From: Simon Magson (twix_570@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Nov 27 2004 - 21:15:53 GMT
Scott Roberts wrote:
>[Scott:] A few posts back you said this: "Mathematical truths are thus
>patterns of values. Value is phenomenal, it is sense experience. Therefore,
>mathematical truths are verified by sense experience."
>
>This is what I am arguing against. I brought up the proof of the
>mathematical truth that the square root of 2 is irrational, as a
>counter-example to the claim that "mathematical truths are verified by
>sense experience." If you maintain that the proof is sense experience, then
>all rationality must be called sense experience, and so Spinoza's arguments
>are sense experience, and therefore empirical. This, of course, is absurd,
>so where do you make a distinction between empirical and non-empirical? I
>say that mathematics is rational and not empirical. There is an experience
>of quality in doing mathematics, but that does not make it empirical, if
>'empirical' is to have any distinctive use.
The truth of a mathematical proposition is ultimately known by its
intellectual quality i.e, it contributes to an intellectual harmony, it is
this harmony that has formed, is taught, and is immediately found in, 2+2=4
and it is this harmony that is absent from 2+2=3. This quality is empirical,
it is sensed and experienced. This is distinct from the rationalist
proposition that there are fundamental realities which can only be grasped
by reason and are not experienced in any way.
>
>(And rationalists do not say that all that is conceivable is real. A
>unicorn is conceivable, but not real.)
What is stopping a unicorn being real to a rationalist? What is the
difference between a unicorn and God? What are the constraints on existence
when experience is disregarded? Logical necessity?
The
>question is: not whether one can speak of quality outside of the S/O form,
>but whether one can one speak of Quality without any form at all?
One can experience Quality without any static form at all but as soon as one
speaks there is static form.
>[Scott:] Isn't "the experience of observation" without an observer
>and an observed a metaphysical assumption? Mystics, it is true, claim this
>experience, and I accept that claim. But accepting that claim is to accept
>the mystic as an authority. It is not empirical.
I'm not even talking about mystical experience. In the actual empirical
experience of everyday life there is no separation, there is just sensation
going on. It doesn't take much effort to see that.
>I am not disagreeing with the MOQ in that it says that Quality produces the
>experience and the experiencer. What I am disputing is that the MOQ is
>justified in calling itself empirical, and the claim you make that
>experience is "just value". If I touch a hot stove, I experience pain, not
>"value", and I experience pain because I am a biological being.
Pain is a description given to low quality. There is something on this
subject in LILA'S CHILD:
"When you examine pain closely you see that it is not in the mind. Pain that
is subjective, i.e. has no medical origin, is not considered to be real
pain, but a hallucination, a symptom of mental illness. “Subjective
valuation” of pain is a form of insanity. But you see that pain is not out
of the
mind either. When a medical patient is unconscious, i.e., whose mind is
absent, there are no objective traces of the pain to be found. Once can
possibly find the causes of the pain with scientific instruments but one
cannot find the pain itself. So if pain isn’t in the mind and it isn’t in
the
external world where is it? The answer provided by the MOQ is that pain,
like hearing and vision and smell and touch, is part of the empirical
threshold that reveals to us what the rest of the world is like. At the
moment pain is first experienced it is not even “pain,” it is just negative
quality, a third category, outside of subjects and objects, whose
definitions have not yet come in."
Pain only
>occurs in a setting of biological SQ. If there is no SQ whatsoever, there
>is no experience whatsoever, S/O or non-S/O.
>
>The MOQ claim that there is "pure experience" prior to any division is
>either a metaphysical a priori assumption, or it is an argument from the
>authority of mystics. It is not empirical.
Why do you have to rely on the authority of mystics? It is there all the
time. If you don't know what I mean there is really nothing else I can say.
>I wasn't saying that one needs the concepts of space and time to experience
>things spatio-temporally. She also has no category "value". She cries when
>she experiences hunger or a wet diaper, not when she experiences something
>called "low quality".
So "hunger" and "wet diaper" are conceptual categories more fundamental to
the differentiation of one's experience than that of good and bad? Do they
precede quality in one's experience?
SM
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