{"id":156,"date":"2017-02-13T16:59:09","date_gmt":"2017-02-14T00:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beyondtherealm.org\/?p=156"},"modified":"2017-02-13T16:59:09","modified_gmt":"2017-02-14T00:59:09","slug":"form-and-function","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/2017\/02\/13\/form-and-function\/","title":{"rendered":"The World as Form and Function"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reality is created by observers in the universe<\/em> \u00a0\u2013\u00a0John Archibald Wheeler,\u00a0Theoretical Physicist (1911-2008)<\/p>\n

Today I am revisiting the views held by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea (1818), and his rejection of na\u00efve realism, or what has been called\u00a0scientific materialism<\/em>, that the things we observe in the world are what they appear to be, absolutely, and forever, and not in anyway all or part a function of human perception and experience in the sense that they can be modified based by the very act of perceiving or experiencing them<\/p>\n

Thus,\u00a0 scientific materialism<\/em> would reject the distinction between how things are independently from human observation versus how they are perceived by our perceptual and conceptual processes.\u00a0 At the same time,\u00a0 a scientific materialist would have to accept the the distinction between subject and object, i.e., the distinction between the observer and the thing being observed.<\/p>\n

But if we\u00a0 have no other means of accessing the world other than perceiving or experiencing,\u00a0 is it in fact a meaningful exercise to even refer to it as a matter of some significance? To all intents and purposes, if we never refer to it again, what would be lost in our discussions about the nature of the world?<\/p>\n

To deal with this alleged problem the German philosopher Immanuel Kant\u00a0 (1724-1804)\u00a0 introduced the \u201cthing-in-itself\u201d, or \u201cding ansich\u201d in German \u2013 to suggest that the true nature of \u00a0the world is fundamentally unknowable<\/em> as we can only grasp the nature of things indirectly through perceiving them as objects in relation to ourselves \u2013 how we have experienced them.\u00a0 I believe Prof. Kant may have gone too far, in the sense that is is contradictory to say that something is fundamentally unknowable as to make such an assertion implies some knowledge about\u00a0 it. Existence is not an attribute that can be asserted independently of the qualities through which it is instantiated.\u00a0 \u00a0In other words, the distinction serves no useful purpose, when at most the existence of the \u201cding ansich\u201d might be implied as an essential element in a theory of perception. And maybe that is all what Kant had in mind.<\/p>\n

Moving on,\u00a0 it is one thing to experience the world through one\u2019s senses \u2013 it is another thing to experience it logically, e.g., to experience such things as cause and effect, time, space and the various ways in which objects relate to us and each other. If these relationships are permanent features of the physical universe, it\u00a0wouldn\u2019t\u00a0matter in what form you encountered them in your experiences, your conclusions about them would be same<\/em>. But in the end, it would be less important what the world looks like versus what can be abstracted from it simply from interacting with it. And this would lead me to say that the nature of the world is about function (<\/em>a method that relates an objective to its instantiation)<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 \u00a0and not form (the manifestation of matter and energy), the latter being \u00a0incidental to the process, and a means to an end in terms of being the medium that allows the function to be enabled or expressed.<\/p>\n

This is an important view for me and consistent with my argument that we should perhaps be less preoccupied with the makeup of the material \u00a0universe, by poking into the furthest and oldest region of the universe, looking for clues of sorts and so on. Instead, we should look look more closely at what the logical or functional nature of the various cosmic events appear to be about, \u00a0such as the manifestation of a directional and seemingly intrinsic teleological process<\/em> leading to ever higher degrees of material complexity and organization and where this particular process would seem to want to take us to.<\/p>\n

And so the question should be: What has been accomplished to date by the process of material evolution?\u00a0 As such, the cosmos appears to be a\u00a0 work in progress, and that is at least some concrete information we have about the nature of the world as we have encountered it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reality is created by observers in the universe \u00a0\u2013\u00a0John Archibald Wheeler,\u00a0Theoretical Physicist (1911-2008) Today I am revisiting the views held by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea (1818), and his rejection of na\u00efve realism, or what has been … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[479],"tags":[82,125,143,148,228,240,259,362,436,449,469],"class_list":["post-156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy-science-religion","tag-cosmos","tag-evolution","tag-form","tag-function","tag-kant","tag-life","tag-matter","tag-schopenhauer","tag-thing-in-itself","tag-universe","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}