Existential Import

[Mudhammam]

I've been kind of bothered by something tonight. Well, a few things. First, when philosophers talk about "existential import," it seems like they mean it primarily in the sense of whether something has a "material" existence or not. But how does that apply to what we may call "formal existence," such as abstract objects: numbers and/or logical relationships? Or "fictional" existence, such as mythological creatures? And what about moral concepts? How would you classify their existence and if it even makes sense to ask, would you say they have existential import or not? Or are they necessarily excluded by being universal statements? Or can they only be properly used in reference to particular events?

And how can we justify giving precedent to perceptive existence versus conceptual existence?

Finally, when we speak of substances and properties, such as "the ball" and "redness," respectively, for example, do each exist in the same way?

It seems like even the word existence, apart from the actual nature of material objects and/or thoughts in time x and place y perishing and becoming one moment to the next, is ambiguous. It's stressing me out. I feel like.... I'm vaporizing....

Just kidding.

Thoughts?

[Whateverist]

It is telling that the things we take note of and impute existence to are things which we can experience. The 'things' which we might try to classify include objects which prevent the passage of our body like a wall, but also the words we use to describe this, the sounds the words make when spoken, what it feels like to hit a wall, the perceptual qualities of the wall, and also false experiences of walls such as we might experience while dreaming or hallucinating. All of them relate to our ability to perceive objects as well as the qualities of our experience itself in relation to those objects.

Concepts which can be applied to the properties of objects generate more items to sort. Modes of communication used to relate or record the properties of objects generate still more items to sort. The various senses give us ways to experience objects directly. More items arise when we take note of the value we attribute to objects, their properties and the attraction/repulsion each may have for us. All these experiences can also be dissected phenomenologically to generate even more items. But I think in the end, any attempt to account for the being of all the items we experience will all revolve around ourselves as subjects.

Yikes. Time for bed.

[bennyboy]

Idealism ftw. All those things you are talking about are demonstrably real only as ideas. Put your ball under the microscope, and poof! it disappears. It was only ever really "a thing" in your mind to begin with. That this non-thing is highly coherent and behaves consistently through time and space means that all those QM particles are just down with the program of supporting the ideas of things.

Morality and mythology clearly can exist only as ideas. But there's something important to consider: your view of the people around you is ALSO a mythology. Mom is "actually" a collection of wave functions vibrating in space. There's no objective "beauty" for her to have, or kindness, or love, or her sense of what is right: NONE of the qualities by which you define a person actually exist. Even the curves of her face are ideas: the brain organizing the general distribution of light into descriptive shapes, when in fact there is nothing there but a gazillion individual photons travelling in a straight line from an emitter to your eye. You experience not the existent entity, but a mythological interface between your ego and the idea of "Mom-ness," which you believe you perceive but in fact have created as a kind of "best fit" for the collection of random perceptual memories you've stored and tried to relate to each other in as simple a way as possible.

So in my opinion, you don't have to justify anything. Your so-called perceptive existence is just that part of your conceptual existence which is dependent on input coming (unless solipsism) from outside the self. But by the time you get around to perceiving it, it's not qualitatively different than a vivid dream, which of course comes fom the self anyway.

[JuliaL]

Idealism ftw.  All those things you are talking about are demonstrably real only as ideas.  Put your ball under the microscope, and poof! it disappears.  It was only ever really "a thing" in your mind to begin with.  That this non-thing is highly coherent and behaves consistently through time and space means that all those QM particles are just down with the program of supporting the ideas of things.

But the the QM particles you offer in trade are no more supported than the ball.
I think I think therefore I think I think and no more....I think.

Morality and mythology clearly can exist only as ideas.  But there's something important to consider: your view of the people around you is ALSO a mythology.  Mom is "actually" a collection of wave functions vibrating in space.  There's no objective "beauty" for her to have, or kindness, or love, or her sense of what is right: NONE of the qualities by which you define a person actually exist.  Even the curves of her face are ideas: the brain organizing the general distribution of light into descriptive shapes, when in fact there is nothing there but a gazillion individual photons travelling in a straight line from an emitter to your eye.  You experience not the existent entity, but a mythological interface between your ego and the idea of "Mom-ness," which you believe you perceive but in fact have created as a kind of "best fit" for the collection of random perceptual memories you've stored and tried to relate to each other in as simple a way as possible.

I'll go along with you if we can tentatively agree that we're all self aware neural nets in a vat (of cerebrospinal fluid).
Given that, then all the percepts and whatever is built from them are vibes in the mind.  Even the vibes in the mind are vibes in the mind because they exist as patterns of neural discharge, synapse potentiation and dendrite geography evolved by sense and internal modification of prior configurations.  We build patterns of patterns based on prior patterns and call them beauty, love, Mom and the idea of threeness.  Other than patterns in the brain, I don't see where the logical absolutes or any other ideas could reside.  And wouldn't trust the validity of the observation if their locations were pointed out to me.

So in my opinion, you don't have to justify anything.  Your so-called perceptive existence is just that part of your conceptual existence which is dependent on input coming (unless solipsism) from outside the self.  But by the time you get around to perceiving it, it's not qualitatively different than a vivid dream, which of course comes fom the self anyway.

Thanks for the 'unless solipsism'  everybody seems to ignore that this is all contingent then gets mad and frustrated when such is pointed out. 
But it's been a good dream and so much more consistent than REM sleep dreaming.  I'm inclined to trust it and predict its unfolding confident my actions to optimize future states will be fruitful.  And because AFAIK I don't have any other choice.

[Mudhammam]

Idealism ftw.  All those things you are talking about are demonstrably real only as ideas.  Put your ball under the microscope, and poof! it disappears.  It was only ever really "a thing" in your mind to begin with.  That this non-thing is highly coherent and behaves consistently through time and space means that all those QM particles are just down with the program of supporting the ideas of things.

Morality and mythology clearly can exist only as ideas.  But there's something important to consider: your view of the people around you is ALSO a mythology.  Mom is "actually" a collection of wave functions vibrating in space.  There's no objective "beauty" for her to have, or kindness, or love, or her sense of what is right: NONE of the qualities by which you define a person actually exist.  Even the curves of her face are ideas: the brain organizing the general distribution of light into descriptive shapes, when in fact there is nothing there but a gazillion individual photons travelling in a straight line from an emitter to your eye.  You experience not the existent entity, but a mythological interface between your ego and the idea of "Mom-ness," which you believe you perceive but in fact have created as a kind of "best fit" for the collection of random perceptual memories you've stored and tried to relate to each other in as simple a way as possible.

So in my opinion, you don't have to justify anything.  Your so-called perceptive existence is just that part of your conceptual existence which is dependent on input coming (unless solipsism) from outside the self.  But by the time you get around to perceiving it, it's not qualitatively different than a vivid dream, which of course comes fom the self anyway.

I've been giving idealism a serious reconsideration as of late, not so much as it is related to mind per se, but as it relates to the concept of abstraction (concept of a concept?). When I say, "serious reconsideration," I don't mean that I'm putting all or even most of my time into further research of it, just that discussing Plato and numbers with my college professor has shaken my "dogmatic slumber" a little in the way that Kant did, and that I feel like the doorway between idealistic philosophies and my definition of credulity have been opened further. Now, I don't know what it means to exist independently in the abstract, or as you put it, "demonstrably real only as ideas," so that's about where I'm at with it, lol. 

I agree with most of what you said, but with qualification.

Put your ball under the microscope, and poof! it disappears.

Yes and no, I think. For example, when the popular physicist Sean M. Carroll says that all of matter is not made of discrete points, but that we should conceive of a thing's individual particles as excitations of different fields (for example, an electron field), like waves in an ocean, it seems undeniable that he is in one sense saying (my words), "reality as you perceive it is not as it actually is, but rather it is more like this mathematical concept," which is unreal according to the terms in which we usually speak of perceptive existence, but like the philosopher in Plato's cave discovers, what we perceive is only one representation of the matter. Yet, beyond the limitations of syntax, I believe he still means that these fields exist in a physical spacetime, and are every bit as independently real in a manner that the thoughts about them are not. But more thoughts about thoughts in a minute. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Take five steps away from your computer, but not too far that you can't see the continuous line above this sentence. But wait, it's not a continuous line. It's a collection of fifty or so units appositioned on the screen, and we all know that units aren't lines. But further away, there are no disconnected parallel units, there's just one straight line. I think in the same way, the ball doesn't disappear because we focus on one part of it and the part turns out to appear much different than it does when our vision is "further away." Zoom out far enough, and the ball is still there too. Maybe that's a crummy analogy, but that's the way I think of individual particles (or excitations in a field) and the apparent objects perceived by our relatively poor eyesight. I mean, if it was ever only a thing in my mind to begin with, then it makes no difference what it appears like very close or far away (far in the sense of human intuition).

That this non-thing is highly coherent and behaves consistently through time and space means that all those QM particles are just down with the program of supporting the ideas of things.

(Bold mine) So that's what is going on! 

Morality and mythology clearly can exist only as ideas.  But there's something important to consider: your view of the people around you is ALSO a mythology.  Mom is "actually" a collection of wave functions vibrating in space.  There's no objective "beauty" for her to have, or kindness, or love, or her sense of what is right: NONE of the qualities by which you define a person actually exist.  Even the curves of her face are ideas: the brain organizing the general distribution of light into descriptive shapes, when in fact there is nothing there but a gazillion individual photons travelling in a straight line from an emitter to your eye.  You experience not the existent entity, but a mythological interface between your ego and the idea of "Mom-ness," which you believe you perceive but in fact have created as a kind of "best fit" for the collection of random perceptual memories you've stored and tried to relate to each other in as simple a way as possible.

See, again I'm like yes, that seems true in one sense, but no in another. My view of the people around me is a mythology to an extent, but I think that has more to do with the psychological filters lying between our conscious thoughts (where something like beauty enters our mind) and total amount of information our brains receive at any given moment, rather than QM. Sure, in terms of physics, reality is still a lot different than human intuition leads on, but the reality we perceive is not mythological. "Mom" is a collection of wave functions vibrating in space, but like our disjointed units in the continuous line, they still have evolved according to formula and as a result operate, when seen from our vantage point (or that of presumably any other macroscopic organism), as concrete objects, and furthermore, according to a narrower set of rules. Granted, light is hitting our retina from every direction, and our brain reorganizes the data to put each thing in its proper spatial location, I don't think it can be said that it is our mind that determines the substance of all the individual objects we perceive, such as a thing's position in relation to us or anything else, though it's fair to ask how much of it is substance and how much of it is transposed by properties of mind and where precisely the distinction lies, as that's a much more open-ended question. You seem to know this already, though, because you say: 

Your so-called perceptive existence is just that part of your conceptual existence which is dependent on input coming (unless solipsism) from outside the self. 

So, perhaps I've misunderstood where you see mind come into play, or perhaps we just disagree on where the division lies. I see idealism as more of a solution to the problem that (a) perceptible objects seem finite by nature, as in everything composed of matter and within time (possibly a physical construct though I don't know what that really means either) appears doomed to a process of becoming and perishing, except abstract objects, and (b) certain abstract objects, while they exist in minds, behave, like everything else, according to abstract principles. So, for example, the force of gravity causes objects to move according to principles that we rewrite in mathematical language. But what are principles as such if not abstractions that have an independent existence? That is, unless we are going to say that the force of gravity only exists as it does, i.e. in a universal framework that appears rigid and consistent in application, in minds only, which does seem like solipsism. So, my inability to conceive of the differences between the modes of existence that I outlined in the OP makes me more open to idealism, but I'm not sure how far I see this as related to mind or QM specifically.

[Exian]

I can't help but feel like, in my overwhelmingly uniformed opinion, idealism is taking an end result and applying it backwards. Evolution tells a story of life inventing new ways to describe the world in direct response to pressures applied from the outside. Shouldn't the fact that we all don't walk off cliffs be some sort of proof that our mental representations are pretty damn accurate? I think of it like this: The brain developed over millions of years; at first just a nerve bundle barely able to describe its surroundings, but after a long while it reached such a height of processing power that some positive side-effects cropped up, like abstract thinking and immaterial ideas. That these new features are processed in the brain in the same manner as material things is just evolution being economical. How else should they be perceived, after all? And it might say something that we all intuitively separate the two worlds into their own categories (with the same damn organ, I might add). Then, Idealism comes along and says that reality is processed in the same manner as the immaterial, so it all must be immaterial. Is this not undermining the evolutionary progress of the brain?

Here's a thought I had while reading this thread. Doesn't exactly pertain, so I'm hiding it:

---

I'm 100% positive this isn't an original thought, so many of you may have answers, or just some more complete thoughts. It was mentioned that we look at a ball and see a ball, but on a microscopic scale it disappears. So, I wonder if everything about us was scaled down to the microscopic level, would we still see the ball as a ball, or would we see the atoms and space making up the ball, and be totally oblivious to the fact that we're seeing a ball? Similarly, if we had some unimaginable super-mega telescope, would what we perceive as bodies separated by space really be the pieces of some larger body, like a mega-macro ball. I realize that the similarities between the micro and macro have been observed and commented on a million time before, but I'm more talking about the perspectives from these different levels. Nope. No matter how I try to qualify it, this is just plain silly. haha Eh, that's why I hid it.

---

[bennyboy]

@Exian: I think that evolved traits show that those traits had a statistical advantage over other traits, or a lack of the traits, in the past. That's the only truth statement I think it's fair to make.

@Nestor: (I'll skip quoting because of post explosion)
When I say the ball disappears, I mean the ball as we perceive it. That "ball-ness," that collection of essential qualities through which you experience the ball, is only an idea. I like your idea of zoom, though, and it could be applied to a multi-layered speculation. For if you zoomed out, a galaxy would look like a single, indivisible "object," and if you zoomed out more, galaxy clusters would give way to another "cluster" object. And if you zoomed out on the whole universe, you'd presumably end up with a single point. Considering that's what the Big Bang is, it makes me wonder if the universe really Banged, or if everything in it is really just changing perspective on what is actually a static entity, like staring at a picture of a fractal on LSD? /woo

The idea of abstracts as being imperishable truths is pretty close to my view of idealism. I call things like a formula which affects everything but cannot itself be located in form or space an "idea," as I would a "particle" which has no definable volume. Existent things I see as a kind of interaction among, and expression of, those ideas.

[Exian]

It wouldn't be fair to say that some of those traits emerged before others?

[Mudhammam]

Shouldn't the fact that we all don't walk off cliffs be some sort of proof that our mental representations are pretty damn accurate? 

The question, as I see it, is that our mental representations are pretty damn accurate at describing what? The physical world, of course, right? But then we start asking, what is the physical world (and moreover, what is a mental representation?), and so on and so forth, everything begins to seem very... strange... and murky. It's like we want to take definitions and divide them more and more until we come to the primal substance, and every direction from which we approach the task seems to leave us with less and less of any definite something.

[Pizza]

And that's why I'm a philosophical quietist.