David,
This thread's been inactive for a while but I'm finally responding as I wrote some time ago that I would.
I've done some reordering of quotes from your last post in our exchange, and I'll start by answering a question that you put to me, before responding to some other parts of that post:
David Quinn wrote:If an object's properties and attributes can change when the observer's perspective changes, then in what way can they be said to possess them?
One answer is that the conflicting subjectively-perceived properties and attributes can be abstracted and generalised into properties and attributes that are not conflicting. For example, the two conflicting subjectively-perceived properties of the mountain that you wrote about - that to us it appears to be solid and unchanging whereas to a slower-moving mind it would appear to be a fluid process - can be abstracted as the single property of being subject to time. The two conflicting subjectively-perceived properties ascribed to the bucket of water - as either cold or hot depending on who dips their hand into it - could be abstracted as the property of having a temperature.
Another answer to the two examples that you provided is more general, and probably better: that being able to make observations about any thing at all, regardless of perspective, depends upon that thing having at least one property - the property of being observable (from at least one perspective), or in other words the property of being a source of (sensory) perceptions.
Please let me know if you have any other problems with the proposal that the test for existence can be defined as the possession of one or more properties (that's not worded as precisely as I'd like, but I can't find the right wording, so please cut me some slack).
guest_of_logic: [D]oes the hidden void plus consciousness(es) - including the entirety of all appearances within consciousness(es) - constitute all of the Totality, and if not, then what else is there?
David: I've already answered that. It depends on how these things are conceived.
Were you conceiving of them in that way in the final chapter of WOTI?
-----
Elsewhere in your post this quote can be found:
David Quinn wrote:The causes of any particular thing are infinite in number. If we trace them back far enough we will eventually reach the hidden void, beyond which we cannot go.
As well as this exchange:
guest_of_logic: Just as the hidden void has an effect on consciousness (at least by creating it, and, depending on your answer to the first question, by directly causing the appearances within it), does consciousness, and in particular do the appearances within consciousness, have an effect on the hidden void (I'm using "effect" in the sense of temporal causality - i.e. that an event within consciousness causes a subsequent effect on the hidden void)?
David: Undoubtedly.
Taken together, the above two quotes of yours indicate that the hidden void is both a source of causes and a target of effects: we might say that it is "causally active". So, looking at the following exchange...
guest_of_logic: Is the hidden void differentiated?
David: There is no answer to that because the hidden void is beyond our imagination. To employ terms like "differentiated" and "undifferentiated" is an attempt to couch it in terms that the imagination can understand and thus is self-defeating from the outset. In academia, they would call it a category error.
...I want to ask: how can that which is causally active be other than differentiated? Isn't it necessary that something which is subject to effects, and which propagates causes, be differentiated?
I'll respond simultaneously to the following three quoted exchanges:
David: Science never deals with what is beyond conscousness. Like us, it too can only deal with objects within consciousness. Electro-magnetic waves, for example, can only occur within consciousness and nowhere else.
guest_of_logic: If the reality beyond the mind has effects on the mind, then it can be scientifically studied.
David: Unfortunately, it can't in this instance. Science cannot apply theories to a realm in which specific forms are impossible to discern. The hidden void can only ever be known as a logical reality. It is a philosophical entity, not a scientific one.
David: Of course, for practical purposes, we can reduce our concept of consciousness to a subset of our entire field of consciousness and then pretend that the electro-magnetic waves that we observe are occurring beyond consciousness. But that is simply an artifice.
guest_of_logic: How can you be so sure?
David: Everything is an artifice, at bottom.
guest_of_logic: Do you accept the possibility that the "cause of consciousness" could be as is conventionally believed: i.e. that there is an external reality in which consciousness evolved?
David: Not in the sense you mean. For things to be replicated in two different realms, the causal circumstances supporting them need to be replicated. The absence of consciousness in external reality makes such replication impossible.
guest_of_logic: Ah, but they wouldn't be replicated. The "thing" in external reality would have a different nature (physical) to the corresponding "appearance" within consciousness (mental/qualia) - they would, however, be intimately related of course.
David: In this instance, the qualitative difference between consciousness and the absence of consciousness is too great to make such attempts at correspondence meaningful.
I think - and I wonder whether you'll agree - that the disagreement between us in these three exchanges might be resolved if we can resolve the issue of whether the hidden void is necessarily differentiated.
David: I brought it [the possibility of "external reality" being a computer within which we exist and within which our external reality is simulated] up to illustrate that what you call the conventional view of external reality - i.e. the child's natural view of things - is but one of countless possible explanations of what we consciously experience.
guest_of_logic: But you deny the conventional view of external reality, and for the same reason (that there are no objects beyond the mind, and no world "out there") you should deny the [computer] scenario that you instead posited.
David: I think of it as irrelevant to the fundamentals of the issue, yes.
guest_of_logic: It's not just irrelevant, it's contradictory, but given that it's both irrelevant and contradictory, then why did you posit it as a legitimate alternative to the scenario that I canvassed, which didn't suffer from the problem of contradicting your premise that there are no objects beyond the mind?
David: To show you how flimsy and groundless the conventional view of external reality is.
David[cont]:If the conventional view were to state that "something or other is beyond the mind and creates what we experience, but we don't know what that something is", then that would begin to tally with what I think. But conventional people are rarely satisfied with that. They want an external reality that they are familiar with and can mentally grasp.
I think that most "conventional" people would accept the possibility of the computer scenario if it were put to them, though - don't you? A lot of people have seen the Matrix, or have otherwise been exposed to the developing field of virtual reality. I think that most "conventional" people simply don't consider it during their daily lives just because it's of little relevance to the tasks of those daily lives.
In respect of your attempting to show me how "flimsy and groundless the conventional view of external reality is", I appreciate the effort, but in my original post I intended "external reality" to mean "reality beyond the mind" i.e. what you have now clarified is the "hidden void", and so - according to you - we can't even begin to imagine what it is, which is why I was so surprised to see you doing exactly that by imagining it as the computer scenario.
David: Presumably trees are finite in number as well, but that says nothing one way or the other about the finitude or infinitude of reality.
guest_of_logic: That's still not responsive to my argument, because trees don't comprise all that is, whereas to you, the bubbles of consciousness are all that is (plus the hidden void of course).
David: The "plus the hidden void" bit rather undermines the head of steam you were building up there.
guest_of_logic: I see. I have no choice but to conclude that you maintain that the hidden void is infinite. Is that conclusion correct?
David: The totality of all things is infinite - whether it be the hidden void plus whatever is left over, or a combination of other things.
According to you, the hidden void cannot be imagined in any way, yet here you are seeming to imagine it as infinite.
I also have some comments on your last response to Jason. It seems to me that you didn't think it through very carefully before posting:
David Quinn wrote:You make a good point [that "there is no logical necessity for your hidden void, it is no more than an unnecessary kludge for a non-existent problem"], which I essentially agree with. It doesn't really oppose what I've been talking about, just goes a little deeper.
Joining you on that deeper level, the hidden void is itself an appearance which contrasts with the appearance of consciousness and creates their mutual existence. They are both parts of the room.
I'm not sure how you essentially agree with Jason's demonstration that your invention of a hidden void is a logically unnecessary kludge, whilst at the same time asserting that this "doesn't really oppose what [you, David, have] been talking about" and that "the hidden void is itself an appearance". Given that until now you've maintained that the hidden void can only be perceived through logic, and that it "lies beyond consciousness" (WOTI) and is therefore "
not comprehensible to us", then the hidden void can definitely
not be an "appearance" (because an appearance by your definition does not "lie beyond consciousness" and instead exists within consciousness).
You've made clear many times the impossibility of the hidden void being an appearance; here's
one of many instances from earlier in this thread: "The hidden void is the world out there beyond the mind [and it] lies beyond consciousness [and it is a] potentiality beyond consciousness".
Also, given your agreement with Jason that the hidden void is a logically unnecessary kludge, then in the absence of some other evidence for it, it should be discarded according to Occam's razor, yet you continue to try to justify it on false grounds (as an appearance).
As you might have guessed, though, I actually disagree that the hidden void is logically unnecessary in your philosophy of existence and consciousness: I can't see how to make sense of your philosophy without positing something beyond the mind through and by which both consciousness itself (the "bubbles" of consciousness) exists and through and by which conscious experiences are synchronised inter-personally, so I don't think that you should give up on the hidden void.
I'll drop you a PM to let you know that I've reactivated this thread given how long it's been and since you haven't posted to GF in a while.