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Originally Posted by Kriminal99
I am not sure what you are referring to when you talk about science defining objects. I am referring to, for example, an apple. Animals have concepts of things like apples, without having a concept of science. An animal or even unscientific human may wonder if he hits an apple from a tree, where will it land.
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I didn't mean to imply that we are defining objects only when we do science, rather we are defining objects in all our attempts to understand anything about reality.
When you perceive that apple, the definition has already been made since you can understand some pattern as an "apple". Note that we don't necessarily do this "defining" consciously.
Think about the avalanche of sensory data that is flowing into your brain. You recognize things like apples, reflections, glares, waves on an ocean, rivers, tornados and all sorts of stable patterns that you have tacked with identity. Your comprehension of reality rests on these "sensible things", and it is the interplay of these things that you draw your predictions from.
But you were not born with the knowledge that these things exist, instead you defined them. I.e. certain spatial/temporal features of your sensory data become tacked with identity so you understand them as the "same thing"; a thing which preserves its identity through "time" and "space".
Whatever behaviour you find from reality will affect how you break it into components. When you see certain familiar behaviour (pattern), you perceive that as an "object X" that
you defined.
(btw, this is relevant also to your example about babies learning language. You cannot suppose the baby just knows what constitutes a "word" or that there even are such things as "words". That is part of your worldview)
So I hope this clears up what I mean by us deciding what constitutes an object. For more philosophical aspects of this, take a look at "Ontological perspective" and "Epistemological perspective" at post #34. (really take a look, I spent a lot of time on that one
Let's take a quick look at physics still. Look at the different ontological interpretations of quantum mechanics.
They are each a different set of "ontological elements", and they define "space" and "time" differently; they define them exactly the way they need to so to produce correct predictions/expectations for reality. These views are
self-coherent but do not mix with one another; one paradigm cannot be investigated from within another paradigm.
Note that we always have multiple
valid options as to how to break it into "objects". It may not be trivial, but it can be done. Also note that it certainly seems, that to break reality into components at all is inherent to how our understanding of reality works, not inherent to how reality itself works. I.e. what Kant said. In brief:
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Originally Posted by AnssiH
Each worldview or model functions by us having first defined its components, without having any idea about what is the "real way" to define reality into components (or rather, without having any reason to believe reality actually is, ontologically speaking, a set of components)
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So, assuming you understand how I mean the above, you can understand that world seems very much different when seen through different worldviews (that have tacked identities onto different features of the data, including defining space and time differently). Yet they both can have the exact same explanation power; just they work with different terms.
The question is now, is there something that is common to each and every possible (valid) worldview. By valid I mean they do not contain self-conflict. So, how do we express the constraints that arise from the simple fact that each worldview, whatever it may be,
needs to be internally coherent. If it contains self-conflict, it cannot be a good description of reality can it?
Now we are moving closer to where Qwfwq is already standing (I think). Onto the next post ->
-Anssi
