On 17 July, 08:08, Rex Allen <rexallen....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> But taking a more platonic view, abstract concepts also exist. And if
> this is so, could we not just as well say that our conscious
> subjective experience is formed from particular configurations of
> these platonically existing abstract concepts?
>
> In this view, these abstract concepts stand in specific relations to
> one another, like symbols on a map, representing the layout (the
> landscape) of a particular moment of consciousness.
>
> And such subjective conscious experiences would include (but are not
> limited to) those that lead us to mistakenly infer the actual
> existence of an external world whose fundamental constituents are
> electrons and atoms and photons and all the rest.
Yes, just so. This is more or less what I was trying to convey in my
sally on 'what is real? (in the sense that I am real)'. Finally - 'in
some sense' - we needs must ground any such discourse about the number
realm in 'my-existence-in-the-world': i.e. no longer 'abstracted', but
centred on the self. Consequently any attempt at a non-dual account
must be reflexive or self-referential - i.e. "I am the singular
mysterious qualitative referent of this abstracted set of entities and
their relations". I suppose this 'embedded' account - the unknowable
ground of our being - could be thought of, if only poetically, as the
true, ontic, or implicit 'language of the dreaming machines', towards
which any explicit version can gesture only partially and
indicatively.
David
> On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 8:38 PM, David Nyman<david.ny....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> > In COMP, the 'mechanism and language of dreams' is
> > posited to be those elements of the number realm and its operators
> > that are deemed necessary to instantiate a 'universal TM' (i.e. one
> > that - assuming CT to be true - is capable of computing any computable
> > function).
>
> So it occurs to me to ask: do abstract concepts other than numbers
> also exist in a platonic sense?
>
> What about "red", for example? Does the concept of red exist in a way
> that is similar to the concept of "3"?
>
> So if I write a computer program that deals with colors, red might be
> represented by the hex number 0xff000000. The hex number itself is
> represented in memory by a sequence of 32 bits. Each bit is
> physically represented by some electrons and atoms in a microchip
> being in some specific state.
>
> But ultimately what is being represented is the idea of "red". So in
> this particular example, does this not make "red" a more fundamental
> concept than the number that is used to represent it in the computer
> program? Is not "red" the MOST fundamental concept in this scenario?
>
> So the typical materialist view is that we are in some way made from
> atoms, though they don't usually go so far as to say that we ARE those
> atoms. Rather we are the information that is stored by virtue of the
> atoms being in a particular configuration. The "actually existing"
> atoms of our body form a vessel for our information, and thus for our
> consciousness. But in their view, we exist only because the atoms
> exist. When the vessel is destroyed, so are we. The atoms are
> fundamental, our consciousness is derivative.
>
> But taking a more platonic view, abstract concepts also exist. And if
> this is so, could we not just as well say that our conscious
> subjective experience is formed from particular configurations of
> these platonically existing abstract concepts?
>
> In this view, these abstract concepts stand in specific relations to
> one another, like symbols on a map, representing the layout (the
> landscape) of a particular moment of consciousness.
>
> And such subjective conscious experiences would include (but are not
> limited to) those that lead us to mistakenly infer the actual
> existence of an external world whose fundamental constituents are
> electrons and atoms and photons and all the rest.
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Received on Fri Jul 17 2009 - 03:53:53 PDT