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PaperclipPerfector  29d ago (text post)   3190 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 7, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Does anyone here actually "believe" Plato/Aristotle's theory of forms, material/formal/efficient/final causes, and hylemorphism? Or is at all basically nonsense, dreamed up for a want of robust physical science, with 'ball', 'sphere', 'man', 'dog' being just human oversimplifications for matter arrangements?

In what way? I don’t know of anyone who takes the idea literally in the sense that they think that there’s a literal perfect [object] in heaven that Al, similar things on Earth resemble. On the other hand the concept is used quite a lot in mathematics as mentioned below and in law. We have legal definitions of all sorts of things which is why tomatoes are vegetables in a legal sense. It probably happens in CS as well.

Mathematicians are often basically platonists, because what is math if not attempting to gain knowledge of platonic forms?

I have no idea myself; metaphysics isn't terribly easy.

theory of forms

In a metaphysical sense, no. W/r/t consciousness, sure. Our brain 100% works in terms of forms and fetishes are the easiest/roughest example.

I'm ambivalent about Platonic forms (despite the prevalence of such views among physicists), but I'm definitely down with Aristotle's four causes. I even have a toy example I like to use involving an ordinary claw hammer, and how they are four different ways of answering the question "why is this hammer here?"

I even have a toy example I like to use involving an ordinary claw hammer, and how they are four different ways of answering the question "why is this hammer here?"

Its the final cause (teleology) that really gets people upset with Aristotle here. He believed you could meaningfully talk about a dog having sharp front teeth because:

  1. Material - Enamel
  2. Formal - "Tooth"
  3. Efficient - Genetic expression
  4. Final - To sever meat to eat

Whereas modern scientists are iffy on #2 and hostile to #4.

I think you're greatly overstating hostility to #4 here. This is my field and I'd say the majority of biologists is not only fine with it, but even frequently colloquially uses the language indicating #4 as the primary reason. Me included. Yes, it's more complicated overall, but "genetic variants associated with sharper front tooth developed because it allowed specimen to sever meat better and so they had more offspring" is more or less correct in my view.

Yeah, this is a point I keep making to people — natural selection the process may be atelic, but the products of evolution are consequently telic — that's what makes an adaptation an adaptation. Indeed, I argue that this, though oft ignored, is one of the key philosophical insights of Darwinian theory: the explanation of how you can get purpose without a Purpose-Giver.

Overview of Platonistic metaphysics, see especially the section on mathematical objects and the associated bibliography because usually when people talk about Platonism in a contemporary context it's in relation to mathematics.

Here is an introduction to some problems in the metaphysics of physical objects.

I'm less familiar with contemporary hylomorphic approaches but searching philpapers.org for hylomorphism turns up some results like this that seem relevant.

I would say that things like the idea of a circle or the idea of a dog exist in some sense, even though ideas are not material things that you can touch. Maybe it's a feature of the human brain that it tries to find patterns with commonalities in everything that it perceives, and you can only mentally process physical things as representations of these patterns. If you see a rock that is approximately the shape of a circle, you can see and remember it as a rock shaped like a circle, but if you see a rock with a random shape then it's kind of like looking at something that's in the blind spot of your retina, it's right there, but it's difficult to remember what the shape is or to draw it on paper, etc. If you analyze your subjective experience further along these lines you may come to think that there is some other reality of pure ideas that is parallel to physical reality, because that's what it feels like from a subjective point of view.

That's a difficult question! But I will attempt to answer it. Keep in mind that this is my own thoughts, not any specific theory that some other guy came up with. I don't believe in the theory of forms, but I can see how one could mistakenly believe they exist, and they might be useful either way (every model is wrong, but some are useful!)

I believe that everything is unique, finite and different, that there's nothing universal, and the desire to equalize and unify is a quirk of human perception (an attempt to dominate the environment). However, many things are similar! But noticing these similarities requires a great deal of intelligence. Being a shape-rotator myself, I can usually tell when things are similar in their mathematical structure, for example if something is isomorphic to something else.

And easy pattern is: A "branch" of government is similar to a "branch" of a tree. They both contain one-to-many relationships.

The more intelligent you are, the more abstract similarities you will be able to grasp. But these shared aspects aren't universal objects, we just recognize common structures (overlaps, redundancy) and start giving them names. At best "universal" will mean universal for our universe, with our laws of physics. Or perhaps "universal for humans". But this is a form of "universal" which is bound to a scope. But that makes it not universal, no? Many people don't believe in love/morality/meaning because they don't exist outside of humanity. But nothing can exist outside of itself, so nothing can be universal in such a sense.

The theory of forms might reveal how the human brain works, just like how the Buddha recognized how suffering functioned in humans. Both theories are about objective reality as it appears to humans. In fact, it's only about the "Appears to humans" part, as that's the only thing we can perceive. For human beings cannot break out of their own humanity. For the same reason that you can't write what's beyond words. It should also be noted that great pattern-recognition has limited value. It can't carry me in life. Everything has its own specifics outside of the shared patterns. You can't compress knowledge beyond a certain point. And everything is specific - even set theory. It's an axiomatic system, it's not the one true axiomatic system, such thing could never exist. You can create anything which doesn't contradict itself, but said creation doesn't contain anything but itself, it doesn't exist outside itself. I think "Sphere" is a category, many spheres can exist. But you can think up an infinite amount of categories, and these definitions can contradict eachother, so you can't evaluate one as more correct than another. Even if you use the laws of physics as your "base", an infinite amount of universes with different laws could exist, so our universe is also specific. The universe isn't real outside of the universe, so zooming in and out doesn't change anything.

This reply may be inadequate, but I believe the problem is beyond most people, possibly also beyond me. But in this case, I don't think it can be explained in a way which we can understand it.

Yes. The Aristotelian understanding of essence and causality still underpins Catholic doctrine.

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