Heidegger

In a message dated 15/07/2007 _etho3681 at bigpond.net.au_
(mailto:etho3681@bigpond.net.au) writes:

Hi Tony,
To address the most important question first.

Tony:
Perhaps you might argue that this is an improper question, and adopt the
usual linguistic evasion to answering difficult or impossible philosophical
questions.

Jud:
I never answer questions with linguistic evasion - there is no point. For me
this is not a point-scoring operation - it is a serious investigative and
learning process of my own philosopheme. If you look back over our last mails
every one of your comments have been answered honestly and fully in accordance
with my eliminativist ontology. Secondly, I do not consider any ontological
or philosophical questions to be improper ones - nor the serious responses
that such questions may illicit.

Tony:
Thanks for your piece on eliminativism, which I will study. As an immediate
response, may I offer the following comments. I do not understand the scope
(definition) of the material objects that you adopt as the basis for reality.
It seems to me that you must have some criteria for judging whether a
so-and-so is real or not, according to your materialist ontological taxonomy..

Jud:
My definitions of what an object is are the well known ones of the
materialist. A developing materialist on the road to radical physicalism does not
usually come to his materialism epiphanically in a moment of sudden understanding
or revelation. It is a gradatory process. usually arrived at via nominalism
and the problem of overcoming the hypostases of linguistic origin.
Philosophical language is burdened with more metaphor and reification than the language
of science and natural language put together, which often comes as a shock
to philosophical newbies expecting a more rigorous and professional approach
to philosophical questions.

Language is teeming with nouns or noun-like forms, and the tendency is to
anticipate an object lurking behind them and forget - or even to be unaware,
that the naming-word has no nominata in the real world and that the noun is an
abstract one. Basic or simple ontology is completely absent from the school
curricula and in grammar lessons. Only rudimentary emphasis is placed on
defining which of the names of things the children are taught are actually out
there in the world beyond the classroom. Alas, our children face the world
bereft of such a grounding and leave school ignorant of the fact that ‘freedom’ or
‘love’, etc. are relativities which have no existential referent, but form a
part of the compendium of descriptive terms used to depict or circumscribe
actual objects, rather than existing as objects in their own right. Thus our
children are abandoned as easy pray to fanatics of all kinds both
philosophical, religious and political and left to wade through a morass of pretended
ontological problems with the incremental deleterious effects on the organon of
principles for philosophic or scientific investigations and society as a
whole.

As Leibniz wrote: problems bristling with difficulties can be dispelled as
soon as we stick only to the names of concretes in our discourse. Nouveaux
essais 2, XXII,§ 1)

The eliminativist is not as radical as Leibniz in the sense that he desires
that useful abstract expressions like the names of properties or relations be
altogether abandoned. Quite the reverse - he accepts the necessity of
applying them because their presence is convenient for communication and reduces
the length of utterances.

Tony:
You seem to accept human bodies (with or without brains) as being in the
lexicon, and presumably this would include Madonna as well as the usual denizens
of the morgue.

Jud:
Human animals are objects that is true - Madonna is a human animal,
therefore she is an object dead or alive and even when that which was once known as
*Madonna* is no more than bones and a bubbling corruptive mass on the bottom
of the coffin floor..

Tony:
Such material objects as dogs, moons of Neptune, viruses, the King of
France’s Breasts or protons are not equally accessible to the senses.

Jud:
As long as such objects CAN be detected and categorised as complying with
the definition of a material object by the human sensorium then they are
accepted as objects. Human curiosity allied to man’s incredible creative ability
and technical prowess is rolling back the frontiers of objectival detection
every day. Things have moved on a lot since in 1948 my home city of Liverpool
had the most powerful accelerator outside America. Synchrocyclotrons are much
more powerful than the one at Uppsala University which I was personally shown
around in 1957 by my Swedish friend Olle Byström who worked in the control
room [sometimes all night.]

Soon the new European atom-smasher far more powerful that the original
Cern synchrocyclotron will come into commission with the prospects of even
more exciting identifications of material particles. A hot broth will be made of
quarks and gluons, the subatomic particles that make up the protons and
neutrons that compose everyday matter. The new machine will create this
quark-gluon soup, or plasma, by smashing together gold particles until they
disintegrate into quarks and gluons. In the USA RHIC’s experiments will also, for the
first time, probe the theory describing how quarks are held together in
ordinary matter.

For me (who thinks about such things) and others (who do not think about
such things) it is convenient most of the time to think and regard entities as
having a static schema and for some entiatic situation (state of affairs) to
be put on perceptual hold. It helps, and indeed is essential to view an entity
as if there exists a meeting situation in which every human interpretant of
the object (except time) holds true. We could not function efficiently if we
continually conceptualised the object as a transformative being undergoing
constant physical change. We need to conceptually freeze-frame objects in order
to deal with them. I remember seeing a highly speeded-up version of a
delayed action film-clip of the decomposition of a dead field mouse. Where before
one’s very eyes, the flesh rotted, and the insectival scavengers reduced the
object to but a shadowy outline on the forest floor in one minute flat. The
same sort of degeneration is taking place to any object that we look at -
albeit at relatively enormously different rates of cataplasia or dissolution. For
me non-objects, abstractions and reifications like the number 67 or the
Battle of Hastings are not capable of such material transmogrification - for they
do not exist to change their corporeal composition. I suggest therefore that
if in our discussions you are ever unsure of what I mean when I use the word
*object* that you subject it to the above definitional criteria.(let’s call
it: *The Field-Mouse Test.*) I understand from my little reading of physics
that particles also decay and convert to other forms of material in a similar
manner as the field mouse, though without the assistance of bacteria or the
six-legged insect denizens of the forest floor.
All processual entities are inherently changing entities, apart from
(imagined) stationary temporal interstices or phases. The human observer can exist
in two sequential cognitive conditions in which the characteristics (except
temporal features) of an objectual entity do not seem to change.

Localized entities (’continuants such as the pen on your desk’) are
cognitively constructible as tendentiously stable. This is not to say that objectual
entities cannot have a kinematics and a dynamics. ‘Kinematic’ and ‘Static’
are not *properties* of the actual object but of human intuition and an
‘extreme’ analysis reveals that kinesis and stasis do not actually exist - only the
pen or the humming-bird exist. Prototypical, objectual *intuitionally static*
entities include objects like ‘Ben Nevis’ or the Rock Gibraltar.
(B) Other *perceptively ephemeral objects like the female of the mayfly
Dolania americana ephemeroptera which lives for less than five minutes after its
final moult. During this brief window, the insect mates and lays her eggs.
Localized entity has two direct subtypes: object and region.” We see it *born* –
we see it mate – we see it die in the time it takes us to boil a kettle.

Tony:
Indeed, some objects of physics, such as black holes cannot be directly
‘observed’ but must be deduced from their effects. Indeed, the black hole was
predicted by a theory (Penrose I think rather than Hawking) and was only
‘confirmed’ (pace Popper) by later accumulated evidence.

Jud:
Binary stars, black holes, rapidly spinning stars and other invisible
objects are often detected by senses other than our eyes. Often the regular
perturbations of nearby objects *give the game away* as to the presence of an object
concealed from our view. The movement of objects in certain paths and the
disappearance of objects and behaviour of known objects in the vicinity of a
Black Hole can determine its position. These *effects,* or more scientifically
speaking,* these effected objects* are detected by our visual senses via the
*read outs* on ticker-tape, computer monitors or sometimes audibly via radio
astronomical apparatus. For the eliminativist *theoretical objects* are not
finally accepted in the materialist canon, until a sound verificatory evidence
has been generally approved by the scientific community, even if the
*scientific* theoretical existence of such objects appears to be absolutely
convincing.
That is precisely my stance on the question of dark matter at the moment. I
am naturally hopeful of a successful outcome in this area. It would be
convincing evidence for my own theory of eliminative determinism, which posits a
completely materialistic cosmos. It can be thought of as a soup of variously
sized objects. Rather like a thin gruel with lumps of vegetables and meat
floating about in it which is radically rather different from the traditional
version of the lumpy ingredients floating around on their own like a suitably
harnessed by gravity like Peter Pan and the Lost Children flying around the
stage suspended by unseen wires in some transcendentalist pantomime scripted by
the clerici vagantes of some medieval masturbatorium.

Tony:
The point is that the concept of the black hole may have been altered by the
observations (fine tuning) but the pre-existence of black holes in theory is
a distinct and independent kind of existence. Can you please say whether
black holes and quarks are real or imaginary? Similar remarks might have been
applied to the American continent before its discovery.

Jud:
There is a big difference between 15th and 16th century attitudes towards
the discovery of the North American land mass and theories concerning the
presence of black holes and quarks. Forgetting about the supposed voyages in
currachs, [coracles of wooden frames covered in light skins] to American shores by
Irish monks, and Eric the Red’s saga rauða or the Saga of the Norse
exploration of North-America. as well as Leif Erickson’s (I named my second son
*Leif* after him] discovery of Vinland the Good, (a more feasible trip via Iceland
and Greenland, and the *discovery of Black holes and quarks.
There may have been, or there may have not been objects washed ashore on
Irish, Scandinavian , and Portuguese beaches, which, because of the
predominantly westwardly weather system [winds blowing towards the east] and the
predictability of the seasonal currents have caused people to believe that there was
indeed a landmass of some sort over the western horizon. On the other hand
the geographers may have considered the roundness of the earth theory pointed
to such a continent - I have not studied the subject in that much depth.
Certainly Columbus was a chancer, but the accounts of the voyage lead one to
conclude that he was utterly convinced that such a landmass existed. This
stoutness of heart and conviction was essential when the crew got restless and wanted
to turn back.

One could compare the contemporary theories of the black hole and the less
well know particles to this sort of exploratory paradigm as being based upon a
combination of observed objectival intrusion. The perturbationary seasonal
washing up of exotic fruits and plant material [maybe empty sailing craft]
washed up on the beaches, and the observation of migratory birds flying west in
certain seasons and returning at others. When evidence of this sort piles up
it leads men to think that the *is something there.* (*perturbation*: -
physics- a secondary influence on a system that causes it to deviate or change.]
I am only prepared to accept the existence of objects like America or Quarks
when there is overwhelming evidence presented which persuades me that
continued disbelief would be fatuous.

Tony:
You seem to accord humans a privileged position in your ontology, as if they
were somehow different from other material occurrences.

Jud:
I follow an identificary convention whereby a binary relationship like
*humans - other objects* is read as the English sentence thus:

*Person subclass-of animal* rather than *person superclass-of animal.*

Humans are different in the sense that they have a complex system of
communication - the cheetah is different in the sense that it is said to be the
fastest animal alive, and the bat has incredible powers of navigating by sound.
Whether this makes both their short lives on this planet more enjoyable an
experience than that of a wolf, a sloth or a cockroach it is impossible to tell.

Contrary to what Nagel wrote - there is NOT something it is like to be a bat
- there is no such thing as *being a bat* there is only the bat. Nagel holds
that something-it-is-like-to-be-ness is the determining characteristic of
conscious mental states. For him no creature could be conscious without there
being something it is like to be that thing. As Nagel puts the point, “an
organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is
like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism.” The
eliminativist rejects this nonsense. Consciousness and mental states are
reifications - only the conscious entity exists. The conscious person can try to
describe *what it feels like* to slide down a mountain on skis - but *sliding
down a mountain on skis* - doesn’t exist - only the skier, the skis and the
mountain exist.

Tony:
Are you saying that before the advent of humans and their brains that the
material world did not exist? Perhaps you might argue that this is an improper
question, and adopt the usual linguistic evasion to answering difficult or
impossible philosophical questions.

Jud:
No I am not saying that before the advent of humans and their brains that
the material world did not exist. Actually I believe that the material world
has ALWAYS existed - that the religious notion of creatio ex nihlio is naive -
and that the material world will ALWAYS exist because the alternative
[nothingness] is a logical, scientific and commonsensical impossibility. That
introduces my theory which I call: *The Existential Imperative* or *The
Existential Aseity* of which more later…

Kind regards,

Jud Evans.

Personal Website.
_http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm_
 http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…)

Regards,

Jud Evans.

Personal Website. http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…

Posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
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