Question that came up over coffee with Maddie today: can non-pysical things (like God) even be said to exist, and in what sense? Is their existence somehow different from the existence of physical things like a cup or a brain?
I’m more interested in how other people approach this problem, but I’ll try to lay out very very briefly what I think. In two words: yes, no. I suppose a good example of this sort of physical, existent thing is thought. I think that most people, intuitively, would agree that thoughts exist, even as discrete things, but we have to admit that even if we think that thoughts are somehow physically instantiated (such as in a brain), there isn’t any sort of physical “thing” that corresponds to the thought; thoughts don’t have a physical “body” or existence. In neuro-scientific terms, a thought corresponds to a pattern of electricity and chemicals in the brain. From a first person point of view, a thought is also a sort of pattern, made up of smaller, conceptual “words” or components that, in their particular combination and arrangement, form the thought.
The tricky question is how we have to understand the existence of solid, physical things. I don’t really feel like trying to tackle that right now, but I’d still love to hear what you think.
In other, less mentally strenuous news, there’s a super-duper-awesome Presidential Tag Cloud generator over at the blog of one Chirag Mehta. It shows both the frequency and freshness of words used in a huge number of presidential speeches and documents from 1776 to the present, with a swanky slider so you can easily see how things have changed. It’s really neat to be able to see in a single glimpse the main rhetorical vocabulary of different ages and administrations. I guess in some ways it is “LSA for humans,” where we can use the aggregated semantic content of Presidential language to get some sort of easy intuitive idea of the main conceptual components of their worldview. (see this post for a very brief description of what LSA is, besides super-cool)
I’ve been sort of thinking on and off about how to add a tag cloud to this blog, which is difficult since I can’t actually just add a script to generate and display it automatically, unless I find some way to host the blog myself. Any ideas?
-
1
Pingback on Jan 3rd, 2007 at 12:20 am
[...] January 2nd, 2007 My friend Dave posed a question on his blog a while back, to the effect of “Can non-physical things exist, and how?” Far from being exhausted by philosophers over the years, the topic has inspired some interesting [...]
-
2
Pingback on Jan 9th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
[...] 09Jan07 A little while ago I posted here the question of what existence and physical instantiation have in common, and [...]
Leave a Comment
Badges
my name is dave
and this is my blog.
-
Flickr
More Photos -
Recent Comments
November 3, 2006 at 10:59 pm
Descartes has a pretty pretty powerful reply to your question in Principles of Philosophy or Meditations on First Philosophy. His mind/body dualism might not ring as true nowadays to the ears of cognitive scientists, but he makes a good case for a way to construct physical existence, if you can somehow postulate consciousness or mental existence first. Just throw out the soul and bring in subatomic particles and a few physical laws, and synthesize this with the idea of pattern formation as the foundation of a lot of non-physical or abstract meanings, you get a pretty convincing picture. Without being too postmodern about it, you can easily imagine something like neural synapses interacting in a system of relations that is in itself existence — a la information theory (think Hofstadter in GEB) or complexity theory (butterflies and whatnot), or good old Aristotelian dialectical synthesis. Lest the scientific approach seems facile, you have your aesthetic critics arguing similar things — that simple elements (postulated or physically fundamental or arbitrary — ah, but that may be the question) interact to create an infinite combination of higher, synthetic meaning. Kandinsky or Nietzsche will give you a good explanation of that.
November 4, 2006 at 3:38 am
Well, before any one else points it out, yes, I have noticed that I am that jackass who lists his fall semester reading list and passes it off for knowledge, and yes, you will enjoy reading those books.
November 6, 2006 at 1:27 am
Heh, yeah you are.
January 3, 2007 at 11:04 pm
dave,
read the categories by aristotle. it explains some of his notions about metaphysics. specifically, he discusses substances and matter. he asks some of the same questions and gives some killer examples. for instance, he talks about skin color. color merely qualifies the substance of skin. just as height and weight and other qualities help to explain and define matter as we see it. however, these qualifiers (which aristotle lists in section 4) can not exist by themselves. obviously, things like color and shape and size are abstract concepts which can only be realized by matter and substance. i would have to say that the distinction of physical and non-physical is not really a valid way of approaching this question, since non-physical things serve to qualify physical substances or matter. the discussion about god is interesting, because many people would argue that god’s existence transcends the physical realm of being. nevertheless, i would argue that, since our proof of existence is predicated on physical manifestations of non-physical properties, the only times when we can really know when god truly exists is when god is manifested through physical objects, such as the burning bush or jesus christ. I would say that the non-physical god serves to qualify various physical things or substances in our world.