Kant, the key is that we can't know anything transcendent whatsoever (not even thoughts, that's empirical apperception), but the nature of how we perceive things can allow us to make transcendental arguments to establish things about the empirical world and also to show what things (like space and time) are clearly provided by us rather than by the things in themselves. I'd say I always supposed something vaguely like that to be the case, but the fact that there are so many people like Brad who deny it seems to imply that it's not a common agreement. It seems to me that Patanjali isn't so making so much of an absolutist statement about objective reality or 'things in themselves' but just pointing out that with focus and contemplation beyond the human norm our perception is vastly improved and we see things beyond the norm. In the Yoga-Sutra, Patanjali clearly states that his form of meditation can allow the self access to the transcendental realm, things in themselves. He also specifies that a person can perform various miracles and inhabit the minds of others -- although he finds this relatively unimportant, since the real goal is to eliminate the mind and let the pure consciousness shine uninhibited. Buddhists, as non-absolutists who didn't go for his talk about accessing transcendent reality, went back and tried to salvage his system and carve out all the absolutist stuff, and created the Yogacara system. In this way, Buddhists were able to do all the same meditations and achieve the same states while talking about it very differently. Occam's razor is valid in many contexts and situations, but I don't think it can necessarily be applied to everything. It can be misapplied frequently, when the situation doesn't actually fit the criteria (often people think something is a fuller explanation which isn't), but I don't believe it is at all theoretically possible for it to be false. It cannot ever possibly be wise to hypothesize something more complex than what you need to explain all your experience. When two systems both fully explain your experiences, you cannot ever possibly have a reason to speculate the more ontologically complex one. Never add something to your ontology which is not needed in order to explain anything at all... it should be obvious that it cannot do any good to do so. Or as Wittgenstein puts it: "If a sign is useless, it is meaningless. That is the point of Occam's maxim." There's no point to holding onto extra complexity which doesn't explain anything at all. Just because Bohr's simplistic description of atoms and electrons works in many cases and is simplistic doesn't mean it is correct - Ockham's razor would tend to suggest otherwise, excepting the proof to the contrary, of course. (BTW, the atom example is a bit borderline since it's not clear that this is multiplying ontology... applying Occam to areas other than the number of metaphysical commitments in ontology is a bit hazy because it can be unclear what simpler really means... simplest to explain or understand isn't important, it's what it's simplest for the universe to be. But in your example at least it seems to work anyway, perhaps because atoms are borderline metaphysics?, so I'll address it anyway.) Occam's razor clearly requires that all data be accounted for -- simplicity is worthless if it doesn't explain things as fully as the complex theory. Obviously Occam's razor dismisses Before there were things found which needed a more complex model, it would in fact have been irrational to believe a more complex model. If someone believed a complex model of an atom when they'd never encountered or heard of anyone else encountering one single thing which was not fully and completely explained by the simpler model, then they would be totally irrational to believe their complex model. When someone accidentally believes something which later research will show to be reasonable but which their own research does not indicate whatsoever, they are not whatsoever justified in their belief. Throwing in notions of what people a century later may decide to be truth from there different evidence only serves to show how useless the idea of knowledge-independent truth is. When you bring in your psychic to say "I see nonexistent data that will appear in 20 years making the more complex theory more complete", the wise person tosses the psychic back out on the street... unless there's solid data of the validity of the psychic which means their predictions are so good that they require being explained as true by a complete theory (which is highly unlikely, but since you seem to be speculating psychics in your challenge I guess I'd better cover them). If it is absolutely impossible for there to be justification for using the more complex complete explanation of all existing data over the simpler complete explanation of all existing data, as is certainly true, then it is always better to believe the ontologically simpler explanatin -- regardless of "objective truth" which God sees. Math, for example. I think that for people who have a good understanding of mathematical concepts - they can understand math 'in itself' without removing the subject - and our perspective, simply because of it's rudiemtnary nature. Math and logic are about the structure of how we can relate things, but don't "exist" in the world. (No platonism, please.) I would describe them as being a description of the relation itself, the relation between the subject and object... math is used by the subject and applied to the object but I think the best way of describing it is that it's between them -- as it describes the nature of how they can relate. Understanding math "in itself" is possible, I would agree, since math is not is not a thing but rather a way of describing the nature of things. If you take the Bertrand Russell route (which I do not), you can argue that logic (he preferred logic over math, wanted to reduce math to logic, even though modern times seem to have the reverse belief) is a background which lies behind both thoughts and the external world, and is thus to be considered the monistic subtratum... this leading to Russell's logical atomism in which he searched for the proper logical atoms out of which the entirety of existence could be reconstructed.
"We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'." - Arthur Eddington

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