I very much appreciate trying to figure out what things are. I think, though, you’ve added more complication than needed. However, my take depends on a particular view on philosophy.
So, first I think Kant is wrong about noumena. They don’t exist. There are no things in themselves, there are only phenomena: things that exist because we reify them into existence to fit some concern we have. Things are reified out of sensory experience of the world (though note that “sensory” is redundant here), and the world is the unified non-thing that we can only reify by virtue of it being the whole of existence and it is defined against the null set of hypothetical non-existence.
So given this stance, things are then just us experiencing the world and putting bits of it into little boxes by making claims that a things are this and not that. The non-thing is the nothing of the whole, unified, undivided world.
One very interesting consequence of this view is that things exist only in the map, not in the territory, because things only exist by virtue of some part of the world experiencing itself and creating a little pocket of self-referential information.
This is confusing two different notions of exist. There is existence as part of the wholeness of the world that is as yet undifferentiated and there is your existence in the minds of people. “You” exist lots of places in many minds, and also “you” don’t have a clearly defined existence separate and independent from the rest of the world.
I realize this is unintuitive to many folks. The thing you have to notice is that the world has an existence independent of ontology and ontology-less existence can’t be fathomed in terms of ontology.
How can self-observation be the cause of my existence as a differentiated being? Don’t I have to already exist as a differentiated being, in order to be doing that?
Oh, I thought I already explained that. There’s at least two different ways “exist” can be meant here, and I think we’re talking past each other.
For some thing to exist that implies it must exist ontologically, i.e. in the map. Otherwise it is not yet a thing. So I’m saying there’s a difference between what we might call existence and being. You exist, in the sense of being an ontological thing, only by virtue of reification, but you are by virtue of the whole world being.
I have a theory that belief in a good God is the main delusion of western religion, and belief in a fundamentally undifferentiated reality is the main delusion of eastern religion.
I see no way around the conclusion that differences are real. Experience is part of reality, and experience contains difference. Also, my experience is objectively distinct from yours—I don’t know what you had for breakfast today (or indeed if you had any); that act was part of your experience, and not part of mine.
We can divide up the world in different ways, but the undivided world is already objectively differentiated.
Sure, differences are as real as the minds making them are. Once you have minds those minds start perceiving differentiation since they need to extract information from the environment to function. So I guess I’m saying I don’t see what your objection is in this last comment as you’ve not posited anything that seems to claim something that actually disagrees with my point as far as I can tell. I think it’s a bit weird to call the differentiation you’re referring to “objective”, but you explained what you mean.
Why does there need to be structure? We can just have a non-uniform distribution of energy around the universe in order for there to be information to extract. I guess you could call this “structure” but that seems like a stretch to me.
I don’t know if I can convince you. You seem pretty convinced that there are natural abstractions or something like them. I’m pretty suspicious that there are natural abstractions and instead think there are useful abstractions but they are all contingent on how the minds creating those abstractions are organized and that no abstractions meaningfully exist independent of the minds that create them. Perhaps the structure of our universe limits how minds work in ways that de facto means we all create ontology within certain constraints, but I don’t think we know enough to prove this.
By my view, any sense in which abstractions seem natural is a kind of typical mind fallacy.
a non-uniform distribution of energy around the universe
So in the end you are willing to hypothesize that reality has gradients of difference, even prior to the activity of minds? That was my biggest stumbling block, everything else is a detail.
So, first I think Kant is wrong about noumena. They don’t exist. There are no things in themselves, there are only phenomena
Kant says that noumena don’t exist. Kant also says that the thing in itself does exist. From these statements, we can infer that (despite what many people think) “thing in itself” is not a synonym for “noumenon”.
A noumenon is something external to the mind that is knowable in a purely intellectual, non sensory, way. (Eg. a Platonic form).
A thing itself is the assumed source or cause of a phenomenon (or intuition on Kant’s vocabulary). But there is nothing in the concept of the thing in itself that requires it be knowable noumenally in addition to its phenomenal effects.
The famous statement that the thing in itself is not knowable is another way if saying it is not a noumenon...if it were a noumenon, it would be knowable intellectually. Phenomenonal appearances also do not reveal the thing in itself , because they are only ever in relation to an observing subject … so not “in itself”. Nonetheless, entirely general considerations suggest that appearances must be appearances of something, ie. have external causes
Things are reified out of sensory experience of the world (though note that “sensory” is redundant here), and the world is the unified non-thing
Okay, but the tabley-looking stuff out there seems to conform more parsimoniously to a theory that posits an external table. I assume we agree on that, and then the question is, what’s happening when we so posit?
Yep, so I think this gets into a different question of epistemology not directly related to things but rather about what we care about, since positing a theory that what looks to me like a table implies something table shaped about the universe requires caring about parsimony.
(Aside: It’s kind of related because to talk about caring about things we need reifications that enable us to point to what we care about, but I think that’s just an artifact of using words—care is patterns of behavior and preference we can reify call “parsimonious” or something else, but exist prior to being named.)
If we care about something other than parsimony, we may not agree that the universe is filled with tables. Maybe we slice it up quite differently and tables exist orthogonal to our ontology.
This seems straightforward to me: reification is a process by which our brain picks out patterns/features and encodes them so we can recognize them again and make sense of the world given our limited hardware. We can then think in terms of those patterns and gloss over the details because the details often aren’t relevant for various things.
The reason we reify things one way versus another depends on what we care about, i.e. our purposes.
I didn’t link it in my original reply by work on natural abstractions is also related. My take is that if natural abstractions exist they don’t actually rehabilitate noumena but they do explain why it intuitively feels like there are noumena. However abstractions are still phenomena (except insofar as all phenomena are of course embedded in the world) even if they are picking up on what I might metaphorically describe as the natural contours of the territory.
To me this seems obvious: noumena feel real to most people because they’re captured by their ontology. It takes a lot of work for a human mind to learn not to jump straight from sensation to reification, and even with training there’s only so much a person can do because the mind has lots of low-level reification “built in” that happens prior to conscious awareness. Cf. noticing
I very much appreciate trying to figure out what things are. I think, though, you’ve added more complication than needed. However, my take depends on a particular view on philosophy.
So, first I think Kant is wrong about noumena. They don’t exist. There are no things in themselves, there are only phenomena: things that exist because we reify them into existence to fit some concern we have. Things are reified out of sensory experience of the world (though note that “sensory” is redundant here), and the world is the unified non-thing that we can only reify by virtue of it being the whole of existence and it is defined against the null set of hypothetical non-existence.
So given this stance, things are then just us experiencing the world and putting bits of it into little boxes by making claims that a things are this and not that. The non-thing is the nothing of the whole, unified, undivided world.
One very interesting consequence of this view is that things exist only in the map, not in the territory, because things only exist by virtue of some part of the world experiencing itself and creating a little pocket of self-referential information.
I explore this idea in more detail here by considering the special case of causation: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RMBMf85gGYytvYGBv/no-causation-without-reification
Do I only exist because you “reify” me?
This is confusing two different notions of exist. There is existence as part of the wholeness of the world that is as yet undifferentiated and there is your existence in the minds of people. “You” exist lots of places in many minds, and also “you” don’t have a clearly defined existence separate and independent from the rest of the world.
I realize this is unintuitive to many folks. The thing you have to notice is that the world has an existence independent of ontology and ontology-less existence can’t be fathomed in terms of ontology.
Are you saying my existence is “undifferentiated” from “the wholeness of the world” so long as no one else is observing me or thinking of me?
Yes, though note you can observe yourself.
How can self-observation be the cause of my existence as a differentiated being? Don’t I have to already exist as a differentiated being, in order to be doing that?
Oh, I thought I already explained that. There’s at least two different ways “exist” can be meant here, and I think we’re talking past each other.
For some thing to exist that implies it must exist ontologically, i.e. in the map. Otherwise it is not yet a thing. So I’m saying there’s a difference between what we might call existence and being. You exist, in the sense of being an ontological thing, only by virtue of reification, but you are by virtue of the whole world being.
I have a theory that belief in a good God is the main delusion of western religion, and belief in a fundamentally undifferentiated reality is the main delusion of eastern religion.
I see no way around the conclusion that differences are real. Experience is part of reality, and experience contains difference. Also, my experience is objectively distinct from yours—I don’t know what you had for breakfast today (or indeed if you had any); that act was part of your experience, and not part of mine.
We can divide up the world in different ways, but the undivided world is already objectively differentiated.
Sure, differences are as real as the minds making them are. Once you have minds those minds start perceiving differentiation since they need to extract information from the environment to function. So I guess I’m saying I don’t see what your objection is in this last comment as you’ve not posited anything that seems to claim something that actually disagrees with my point as far as I can tell. I think it’s a bit weird to call the differentiation you’re referring to “objective”, but you explained what you mean.
How can there be information for minds to extract, unless the environment already has some kind of structure?
Why does there need to be structure? We can just have a non-uniform distribution of energy around the universe in order for there to be information to extract. I guess you could call this “structure” but that seems like a stretch to me.
I don’t know if I can convince you. You seem pretty convinced that there are natural abstractions or something like them. I’m pretty suspicious that there are natural abstractions and instead think there are useful abstractions but they are all contingent on how the minds creating those abstractions are organized and that no abstractions meaningfully exist independent of the minds that create them. Perhaps the structure of our universe limits how minds work in ways that de facto means we all create ontology within certain constraints, but I don’t think we know enough to prove this.
By my view, any sense in which abstractions seem natural is a kind of typical mind fallacy.
So in the end you are willing to hypothesize that reality has gradients of difference, even prior to the activity of minds? That was my biggest stumbling block, everything else is a detail.
Kant says that noumena don’t exist. Kant also says that the thing in itself does exist. From these statements, we can infer that (despite what many people think) “thing in itself” is not a synonym for “noumenon”.
A noumenon is something external to the mind that is knowable in a purely intellectual, non sensory, way. (Eg. a Platonic form).
A thing itself is the assumed source or cause of a phenomenon (or intuition on Kant’s vocabulary). But there is nothing in the concept of the thing in itself that requires it be knowable noumenally in addition to its phenomenal effects.
The famous statement that the thing in itself is not knowable is another way if saying it is not a noumenon...if it were a noumenon, it would be knowable intellectually. Phenomenonal appearances also do not reveal the thing in itself , because they are only ever in relation to an observing subject … so not “in itself”. Nonetheless, entirely general considerations suggest that appearances must be appearances of something, ie. have external causes
Okay, but the tabley-looking stuff out there seems to conform more parsimoniously to a theory that posits an external table. I assume we agree on that, and then the question is, what’s happening when we so posit?
Yep, so I think this gets into a different question of epistemology not directly related to things but rather about what we care about, since positing a theory that what looks to me like a table implies something table shaped about the universe requires caring about parsimony.
(Aside: It’s kind of related because to talk about caring about things we need reifications that enable us to point to what we care about, but I think that’s just an artifact of using words—care is patterns of behavior and preference we can reify call “parsimonious” or something else, but exist prior to being named.)
If we care about something other than parsimony, we may not agree that the universe is filled with tables. Maybe we slice it up quite differently and tables exist orthogonal to our ontology.
I’m asking what reification is, period, and what it has to do with what’s in reality (the thing that bites you regardless of what you think).
This seems straightforward to me: reification is a process by which our brain picks out patterns/features and encodes them so we can recognize them again and make sense of the world given our limited hardware. We can then think in terms of those patterns and gloss over the details because the details often aren’t relevant for various things.
The reason we reify things one way versus another depends on what we care about, i.e. our purposes.
I didn’t link it in my original reply by work on natural abstractions is also related. My take is that if natural abstractions exist they don’t actually rehabilitate noumena but they do explain why it intuitively feels like there are noumena. However abstractions are still phenomena (except insofar as all phenomena are of course embedded in the world) even if they are picking up on what I might metaphorically describe as the natural contours of the territory.
How do they explain why it feels like there are noumena? (Also by “feels like” I’d want to include empirical observations of nexusness.)
To me this seems obvious: noumena feel real to most people because they’re captured by their ontology. It takes a lot of work for a human mind to learn not to jump straight from sensation to reification, and even with training there’s only so much a person can do because the mind has lots of low-level reification “built in” that happens prior to conscious awareness. Cf. noticing