21. Notes - grounded in reality / Soul Existence / Ontology

21.  14 and 15 September 2019 ofd16th

       I see you opened the Facebook page of today's blog to 'public' from 'friends' after seven hours. Why? - Amorella

       2036 hours. Originally, when I put today's (14th) online it was on 'public' but I felt I should open it to friends first, so I did. I didn't receive much notice but deep down I thought there should be. I'm not sure why but is an honest plea from the heart for somebody to at least listen to what an old man has to say. So, I opened to 'public' to say my public piece even though I did not write it to open from the public blog at all. After 'we' wrote it, the blog had a deeper personal meaning than I intended. The whole piece said more than I thought, until I sat down a read it though. (2048) 

       In any case, you feel better for having opened the piece for a public read. - mh

       2056 hours. Yes, Ms Havisham. You just stated what I should have stated in few words and even more to the point. I wish I could write like you just did for real but I cannot. You are a much better writer than myself but I cannot stop my physical fingers from tapping far too many keys. 

15 September 2019

       Sunday morning. You had a late breakfast while reading the Dispatch. You had five hits from posting yesterday's blog on Facebook which was enough to satisfy you so you deleted the post. - Amorella

       1051 hours. Five hits are enough to keep me grounded in reality for which I am thankful. 

       Post. - Amorella

      After noon. You are at Kim and Paul's, Carol is feeding Ellie her special food for lunch. - Amorella

       1219 hours. No great expectations for the day although it's supposed to be another pleasant late summer day. Yesterday, I downloaded a scholarly paper from Academia [dot com] titled, "The Search for Extraterrestrial Life: Epistemology, Ethics, and Worldviews" by Mark Lupisella which I quickly skimmed for questions I could apply to my present circumstance. Then, I quickly noted that a companion spirit and a soul are not life let alone extraterrestrial life. This still brings up a question about what spirit life is. Thus, I ask Ms Havisham to describe, please, what is 'soul life'?

       Let's call 'soul life', 'Soul Existence' for your better self-understanding. Here is a good general definition in context. - mh

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Soul

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The soul, in many religious, philosophical, and mythological traditions, is the incorporeal essence of a living being. 

Soul [or psyche]comprises the mental abilities of a living being: reason, character, feeling, consciousness, memory, perception, thinking . . ..

Selected and edited from Wikipedia

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       An added refined definition, in this context, is:

1, the Spiritual Heart is comprised of character, feeling and perception; and, 

2, the Spiritual Mind is comprised of reason, memory and thinking. - mh

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       Post. - Amorella

       1811 hours. With the above definition in mind, what is Soul Existence?

       We should further define Existence for your better self-understanding within the context of this "Old Man on a Study" blog. Let's follow the same procedure.  - mh

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Edited for my purposes of study - Old Man

Ontology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about ontology in philosophy and is heavily revised for a specific purpose. 

Ontology is the philosophical study of being. More broadly, it studies concepts that directly relate to being, in particular becoming, existence, reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. 

Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology often deals with questions concerning what entities exist or may be said to exist and how such entities may be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.

Overview

Some philosophers, notably in the traditions of the Platonic school, contend that all nouns (including abstract nouns) refer to existent entities. 

Other philosophers contend that nouns do not always name entities, but that some provide a kind of shorthand for reference to a collection either of objects or of events.

In this latter view, mind, refers to an entity or refers to a collection of mental events experienced within a person.

 

Principal questions of ontology include:

·      "What can be said to exist?"

·      "What is a thing?" 

·      "Into what categories, if any, can we sort existing things?"

·      "What are the meanings of being?"

·      "What are the various attitudes of being of entities?"

Various philosophers have provided different answers to these questions. One common approach involves dividing the extant subjects and predicates into groups called categories. . .. Aristotle's categories are the ways in which a being may be addressed simply as a being, such as:

·      what it is (its 'whatness', particular qualities or essence)

·      how it is (its 'howness' or qualitativeness)

·      how much it is (quantitativeness)

·      where it is (its relatedness to other beings)

Further examples of ontological questions include:

·      What is existence, i.e. what does it mean for a being to be?

·       

·      Which entities, if any, are fundamental?

·       

·      How do the properties of an object relate to the object itself?

·       

·      Do physical properties actually exist?

·       

·      What features are the essential, as opposed to merely accidental attributes of a given object?

·       

·      Can one give an account of what it means to say that a non-physical entity exists?

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·      What constitutes the identity of an object?

·       

·      When does an object go out of existence, as opposed to merely changing?

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·      Do beings exist other than in the modes of objectivity and subjectivity? 

·       

Concepts

Essential ontological dichotomies include:

·      universals and particulars

·      substance and accident

·      abstract and concrete objects

·      essence and existence

·      determinism and indeterminism

·      monism and dualism

·      idealism and materialism

·       

Types

Philosophers can classify ontologies in various ways, using criteria such as the degree of abstraction and field of application

1. -

2. Domain ontology: concepts relevant to a particular topic, domain of discourse, or area of interest.

3. -

History

Hindu philosophy

Ontology features in the Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy from the first millennium BCE. The concept of guṇa which describes the three properties (sattva, rajas and tamas) present in differing proportions in all existing things, is a notable concept of this school. 

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Insert from another Wikipedia article

Sattva

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hinduism

In Samkhya philosophy, a guṇa is one of three "tendencies, qualities": sattva, rajas and tamas. This category of qualities has been widely adopted by various schools of Hinduism for categorizing behavior and natural phenomena. The three qualities are:

·      Sattva is the quality of balance, harmony, goodness, purity, universalizing, holistic, constructive, creative, building, positive attitude, luminous, serenity, being-ness, peaceful, virtuous.

·       

·      Rajas is the quality of passion, activity, neither good nor bad and sometimes either, self-centeredness, egoistic, individualizing, driven, moving, dynamic.

·        

·      Tamas is the quality of imbalance, disorder, chaos, anxiety, impure, destructive, delusion, negative, dull or inactive, apathy, inertia or lethargy, violent, vicious, ignorant.

In Indian philosophy, these qualities are not considered as present in either-or fashion. Rather, everyone and everything has all three, only in different proportions and in different contexts. The living being or substance is viewed as the net result of the joint effect of these three qualities. 

According to the Samkhya school, no one and nothing is either purely sattvik or purely rajasik or purely tamasik. One's nature and behavior is a complex interplay of all of these, with each guna in varying degrees. In some, the conduct is rajasik with significant influence of sattvik guna, in some it is rajasik with significant influence of tamasik guna, and so on.

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Return to Ontology page

Parmenides and monism

In the Greek philosophical tradition, Parmenides (fl. late sixth or early fifth century BCE) was among the first to propose an ontological characterization of the fundamental nature of existence. In the prologue or proem to his poem On Nature he describes two views of existence; 

1. initially that nothing comes from nothing, and 

2. therefore existence is eternal. 

This posits that existence is what may be conceived of by thought, created, or possessed. 

Hence, there may be neither void nor vacuum; and true reality neither may come into being nor vanish from existence. 

Rather, the entirety of creation is eternal, uniform, and immutable, though not infinite (Parmenides characterized its shape as that of a perfect sphere).

Parmenides thus posits that change, as perceived in everyday experience, is illusory. Everything that may be apprehended is but one part of a single entity. 

This idea somewhat anticipates the modern concept of an ultimate grand unification theory that finally describes all of existence in terms of one inter-related sub-atomic reality which applies to everything.

Most of western philosophy (especially the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza) — including the fundamental concepts of falsifiability — has emerged from this view.

Ontological pluralism

The opposite of Parmenides' Eleatic monism is the pluralistic conception of being. 

In the 5th century BC, Anaxagoras and Leucippus replaced the reality of Being (unique and unchanging) with that of Becoming and therefore by a more fundamental and elementary ontic plurality. . . .

These ideas foreshadowed the understanding of traditional physics until the advent of 20th-century theories on the nature of atoms.

Plato

Plato (lived 420s BCE to 348/347 BCE) developed the distinction between true reality and illusion, in arguing that what is real are eternal and unchanging Forms or Ideas (a precursor to universals), 

of which things experienced in sensation are at best merely copies, and real only in so far as they copy ("partake of") such Forms. 

In general, Plato presumes that all nouns (e.g., "Beauty") refer to real entities, whether sensible bodies or insensible Forms.

Hence, in The Sophist Plato argues that Being is a Form in which all existent things participate and which they have in common . . . ; and argues, against Parmenides, that Forms must exist not only of Being, but also of Negation and of non-Being (or Difference).

Aristotle

In his Categories, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) identifies ten possible kinds of things that may be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. For Aristotle there are four different ontological dimensions: 

1. according to the various categories or ways of addressing a being as such

2. according to its truth or falsity (e.g. fake gold, counterfeit money)

3. whether it exists in and of itself or simply 'comes along' by accident

4. according to its potency, movement (energy) or finished presence (Metaphysics Book Theta).

 

Avicenna

According to Avicenna (c. 980 – 1037), and in an interpretation of Greek Aristotelian and Platonist ontological doctrines in medieval metaphysics, being is either necessary, contingent qua possible, or impossible. . . .

. . .

Contingent qua possible being is neither necessary nor impossible for it to be or not to be. It is ontologically neutral, and is brought from potential existing into actual existence by way of a cause that is external to its essence. . .. 

Ontological and epistemological certainty

René Descartes, with je pense donc je suis or cogito ergo sum or "I think, therefore I am", argued that "the self" is something that we can know exists with epistemological certainty.

Descartes argued further that this knowledge could lead to a proof of the certainty of the existence of God, using the ontological argument that had been formulated first by Anselm of Canterbury. 

Certainty about the existence of "the self" and "the other", however, came under increasing criticism in the 20th century. 

Sociological theorists, most notably George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman, saw the Cartesian Other as a "Generalized Other", the imaginary audience that individuals use when thinking about the self. . . .

Rather, the self arises in the world" The Cartesian Other was also used by Sigmund Freud, who saw the superego as an abstract regulatory force, and Émile Durkheim who viewed this as a psychologically manifested entity which represented God in society at large.

Body and environment, questioning the meaning of being

. . . The processes by which bodies related to environments became of great concern, and the idea of being itself became difficult to really define.

 Martin Heidegger distinguished human being as existence from the being of things in the world. Heidegger proposes that our way of being human and the way the world is for us are cast historically through a fundamental ontological questioning. 

These fundamental ontological categories provide the basis for communication in an age: a horizon of unspoken and seemingly unquestionable background meanings, such as human beings understood unquestioningly as subjects and other entities understood unquestioningly as objects. 

Because these basic ontological meanings both generate and are regenerated in everyday interactions, the locus of our way of being in a historical epoch is the communicative event of language in use.

For Heidegger, however, communication in the first place is not among human beings, but language itself shapes up in response to questioning (the inexhaustible meaning of) being. 

Even the focus of traditional ontology on the 'whatness' or quidditas of beings in their substantial, standing presence can be shifted to pose the question of the 'whoness' of human being itself.

Ontology and language

Some philosophers suggest that the question of "What is?" is (at least in part) an issue of usage rather than a question about facts. 

This perspective is conveyed by an analogy made by Donald Davidson: Suppose a person refers to a 'cup' as a 'chair' and makes some comments pertinent to a cup, but uses the word 'chair' consistently throughout instead of 'cup'. One might readily catch on that this person simply calls a 'cup' a 'chair' and the oddity is explained. 

Analogously, if we find people asserting 'there are' such-and-such, and we do not ourselves think that 'such-and-such' exist, we might conclude that these people are not nuts (Davidson calls this assumption 'charity'), they simply use 'there are' differently than we do.

The question of What is? is at least partially a topic in the philosophy of language, and is not entirely about ontology itself. This viewpoint has been expressed by Eli Hirsch. 

Hirsch interprets Hilary Putnam as asserting that different concepts of "the existence of something" can be correct. This position does not contradict the view that some things do exist, but points out that different 'languages' will have different rules about assigning this property. How to determine the 'fitness' of a 'language' to the world then becomes a subject for investigation.

Reality and actuality

According to A.N. Whitehead, for ontology, it is useful to distinguish the terms 'reality' and 'actuality'. 

In this view, an 'actual entity' has a philosophical status of fundamental ontological priority, while a 'real entity' is one which may be actual, or may derive its reality from its logical relation to some actual entity or entities.

For example, an occasion in the life of Socrates is an actual entity. But Socrates' being a man does not make 'man' an actual entity, because it refers indeterminately to many actual entities, such as several occasions in the life of Socrates, and also to several occasions in the lives of Alcibiades, and of others. 

But the notion of man is real; it derives its reality from its reference to those many actual occasions, each of which is an actual entity. An actual occasion is a concrete entity, while terms such as 'man' are abstractions from many concrete relevant entities.

According to Whitehead, an actual entity must earn its philosophical status of fundamental ontological priority by satisfying several philosophical criteria, as follows.

·      There is no going behind an actual entity, to find something more fundamental in fact or in efficacy. This criterion is to be regarded as expressing an axiom, or postulated distinguished doctrine.

·       

·      An actual entity must be completely determinate in the sense that there may be no confusion about its identity that would allow it to be confounded with another actual entity. In this sense an actual entity is completely concrete, with no potential to be something other than itself. 

·       

·      It is what it is. It is a source of potentiality for the creation of other actual entities, of which it may be said to be a part cause. Likewise it is the concretion or realization of potentialities of other actual entities which are its partial causes.

·       

·      Causation between actual entities is essential to their actuality. Consequently, for Whitehead, each actual entity has its distinct and definite extension in physical Minkowski space, and so is uniquely identifiable. 

·       

·      A description in Minkowski space supports descriptions in time and space for particular observers.

·       

·      It is part of the aim of the philosophy of such an ontology as Whitehead's that the actual entities should be all alike, quaactual entities; they should all satisfy a single definite set of well stated ontological criteria of actuality.

·       

Whitehead proposed that his notion of an occasion of experience satisfies the criteria for its status as the philosophically preferred definition of an actual entity.

From a purely logical point of view, each occasion of experience has in full measure the characters of both objective and subjective reality. Subjectivity and objectivity refer to different aspects of an occasion of experience, and in no way do they exclude each other. ...

One summary of the Whiteheadian actual entity is that it is a process of becoming. Another summary, referring to its causal linkage to other actual entities, is that it is "all window", in contrast with Leibniz' windowless monads. . . .

Whiteheadian abstractions are not so tightly defined in time and place, and in the extreme, some are timeless and placeless, or 'eternal' entities. All abstractions have logical or conceptual rather than efficacious existence; their lack of definite time does not make them unreal if they refer to actual entities. Whitehead calls this 'the ontological principle'.

Microcosmic ontology

Subatomic particles are usually considered to be much smaller than atoms. Their real or actual existence may be very difficult to demonstrate empirically. A distinction is sometimes drawn between actual and virtual subatomic particles. 

A question that continues to be controversial is 'to what kind of physical thing, if any, does the quantum mechanical wave function refer?'. 

Ontological argument

In the Western Christian tradition, in his 1078 work Proslogion, Anselm of Canterbury proposed what is known as 'the ontological argument' for the existence of God. Anselm defined God as "that than which nothing greater can be thought", and argued that this being must exist in the mind, even in the mind of the person who denies the existence of God. 

He suggested that, if the greatest possible being exists in the mind, it must also exist in reality. 

If it only exists in the mind, then an even greater being must be possible—one which exists both in the mind and in reality. Therefore, this greatest possible being must exist in reality. 

Seventeenth century French philosopher René Descartes deployed a similar argument. Descartes published several variations of his argument, each of which centered on the idea that God's existence is immediately inferable from a "clear and distinct" idea of a supremely perfect being. 

In the early eighteenth century, Gottfried Leibniz augmented Descartes' ideas in an attempt to prove that a "supremely perfect" being is a coherent concept. 

Norman Malcolm revived the ontological argument in 1960 when he located a second, stronger ontological argument in Anselm's work; Alvin Plantinga challenged this argument and proposed an alternative, based on modal logic. Attempts have also been made to validate Anselm's proof using an automated theorem prover.

More recently, Kurt Gödel proposed a formal argument for God's existence. Other arguments for God's existence have been advanced, including those made by Islamic philosophers Mulla Sadra and Allama Tabatabai.

Hintikka's locution for existence

Jaakko Hintikka puts the view that a useful explication of the notion of existence is in the words "one can find", implicitly in some world or universe of discourse.

Selected and edited from Wikipedia

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       1605 hours. 16 September 2019  The 'Ontology' material from Wikipedia has been edited bby Amorella, Ms Havisham and myself, the Old Man, going over the 'study' on 'spirit' and 'soul' being worked out. This is very interesting to me. Reminds me of philosophy class at BGSU, plus my earlier philosophical readings during and after graduation from Otterbein. I have always liked this sort of work as interesting and fun. How true to form this will be, I don't know. I do know the thinking involved has to have a reasonable consistency. (1606)

       Post. - Amorella