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Ilya Startsev

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Everything posted by Ilya Startsev

  1. As another side note: What has been historically known as kinetic and potential energy (since Leibniz, iirc) is the same as matter and not the only energy known today. Hence I prefer to associate kinetic and potential energies with matter (as is done by physicists today), but associate the real energy (that isn't matter) with vacuum, binding, and dark energies. This way I think is more logical and better comprehended, since real energy isn't what we use for fuel (that's material particles like electrons) but the very form of nature, that which moves nature like its inner fire and keeps it together as well. Also this distinction between matter (kinetic and potential energy) and energy (vacuum, binding, and dark) supports the crucial distinction of man-made and natural that seems to have been erased in our highly technical and materialistic society. I guess another way to distinguish the energies is by calling them material (kinetic and potential) and real (vacuum, binding, dark). Therefore my use of the term "potential" is more fundamental than what's called "potential" energy that should be called material one.
  2. I must qualify this statement: I connect it to my heuristic of electromagnetic fields. The issue here is that it is counterintuitive and hard to understand that, for example, H2O has less energy than the sum of energies of the individual atoms, and hence a question arises concerning the source of this "new" energy that supposedly "holds" these atoms together. Intuitively we know that something is gained by the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen when they form the molecule of water. What's really happening is that their atomic energy decreases is lower because of the stability of the molecular bond in which they've gotten themselves involved. Hence even though they lose use less energy, they actually gain stability from the bond. The strength of the bond is what keeps them together, not "energy" per se. However, it is easier to associate energy with stability than otherwise, so what these atoms gain is something they didn't have before, that is -- the molecular form.
  3. Well, the primary unquantifiable form is the form of the immediate reality in which something exists. For example, our form or reality is our environment, where you exist at the moment or can exist. It can be a room, including what you see out of the window or a car with the surroundings as far as you can see on the horizontal plane. If one ignores this form, then one necessarily doesn't follow a distinction between objects and their individual forms. A form of an object is not just its shape, outline, or surface, but it's the kind of energy that holds all of its matter together. To me forms of objects are represented by electromagnetic fields, but in philosophy this is merely a heuristic in order to understand where essences come from. In quantum physics, since we rejected the idea of a medium in which light travels (i.e. ether), we started thinking of particles such as photons as independent of context, and this thinking precipitated in the quantum/cosmic split. However, we all know that humans don't exist in a quantum reality nor in the cosmic one (idealists think otherwise, of course). Instead only quantum particles exist in the quantum reality. Matter and Energy equivalence makes physicists think that matter is its own context and thus its own form, but this is not the case. Quantum electrodynamics and interpretations of quantum theory such as the De Broglie–Bohm provide evidence and theorization of the energetic context of quantum particles, namely the vacuum energy that is not reducible to kinetic or potential energies but rather structures them (i.e. forms them). Vacuum energy is also called potential photons, as we know though the Casimir effect, which describes how photons actualize from this potential field. So this is what I mean that reality is the potential and every physical object comes from (or is actualized in our minds) this potency. This, of course, goes against the mainstream picture propagated by philosophers like Kant and physicists like Bohr that everything starts from matter and ends up in it too.
  4. What's worse is that Rand parallels Kant in the mathematization of philosophy, which necessarily removes the reality of forms that cannot be quantified. And yet reality is not merely objects that it contains. Reality is also the form, the context. I find that most people fail to grasp this, namely the fact that reality is more complex than reason itself. Reality is the potential, not necessarily the mentally actual.
  5. I am starting to sense this too while reading Kant's pre-critical works, and particularly his mathematico-linguistic side shines through. While Aristotle's project was to connect the philosophy of the ontologically real to the language of the essentially and mentally actual, Kant's project, as can be seen from his Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (1763), was to connect the language of philosophy to the mathematics of the real. Hence Kant's logic allowed coexistence of opposites that he saw as non-contraries, such as -1 and +1 with 0 as a real possibility, and hence he switched the context, supporting the idea that Aristotle's logic was analytical and, having nothing to do with reality, meaningless. Meaning for Kant was only in what's real, and what's real for him is mathematically quantifiable, matter rather than form. Aristotle, of course, shunned mathematics, as it wasn't in his primary interests. So this is the way the moderns were able to supersede Aristotle.
  6. For those new to this thread, I am discussing relevant epistemological terminology in greater detail in my other thread on the forum, Toward new epistemology.
  7. So what we need to connect is the two lines going back and forth: 1) subjectivity beneath objectivity, and 2) subjectivity that can be objective. The first is the effect of our concepts, including implicit ones, such as (meta)categories, upon our percepts in our minds. And the second is how we view our concepts in relation to what we perceive. Concerning the first, here is a passage from David Kelley: Concerning the second I don't think there is a problem in either Randism or Kantianism. Both accept the evidence of the senses as important.
  8. I guess my stance would be to connect reason to both objectivity and subjectivity. My previous project to connect Randism to Marxism failed because egoism and altruism cannot be connected. But this new project to connect Randism to Kantianism could succeed because, if you follow my own delineation of these philosophies (which I think is more fair than the chart by the Objectivist Standard because I don't mix altruism and egoism anymore, such as you can see in their third, yellow column, especially row 4 in contrast to the rest and the mixture in row 7), the only thing left to connect is reason to subjectivity from an objective standpoint. The idea that Objectivists seem to ignore is that indeed there is subjectivity hiding beneath the objectivity, but the overwhelming focus on the word "objective" leads to thinking that being subjective can also be objective, and this is actually the Kantian stance.
  9. I'd like to add to that a peculiar corresponding list of altruisms: Marxist altruism: rational and objective Hitlerist altruism: irrational and subjective Stalinist/religious altruism: rational and subjective
  10. In contrast to Kant, I believe that imagination is immediately related to memory, not perception.
  11. And that's unfortunate because, following Kant, I would have been able to say that when I see a white shape on a green surface I then perceive a unicorn on a pasture.
  12. In case anyone missed the implication from the above, Kant would have been considered an idealist, if he had kept the concept of perception in his epistemology.
  13. Hallelujah, I've found "perception" in Kant's KrV! The only unfortunate thing is that it is reduced to imagination for him, and moreover he deleted it from his second edition because he was very upset being called a Berkelean. It's in the section also explaining the 'unity of apperception', by the way, even though the method starts with this kind of 'perceptual' apprehension and ends with the apperception (which is more related to his a priori logic). The most substantial note is 150, which says: Talk about the psychologizing revolution Kant had brought forward!
  14. Perhaps. It doesn't deny the point that it wasn't Kant's fault. Besides, you really can't change history, no matter how much you'd try.
  15. Similarly, concerning Kant from the same book:
  16. I found something quite illuminating from the book that Boydstun recommended, The Sociology of Philosophies. On page 527 there is this chart of most if not all pre-Kantian philosophers in classical Europe. It answers on my question concerning the relationship of Berkeley and Hume. The connecting link is Maclauren (Edinburgh math chair). I have no idea who it was, but it's shown that he attacked Berkeley, so Hume is connected to the attacker on Berkeley, not Berkeley himself. Hence you can see how inappropriately he called himself an "idealist" "following" Berkeley.
  17. Perhaps, but I am not in a syncretic mood. Susskind doesn't deny that the Planck units (particularly of space and time) are the most fundamental in our universe, and he uses them as such natural blocks to explain black holes. However, adding something else besides them or making something else more fundamental seems like an unjustified reification. Like graviton.
  18. To make my point short, I have to say that each of us has one brain, not two or three. And each brain does one and only one thing: it thinks. It thinks in whatever form: whether of understanding, judging, or whatever. Each of these ways of thinking doesn't justify having different brains or different subparts of brains that answer to these functions. I believe that neurological evidence shows that our brain employs more complex nonlinear phenomena than if it had separate functions à la Kant.
  19. Just to confuse everything a thousandfold, I refer to Kant's early use of Verstand in his "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime":
  20. And then there is this which makes everything a lot more confusing:
  21. This all goes back to what 'mind' is for Kant. If 'reason' for him is Vernunft, then 'mind/reason' is Verstand. The two are equivalent semantically but not so philosophically unless you can think of the entire mind within a single thought.
  22. Another distracting projection by Kelley (ibid.) now concerning Kant's philosophy: I think he is confusing Kant with Fichte here. Pamfil Yurkevich in his "Mind from the teachings of Plato and experience from the teachings of Kant" shows that Kant never specified or identified consciousness, in contrast to Plato, for example.
  23. Without having read Locke properly, it's hard to answer on some of these attacks, but they continue bugging me. For example, while reading Kelley's Evidence of the Senses, I came upon this passage: Locke has a form of metaphysical empiricism (I am taking this term from Oizerman's Metaphilosophy). I don't see anything inherently unstable in his philosophy. Now, if Kelley agrees with the criticisms of Locke like Roecklein does of Parmenides, it doesn't mean that those criticisms actually applied to these philosophers. They could very much be straw men or, even better, red herrings. A good criticism always reveals the essence of a philosophy, but I don't see these projections by Kelley and Roecklein as anything other than what they are. Explain how form and substance are different from the bulk of size, shape, solidity, and other primary qualities? Aren't form and substance basically a simplified quintessence of these qualities? Of course as a mere distinction they differ but not as what referents they signify. I've remembered that Unity is the first a priori category belonging to Quality, along with Plurality and Totality. So how can you necessarily have such a 'unity' at all times? Seems like it's doing a double work that is unjustified (not that anything is justified in Kant).
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