Actual Infinities

[Mudhammam]

Nestor, while I tentatively hold to moderate realism; however, I do think the term 'existence' is itself problematic. I find it to 'be' an almost inescapable term of art that molds itself to accommodate a variety of ideas. Or maybe an existential condition of life. I do believe that the Schoolmen made important and subtle distinctions between ideas, forms, concepts and abstractions that get glossed over in Philosophy 101. The professors tend to jump from Aristotle to Descartes as if nothing happened in between ancient and modern traditions.

(cont.) Lately, I’ve wondered (begin recent speculation here) if someone could dispense with ‘existence’ as a descriptive term altogether. For quite, some time I’ve taken to the occasional practice using E-prime (http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm). For example, instead of saying “It is cold outside” or “That’s a pretty sunset,” I would say “It feels cold outside” and “That sunset looks pretty.” I have found that using that semantic structure a speaker/writer must more precisely pair subjects with objects using mostly phenomenological language.
As it relates to the ontological status what those most modern people refer to as abstractions, I ask two questions: 1) Do the objects of knowledge have causal import apart from the knowing subject? And 2) Can different people independently know of the object of knowledge?  If so, then I say it qualifies as ‘existing’ in the traditional ‘objective’ sense of the term.

I didn't mean for this to develop into a rant but... one thought just led me to another and...

Existence certainly is a slippery word. There seems to be something circular in our distinguishing various, for lack of a better term, "levels" of reality; between our perception of particular objects and our understanding them in a universal way. We begin with a lush experience of internal and external impressions: sights, sounds, feelings, etc. Our brain develops patterns through which we begin to recognize similarities and differences in objects, from whence we classify the world by genera and species, i.e. animal, man, Socrates. From here we discover that there appear to be certain regularities in the world and rules which govern thought, and that by rigidly applying the latter in conjunction with a methodical study of nature, we can begin to unveil her secrets (and for each solution we attain a new set of problems emerge). As we collectively press further into the depths of our experiences, a conception of reality emerges in which the objects of sense are akin to something like a bubbling soup of particles jostling this way and that on account of interacting "forces"; these being essentially no different than those from which these very ideas and perceptions arise in the brain. And yet an actual bubbling soup - say a bowl of chicken noodle - consisting of a pleasant taste and smell, possessing a texture, emanating heat, perhaps invoking a memory, etc., appears nothing like the conception of those atomized bits of concreta derived from the sciences. We have our conceptions of the world, arrived at through the narrow prism of our everyday senses, on the one hand, and those which deliver us to an understanding of the complex, mechanistic, inner workings of those objects of sense. And all of this must depend on relations which we can only take for granted: those contained within our ideas - of, for example, a necessary connection between cause and effect; a continuous stream, rather than discrete jumps, of instants or units in time which are perpetually, and paradoxically, in the process of becoming as they vanish, raising a further problem in that the past or the future are rendered no more "real" than any of our other thoughts...  the present "now" passes into non-existence the moment it arrives from a non-existent future. So, what can possibly be said to exist without condition? Or does all existence as we are entitled to participate in it involve some relation to another, some framework that must ultimately depend on arbitrary definition? It seems to me that every difficult question in philosophy boils down to an interaction problem, real or perceived: being-non-being, body-mind, eternity-time, infinitude-finitude, etc. And for me, here's the rub: we process everything through these patterns in the brain, and yet nothing "out there", as far as know, exists as it does in thought - which is to say, there are no concrete universals - there are no two objects exactly alike in every respect, but only particulars, and yet our knowledge consists in abstracting from our particular impressions universal ideas to conceptualize the world, to render it intelligible, to enliven it with meaning. And this somehow is supposed to reflect an objective, external reality. So... now what?