I rather think I do. If you told me you could imagine a euclidian triangle with more or less than 180 internal degrees, I would rightly say ‘No you can’t’. It’s simply not true that we can imagine or conceive of anything we can put into (or appear to put into) words. And I don’t think it’s possible to imagine away things like space and time and keep hold of the idea that you’re imagining a universe, or an experience, or anything like that. Time especially, and so long as I have time, I have quantity.
I don’t know where you are getting yourmfacts from, but it is well known that people’s abilities at visualization vary considerably, so where’s the “we”?
Having studied non euclidean geometry, I can easily imagine a triangle whose angles .sum to more than180 (hint: it’s inscribed on the surface of a sphere)
Saying that non spatial or in temporal universes aren’t really universes is a True Scotsman fallacy.
Non spatial and non temporal models have been serious proposed by physicists; perhaps you should talk to them.
It depends on what you mean by “imagine”. I can’t imagine a Euclidian triangle with less than 180 degrees in the sense of having a visual representation in my mind that I could then reproduce on a piece of paper. On the other hand, I can certainly imagine someone holding up a measuring device to a vague figure on a piece of paper and saying “hey, I don’t get 180 degrees when I measure this”.
Of course, you could say that the second one doesn’t count since you’re not “really” imagining a triangle unless you imagine a visual representation, but if you’re going to say that you need to remember that all nontrivial attempts to imagine things don’t include as much detail as the real thing. How are you going to define it so that eliminating some details is okay and eliminating other details isn’t?
(And if you try that, then explain why you can’t imagine a triangle whose angles add up to 180.05 degrees or some other amount that is not 180 but is close enough that you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in a mental image. And then ask yourself “can I imagine someone writing a proof that a Euclidian triangle’s angles don’t add up to 180 degrees?” without denying that you can imagine people writing proofs at all.)
These are good questions, and I think my general answer is this: in the context of this similar arguments, being able to imagine something is sometimes taken as evidence that it’s at least a logical possibility. I’m fine with that, but it needs to be imagined in enough detail to capture the logical structure of the relevant possibility. If someone is going to argue, for example, that one can imagine a euclidian triangle with more or less than 180 internal degrees, the imagined state of affairs must have as least as much logical detail as does a euclidian triangle with 180 internal degrees. Will that exclude your ‘vague shape’ example, and probably your ‘proof’ example?
Will that exclude your ‘vague shape’ example, and probably your ‘proof’ example?
It would exclude the vague shape example but I think it fails for the proof example.
Your reasoning suggests that if X is false, it would be impossible for me to imagine someone proving X. I think that is contrary to what most people mean when they say they can imagine something.
It’s not clear what your reasoning implies when X is true. Either
I cannot imagine someone proving X unless I can imagine all the steps in the proof
I can imagine someone proving X as long as X is true, since having a proof would be a logical possibility as long as X is true
1) is also contrary to what most people think of as imagining. 2) would mean that it is possible me to not know whether or not I am imagining something. (I imagine someone proving X and I don’t know if X is true. 2) means that if X is true I’m “really imagining” it and that if X is false, I am not.)
Your reasoning suggests that if X is false, it would be impossible for me to imagine someone proving X. I think that is contrary to what most people mean when they say they can imagine something.
Well, say I argue that it’s impossible to write a story about a bat. It seems like it should be unconvincing for you to say ‘But I can imagine someone writing a story about a bat...see, I’m imagining Tom, who’s just written a story about a bat.’ Instead, you’d need to imagine the story itself. I don’t intend to talk about the nature of the imagination here, only to say that as a rule, showing that something is logically possible by way of imagining it requires that it have enough logical granularity to answer the challenge.
So I don’t doubt that you could imagine someone proving that E-triangles have more than 180 internal degrees, but I am saying that not all imaginings are contenders in an argument about logical possibility. Only those ones which have sufficient logical granularity do.
I would understand “I can imagine...” in such a context to mean that it doesn’t contain flaws that are basic enough to prevent me from coming up with a mental picture or short description. Not that it doesn’t contain any flaws at all. It wouldn’t make sense to have “I can imagine X” mean “there are no flaws in X”—that would make “I can imagine X” equivalent to just asserting X.
The issue isn’t flaws or flawlessness. In my bat example, you could perfectly imagine Tom sitting in an easy chair with a glass of scotch saying to himself, ‘I’m glad I wrote that story about the bat’. But that wouldn’t help. I never said it’s impossible for Tom to sit in a chair and say that, I said that it was impossible to write a story about a bat.
The issue isn’t logical detail simpliciter, but logical detail relative to the purported impossibility. In the triangle case, you have to imagine, not Tom sitting in his chair thinking ‘I’m glad I proved that E-triangles have more than 180 internal degrees’ (no one could deny that that is possible) but rather the figure itself. It can be otherwise as vague and flawed as you like, so long as the relevant bits are there. Very likely, imagining the proof in the relevant way would require producing it.
And you are asserting something, you’re asserting the possibility of something in virtue of the fact that it is in some sense actual. To say that something is logically impossible is to say that it can’t exist anywhere, ever, not even in a fantasy. To imagine up that possibility is to make it sufficiently real to refute the claim of possibility, but only if you imagine, and thus make real, the precise thing being claimed to be impossible.
Are you sure it is logically impossible to have [spaceless] and timeless universes?
Dear me no! I have no idea if such a universe is impossible. I’m not even terribly confident that this universe has space or time.
I am pretty sure that space and time (or something like them) are a necessary condition on experience, however. Maybe they’re just in our heads, but it’s nevertheless necessary that they, or something like them, be in our heads. Maybe some other kind of creature thinks in terms of space, time, and fleegle, or just fleegle, time, and blop, or just blop and nizz. But I’m confident that such things will all have some common features, namely being something like a context for a multiplicity. I mean in the way time is a context for seeing this, followed by that, and space is a context for seeing this in that in some relation, etc.
Without something like this, it seems to me experience would always (except there’s no time) only be of one (except an idea of number would never come up) thing, in which case it wouldn’t be rich enough to be an experience. Or experience would be of nothing, but that’s the same problem.
So there might be universes of nothing but qualia (or, really, quale) but it wouldn’t be a universe in which there are any experiencing or thinking things. And if that’s so, the whole business is a bit incoherent, since we need an experiencer to have a quale.
Then by imagining an all qualia universe, I can easily imagine a universe that doesn’t run on math, for some values of an”runs on math”
I don’t think you can imagine, or conceive of, an all qualia universe though.
You don’t get to tell me what I can imagine, though. All I have to do is imagine away the quantitative and structural aspects of my experience.
I rather think I do. If you told me you could imagine a euclidian triangle with more or less than 180 internal degrees, I would rightly say ‘No you can’t’. It’s simply not true that we can imagine or conceive of anything we can put into (or appear to put into) words. And I don’t think it’s possible to imagine away things like space and time and keep hold of the idea that you’re imagining a universe, or an experience, or anything like that. Time especially, and so long as I have time, I have quantity.
That looks likes typical mind fallacy
I don’t know where you are getting yourmfacts from, but it is well known that people’s abilities at visualization vary considerably, so where’s the “we”?
Having studied non euclidean geometry, I can easily imagine a triangle whose angles .sum to more than180 (hint: it’s inscribed on the surface of a sphere)
Saying that non spatial or in temporal universes aren’t really universes is a True Scotsman fallacy.
Non spatial and non temporal models have been serious proposed by physicists; perhaps you should talk to them.
It depends on what you mean by “imagine”. I can’t imagine a Euclidian triangle with less than 180 degrees in the sense of having a visual representation in my mind that I could then reproduce on a piece of paper. On the other hand, I can certainly imagine someone holding up a measuring device to a vague figure on a piece of paper and saying “hey, I don’t get 180 degrees when I measure this”.
Of course, you could say that the second one doesn’t count since you’re not “really” imagining a triangle unless you imagine a visual representation, but if you’re going to say that you need to remember that all nontrivial attempts to imagine things don’t include as much detail as the real thing. How are you going to define it so that eliminating some details is okay and eliminating other details isn’t?
(And if you try that, then explain why you can’t imagine a triangle whose angles add up to 180.05 degrees or some other amount that is not 180 but is close enough that you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in a mental image. And then ask yourself “can I imagine someone writing a proof that a Euclidian triangle’s angles don’t add up to 180 degrees?” without denying that you can imagine people writing proofs at all.)
These are good questions, and I think my general answer is this: in the context of this similar arguments, being able to imagine something is sometimes taken as evidence that it’s at least a logical possibility. I’m fine with that, but it needs to be imagined in enough detail to capture the logical structure of the relevant possibility. If someone is going to argue, for example, that one can imagine a euclidian triangle with more or less than 180 internal degrees, the imagined state of affairs must have as least as much logical detail as does a euclidian triangle with 180 internal degrees. Will that exclude your ‘vague shape’ example, and probably your ‘proof’ example?
It would exclude the vague shape example but I think it fails for the proof example.
Your reasoning suggests that if X is false, it would be impossible for me to imagine someone proving X. I think that is contrary to what most people mean when they say they can imagine something.
It’s not clear what your reasoning implies when X is true. Either
I cannot imagine someone proving X unless I can imagine all the steps in the proof
I can imagine someone proving X as long as X is true, since having a proof would be a logical possibility as long as X is true
1) is also contrary to what most people think of as imagining. 2) would mean that it is possible me to not know whether or not I am imagining something. (I imagine someone proving X and I don’t know if X is true. 2) means that if X is true I’m “really imagining” it and that if X is false, I am not.)
Well, say I argue that it’s impossible to write a story about a bat. It seems like it should be unconvincing for you to say ‘But I can imagine someone writing a story about a bat...see, I’m imagining Tom, who’s just written a story about a bat.’ Instead, you’d need to imagine the story itself. I don’t intend to talk about the nature of the imagination here, only to say that as a rule, showing that something is logically possible by way of imagining it requires that it have enough logical granularity to answer the challenge.
So I don’t doubt that you could imagine someone proving that E-triangles have more than 180 internal degrees, but I am saying that not all imaginings are contenders in an argument about logical possibility. Only those ones which have sufficient logical granularity do.
I would understand “I can imagine...” in such a context to mean that it doesn’t contain flaws that are basic enough to prevent me from coming up with a mental picture or short description. Not that it doesn’t contain any flaws at all. It wouldn’t make sense to have “I can imagine X” mean “there are no flaws in X”—that would make “I can imagine X” equivalent to just asserting X.
The issue isn’t flaws or flawlessness. In my bat example, you could perfectly imagine Tom sitting in an easy chair with a glass of scotch saying to himself, ‘I’m glad I wrote that story about the bat’. But that wouldn’t help. I never said it’s impossible for Tom to sit in a chair and say that, I said that it was impossible to write a story about a bat.
The issue isn’t logical detail simpliciter, but logical detail relative to the purported impossibility. In the triangle case, you have to imagine, not Tom sitting in his chair thinking ‘I’m glad I proved that E-triangles have more than 180 internal degrees’ (no one could deny that that is possible) but rather the figure itself. It can be otherwise as vague and flawed as you like, so long as the relevant bits are there. Very likely, imagining the proof in the relevant way would require producing it.
And you are asserting something, you’re asserting the possibility of something in virtue of the fact that it is in some sense actual. To say that something is logically impossible is to say that it can’t exist anywhere, ever, not even in a fantasy. To imagine up that possibility is to make it sufficiently real to refute the claim of possibility, but only if you imagine, and thus make real, the precise thing being claimed to be impossible.
Are you sure it is logically impossible to have shameless and timeless universes? Who has put forward the necessity of space and time?
Dear me no! I have no idea if such a universe is impossible. I’m not even terribly confident that this universe has space or time.
I am pretty sure that space and time (or something like them) are a necessary condition on experience, however. Maybe they’re just in our heads, but it’s nevertheless necessary that they, or something like them, be in our heads. Maybe some other kind of creature thinks in terms of space, time, and fleegle, or just fleegle, time, and blop, or just blop and nizz. But I’m confident that such things will all have some common features, namely being something like a context for a multiplicity. I mean in the way time is a context for seeing this, followed by that, and space is a context for seeing this in that in some relation, etc.
Without something like this, it seems to me experience would always (except there’s no time) only be of one (except an idea of number would never come up) thing, in which case it wouldn’t be rich enough to be an experience. Or experience would be of nothing, but that’s the same problem.
So there might be universes of nothing but qualia (or, really, quale) but it wouldn’t be a universe in which there are any experiencing or thinking things. And if that’s so, the whole business is a bit incoherent, since we need an experiencer to have a quale.
Are you using experience to mean visual experience by any chance? How much spatial information are you getting from hearing?
PS your dogmatic Kantianism is now taken as read.
Tapping out.