first thought

john grace

Please forgive any ettiquette or procedures i am breaking here. i am brand new and may well have posted this in the wrong place etc.

This is a little bit stream of conciousness, and will not be of much interest to most people. to summarise its essentially some thoughts im having trying to understand existance and reality. I would appreciate hearing the words of those wiser and just generally some feedback on things i havnt considered to help broaden my mind and develop my understanding.




First off im a very ordinary person who has had nagging questions in my quieter moments. I have very little knowledge on this subject and fully accept i have so so much to learn and understand, so forgive any ignorance and Naeivity.


this morning while thinking, i was performing a sort of thought experiment.
I had been thinking of the question 'if a tree falls in the forest does it make a noise'....while i realise that lingustic definitions etc are all wrapped up in this question, what interests me is the idea that without an observer, its not really important whether something exists or not.

That is to say it may exist or it may not, but until something is observed, there remains the possibility for anything. My thought movement then went following the necesity for observation for existance. when i talk about observation i mean i guess conciousness..i mean more then the 5 senses, i mean more then what can be measured, i mean more then 4 dimensions..i mean anything that is concieved of my the mind of man.

my thinking is that, anthing that is outside conciousness, may exist or it may not..but by definition we cant ever be concious of it not existing, therefore all the things that there are; are within concoicness.

my next leap (as anybody still reading this will no doubt recognise massively undeveloped thoughts!), was to think about the beginning of everything. Following my train of thought, the begining of everything began with the first conciousness...as before then while things existed there was no conciousness for them to exist in. Its somewhere about here that i am with my thoughts but what seemed to come into my mind was the line..in the beginning was the word. Im not religious i the traditional sense, but am confused and trying to think my way out of it, but would be interested in anyones comments regarding their beliefs or understandings.

at the moment im thinking through the implications of how conciousness can backfill history...ie that as the light of conciousness shines, things become created including their time and place in reality...this would help me to model in my mind the ability for existance without time.

markyedison

Nice stream of consciousness there, JG. I can never remember my train of thought long enough to get it down.

If you're not already aware of him, check out this Irish Enlightenment philosopher, George Berkeley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley

He has a book about a new theory of vision or something along those lines that seems similar to the ideas you are talking about here.

Cheers,
Marky

edanto

Why do you assume a beginning?

FionnMatthew

Mark has given some good advice there, and you ought to look into Berkeley.

In fact, the popularly quoted thought experiment that prompted your idea is derived from Berkeley's thinking on this matter, so what has happened is that you have reverse engineered a non sequitur, and often misunderstood quote, and arrived at something approximately like what Berkeley talked about.

One other popular quote from Berkeley is esse est percipi - to be is to be perceived.

It's worth noting that Berkeley is often retrospectively recognized as a proto-phenomenologist.

I think you'd also benefit from reading a bit about phenomenology. You might want to read about Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, in terms of their phenomological philosophy. You'll find there a rather large collection of insights in line with the thoughts you've been having.

It's worth noting that the insight you've had, that everything appears to us in consciousness, has been widely thought to be a trivially true, and yet otherwise useless insight these days in the contemporary anglo-american philosophical tradition. It's only in the last 20 years that phenomenological insights have begun more and more to be incorporated back into the materialist philosophy of the English-speaking West.

It's actually a very important thing to keep in mind, and necessary, I would say, to a properly balanced philosophy.

DionysusReborn

The idea you are proposing could be said in a rather vulgarly simple way as "whether the world outside us exists or not does not really matter that truth is inaccessible to us as all we have are the sum total of the phenomenons of this world which we have percieved through our consciousness. if its existence as presented to us is false it does not matter as we can only see this presentation. it is this presentation which we percieve and use whether is false or not is beside the point let us just use what we have". would i be right there? What they have said about Berkeley is absolutely true, you have expressed a similar if not identical idea. The tree thought experience is actually the one that was used when my lecturers where talking about Berkeley and is a product of his thought. The main point is that "to exist is to be percieved"(Berkeley). Your "first consciousness" bears the calling-card of the extremely fallacious arguments based on causality which call 'God' the first cause et al variations. if you look at it properly you'll find that you have pointed out the holes of the causation arguments within your little stream of consciousness. Otherwise i'd suggest that you also look into the writings of Hume.

Gurgle

john grace wrote: »

if a tree falls in the forest does it make a noise'

Of course it does.
The rest of what you ask is therefore irrelevant.

Any other questions / issues I can help with?

DionysusReborn

If you're going to be both rude and stupid you might as well get off this thread gurgle. it does not make a sound( the original and correctly quoted version uses sound) but rather a noise. If you are going to be rude enough to pick at a misquote from something that he has admitted was done from memory you should take the above advice.

Gurgle

DionysusReborn wrote: »

If you're going to be both rude and stupid you might as well get off this thread gurgle. it does not make a sound( the original and correctly quoted version uses sound) but rather a noise. If you are going to be rude enough to pick at a misquote from something that he has admitted was done from memory you should take the above advice.

I had no intention of picking at a misquote or distinguishing between a sound and a noise.

It does make a sound, in that frequency-modulated waves are generated in the air at the source and propagate outwards spherically, losing amplitude as the sphere increases in radius. This being the definition of sound, the falling tree makes a sound regardless of the presence or absence of observers.

This so called 'thought experiment' is out-dated and meaningless. Acting as though its a great unanswerable philosophical question is just pretentious.

FionnMatthew

Actually, sorry to condradict you, Gurgle, but this issue, in its present-day form, is one of the most vehement philosophical problems of the time.

The distinction between the physical phenomenon with a propensity for being heard, and the phenomenal hearing of that noise is still one that is contentious in philosophy of mind and language even today.

You have, for instance, the Churchlands arguing that people's naive view that the movement of molecules causes heat is self-evidently wrong, because strictly and scientifically speaking the movement of molecules is identical with heat.

You've done this here, by prematurely deciding on a final definition of "sound", :

It does make a sound, in that frequency-modulated waves are generated in the air at the source and propagate outwards spherically, losing amplitude as the sphere increases in radius. This being the definition of sound, the falling tree makes a sound regardless of the presence or absence of observers.

But this misses the point that someone who takes a more phenomenological view might defend, that our words refer not beyond our possible experience, and that the concept of the movement of molecules must always be correlated (and not simply identified with) our phenomenal experience of hotness.

The argument would go that although in physical theory your definiton of "sound" is a fine one, it isn't particularly sensitive to the particularities of the philosophy of mind, or to the phenomenological problems. It is, hence, not a very good definition, and you can't just argue your point by recourse to a bad definition.

You might argue that the concept of heat has phenomenal content, whereas the concept of "movement of molecules" has no such.

Equally, the distinction between noise and sound being made here is that sound would be said to have phenomenal content - vibrations are only sound when they act on auditory organs so as to cause phenomenal sound - whereas noise denotes (here) only the physical theory of sound - unheard sound is just noise.

Personally, I don't like this choice of terms, because noise, in commonsense usage, already has phenomenal content. I would think one should use a phenomenally blank term, like physical vibrations, etc.

Ultimately, the problem becomes the qualia problem, which is as impossible to resolve these days as it ever could have been. (typically, what are called resolutions by one side are called circumscriptions by the other.)

bogwalrus

hi there,

i am having trouble understanding this philosophy on sound and the tree. can someone explain the significance in a simpler form for me.

Gurgle

bogwalrus wrote: »

hi there,

i am having trouble understanding this philosophy on sound and the tree. can someone explain the significance in a simpler form for me.

The idea is that the only things that exist (in your personal universe) are what you can see, hear, smell, taste and touch.

Everything else is irrelevant and therefore even if it does exist it might as well not.

bogwalrus

yeah i got it now:D


I have to keep reading things over and over cause of my poor attention span.


I have always wondered what defines consciousness. a system that is capable of holding a "bit" of memory?is the human brain the thing that creates it with its neuro biological make up? how about the most simplest bacterias, are they conscious?

Finally, could man create a conscious being? if so then wouldnt that mean consciousness from what we know of it can and will only ever pick up what is in our dimension where the humans senses receive the full extent of this dimensions physical world (or maybe just receive what we need to know to live). Or maybe man could by trial and error create a frankenstein that could see more in this world than us humans.....maybe there are animals and species on this earth that can experience life on different levels to us.

Maybe sometime in the future humans will evolve other senses that can pick up hidden parts of our dimension which can then be used as a tool to aid humanity on to the next level of existence.