Dan,
I finally found the time and motivation to get to this post of yours from almost a fortnight ago.
Dan Rowden wrote:Firstly, getting your philosophical working constructs from dictionary.com is not something I would recommend. It is hardly intended for the purpose.
Hey, if you can't put a philosophical idea into everyday language then you probably don't know what you're talking about after all.
Dan Rowden wrote:The difference between the abstract and the empirical does not lie in their essential "thingness", but in their secondary characteristics and in the way we engage them.
Can you explain what you mean by "secondary characteristics"? Do you mean, for example, that empirical "things" have the secondary characteristic of affecting our physical senses?
Dan Rowden wrote:The "physical" is no less conceptual than the "abstract". When we first started the Atheist Society of Australia we knew this guy called Ian something (can't recall his last name offhand or I'd Google him and find out what he's doing these days). He was into physics. When we'd discuss with him the illusory or conceptual nature (or whatever similar language we'd employ) of the realm of physical entities, he would love to bash his hand down on a table and say, "This table is fucking real, dammit!". He was sort of right, but not in the way he imagined. Any thing is "real" - partakes of reality - if it presents an appearance in some way, but it doesn't mean it possesses objective or inherent reality.
I'm with Ian.
Dan Rowden wrote:Consider any physical object of your choice. I challenge you to show where it begins and ends in a definitive manner - not merely one based on natural or practical inference (i.e. what appears to us in a brute sense), but where it really, definitively begins and ends.
Maybe I can do it, maybe I can't - probably not. I don't really know what the ultimate nature of matter is anyway - quantum physics seems to point to some pretty strange stuff going down at the lowest levels and I'm not so sure how well the concept of boundaries applies to a smeared-out electron.
I don't really see the point of this challenge anyway. I don't claim that every thing is completely distinct from every other thing, but I do suggest that there are natural boundaries inherent in the external world that are independent of our consciousness. At the lowest level it might be debatable whether this particular atom or that one belongs as part of the "thing" or not - so what? The thing has some small level of arbitrariness to it. I don't see what's so particularly notable about that that you need to challenge me over it.
Dan Rowden wrote:The truth is you can't because the boundaries are just appearances.
And that's where we differ. There is contrast in nature: that much cannot be denied. Contrasts entail boundaries. Boundaries exist in nature, they are more than mere appearances.
Dan Rowden wrote:It doesn't matter how closely you look for the true or real place or plane or point or line - or anything of differentiation, you can never get past the appearance, the natural and automatic inference of boundaries and where and how they fall. You just create new ones with each change of perspective.
You seem to be claiming that I make up boundaries somewhat arbitrarily with my mind. I don't give this viewpoint much credence - we know for example that there are at least three phases of matter - solid, liquid and gas - and that there are (fuzzy) boundaries between matter in each of these phases. Boundaries are not all in the mind.
Dan Rowden wrote:At no point does an objectively real or definitive boundary appear, therefore at no point does an objective, definitive, thing in itself physical object appear either.
Even assuming that I granted you that boundaries were arbitrary/imaginary (which I don't) this would not imply that physical reality is an illusion - a boundaryless physical "empirical" reality is just as believable as a boundaryless conceptual "empirical" reality.
Dan Rowden wrote:The reason is that every object we experience, in whatever mode we experience it, only presents itself in relation to something else. Thingness arises because of differentiation. More than that, thingness is differentiation.
I'm not a physicist so I won't argue with you on this issue, but I think that this is a matter of science more than of philosophy - the primary question being "what is matter?"
Dan Rowden wrote:Now, I could take this further into differentiation being consciousness itself and how that makes the self/other duality, the subjective/objective duality, break down, but that's a step too far I think in this present discussion, so I won't.
You've piked out on me in a related discussion before, in the thread "The affirmative nature of femininity" where we were talking about mind and what it consists of and what created it.
Dan Rowden wrote:Basically what I'm saying is that this mysterious entity we call a "physical object" that we wish to believe is other than conceptual, never arises at all. We simply experience it via different aspects of consciousness than the abstract. We call it "physical" to distinguish it in that sense, from the abstract.
You seem to be saying that "it's all in the mind". The question then is, whose mind is it in? If it's all in my mind, then how can it be in your mind too? Or is my mind inside your mind? These are the sorts of questions that I asked you in that other thread and that you never got around to answering. Perhaps you'll be more forthcoming on this occasion.