12/21/11

Augustine and Ontological Relativity

I wanted to mention Plotinus' neo-Platonism and his exposition of Platonism in The Enneads. Socrates at least believed in God, and the concept of One being emanating everything that exists seems the better interpretation of Plato extent. It was written only about 600 years after, in a language still pretty much like that of Plato.

Numbers are an expression of divisible relations-or an early form of relativity I would think. Natural numbers, rational numbers or Cantor's trans-infinite infinities with given ordinal relations that cannot be sub-divided infinitely (as in the Eleatic paradoxes) are a way the mind made order in representative structure...abstract structures necessarily about reality. The problem as Russell might have pointed out is a categorical error in language about where to categorize abstract idea and designs. As a Christian I have no trouble with any of the opinions because I think God can keep track of the math and quanta of all sorts.

The work of ordering and formalizing expressions of interval and structure with signs is accomplished in-the-world, and there isn't much difference between the mind as a field with trillions of synaptic connection routes processing sense input in its particular way in the unified temporal field of the Universe and the world itself except qualitatively. That is the mind and nature are phenomenal and integral within the fundamental universal monism.

Augustine could easily regard thought as valuable in a special or even Hegelian way. Because of the Creator's relationship to mankind it is ideas and relationships that are consequential. The Spirit of God transcends the material world or encompasses it, and Leibniz's spiritual one-dimensional monads or thoughts about the Intellect emanated by The One lead to the cloud of unknowing's mystery.

Augustine's penetrating examination of abstract objects as being real is something of a very early analytic philosophy as well as Platonist. Strawson's' Individuals' and Quine's Word and Object’ follow up the relationship of ideas to the real world, and improve upon the empiricism of the era that was ending and being surpassed by ontological relativity in epistemology.

The transcendence of classical realism for a phenomenalism and a subjective epistemology unified with the corporeal is a modern point of view. Mind is grounded in the noumenal and the quantum realm of probability statistics as well as naive reality taken as unshakable by traditional empiricists.

Plotinus points out a hierarchy of relations from The One to the Intellect, the realm of forms and the real world with so many examples of broken forms. One might take that as a fair approximation of the concept that fundamental structure given to quantum mechanical energy have an 'intelligible object' content as well as mass or energy. One might wonder if the way that quantum mechanical particles exist with concurrent uncertainty and determinism overall is not an illustration of the way the realm of forms downloads its designs into the actual solid-state universe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon

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