Tags / 11 quotes from 5 sources
#metaphysics
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Penrose the mathematical Platonist
For all intents and purposes, Penrose is a Platonist when it comes to mathematical truth. This might seem at odds with his view that Gödel’s theorem shows that the mind in noncomputable. Penrose accepts the implications of Gödel’s theorem, which implies that human mathematical…
The robustness of mathematical truth
the precise mathematical entities from the approximations that we see around us in the world of physical things. In mathematics, we find a far greater robustness than can be located in any particular mind. Mathematics itself indeed seems to have a robustness that goes far…
Is mathematics discovered or invented?
Penrose believes that math is precise while the physical world is approximate; Dehaene believes that math is an approximation of the physical world. Penrose believes that the universe is mathematically comprehensible and fundamentally mathematical, and further that mathematics…
Nietzsche's perspectivism
Few associate Nietzsche with philosophy of mind per se, but his perspectivism is very similar to Kant’s idealism in that both hold that we cannot have knowledge of the objective world. Perspectivism even rejects the possibility of objective metaphysics outright. Like the…
The objective as a degree of the subjective
quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity is a quite idle hypothesis: it presupposes that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential, that a thing freed from all relationships would still be a thing. Conversely, the apparent objective character of things: could it…
Information as resurgent Platonism
“I am aware that in this information-centered era, many scientists and philosophers are bamboozled by the idea that information lies at the bottom of reality. It is nothing more than a resurgence of Platonism supported by the social and economic power of computer science and…
Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits
We must appreciate the historical justification of our wrong metaphysical beliefs
Some Backward Steps.—One very forward step in education is taken when man emerges from his superstitious and religious ideas and fears and, for instance, no longer believes in the dear little angels or in original sin, and has stopped talking about the salvation of the soul…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Three ways of making mental substance fit the world
It is not easy to make the idea that the mind is a separate substance consistent with the rest of what we know about the world. Here are three ways of trying to do it, each with a different conception of the mind. First, divine intervention. Physical science is incomplete. Our…
Idealism and materialism as two kinds of monism
The dualists said that there are two kinds of things or properties in the universe, and with the failure of dualism, it is natural to suppose that maybe there is only one kind of thing in the universe. Not surprisingly, this view is called “monism” and it comes in two flavors…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Eleusis and Plato's Forms
Did Eleusis birth the basic concepts of Western and Near Eastern metaphysics—the “Forms,” the “Ideas,” the “Archetypes”? The concept of another world, prior to, more pristine than this, from which we journey forth and to which we return in a richer, more highly evolved form?…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
All knowledge is in terms of contrasts
Yet metaphysics, like philosophy as a whole, is not something which can simply be cured or abandoned, as if it were an intellectual disease. The most antimeta-physical philosophers have, in fact, a tacit metaphysics of their own, which lurks behind the assertion that all…