7/13/19

Ontology and Idealism


On the topic of idealism and ontology. Is there true or false ontology that is idealism? It seems necessary to examine the word-components of the proposition to determine how they go together with meaning to construct a meaningful idea.

Idealism for example is from idea. I suppose idealism means people with some idea of what a perfect state would be if it were made to exist. Bishop Berkeley had another kind of idea-ism, or idealism, namely that everything experienced of reality is pure idea. Berkeley thought that experience is an idea of God given unto human minds or thought to experience. In that sense I suppose it might be consistent to abduct a simpler paradigm that sentience of humans is an idea of God made for limited sentient human beings to experience. Human thought is the equivalent of a subroutine within the meta-program of an AI.

Leibniz believed reality was built up from one-dimensional monads of spirit. All of reality so far as anyone knows is made of quantum protocols- relationships- of smallest units of energy in standard spacing, quantity and quality. It actually could be all in the mind of God set with smallest units that relate everywhere in predictable ways. The periodic table is a human description at a larger scale of built up points or strings.

What reality is is another concern. It has meaning. Yet ontology has meanings too. Generally it is the largest set of all things that exist. W.V.O. Quine wrote a book named ‘Ontological Relativity’. Actually it is a book made from a series of lectures he made. Quine was a logician- a philosopher of logic, and he wrote about linguistic ontology (plural) in that book, for example, a lexicon is an ontology and its meaning values cannot be accurately translated into another ontology. Meaning-values of languages may very from one to another. I suppose there are innumerable ways of regarding reality and an ontology that it presents with deontological criteria.

One may describe reality in numerous ways with different language-filters. Words and objects have a relationship that exists within an ontology. The word object for example, has a particular value in the English language. Some do not regard objects as real though because they exist as composites of molecules within a planetful-field of molecules. Instead of objects as particular things they are regarded as an aspect of material monism. Though people comprehend quantum physics and cosmology well enough sometimes to comprehend a meta-ontology comprising quite a bit of the Universe or inflated portion of a particular Universe within an eternal inflation Multiverse, it is yet a set-slice para-ontology rather than a complete one.

It is an error to assume that oneself creates reality because of the subjective way one interprets it. What exists for-oneself is different, it is assumed, from what exists for others. Even if one were the author of one’s self existence, one would need to be God to have done so and always to have existed from eternity-even though it had no start and always was. The ‘I am’  requires no ontology.


Though humans interpret the given, it is a mistake to say they construct what is experienced as if the objective was entirely malleable. Jesus of course said that with faith one could move mountains, yet people generally take that no literally, but figuratively to mean that one can accomplish great things with enough faith in God and personal effort.

Physicists would regard the way the mass-energy field of the Universe is structured such that there is a relationship between it and the way beings could bet within it. Beings are shaped in relation to the possibilities of the Universe. Trees cannot grow too high because their ability to pump water to higher branches is limited by water pressure from gravity on the venous transport system that breaks. People excrete downward instead of upwardly because of gravity- there are innumerable physical structures of humans shaped by the Earth physics. One has conditional ability to interpret what exists and is presented through the senses, yet it is only conditional, Reason about cognition may sharpen awareness of what exists objectively. Reason allows speculation of metaphysics and epistemology, as well as what can say about what exists.

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