On 10/21/2019 5:12 AM, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List wrote:
Probably the single big confusion that lead to the creation of materialism is the confusion between ontological states and their epistemic content. People experienced the ontological state with epistemic content of "chair outside me" and they took the epistemic content as representing an ontological state of the world, so they thought there really is a "chair outside me", when the real ontological state was that of a state of consciousness. Therefore, it appears that in order to get rid of materialism is to stop making this confusion. The problem that arises is that no matter how hard we would try to do that, any retreat from the epistemic content of an ontological state will only gives us just another ontological state with the only difference being a different epistemic content.
I'd say it's the other way around. The epistemic content stays the same "seeing a chair", but the theory of what is real changes: from substance (wood), to chemistry (compounds), to physics (atoms), to metaphysics (mathematics), to...
No matter what, we cannot escape epistemic contents. Is idealism therefore fundamentally unthinkable ?
"Epistemology precedes ontology." --- Terry Savage
I opened this topic after reading about process philosophy. They say that the solution to understanding the world is to not think in terms of "substances", but in terms of "events". The problem is that "events" is also an epistemic content, in the sense that the concept of "event" is extrapolated from the subjective feeling of passage of time. But the "passage of time" is just a quality/an epistemic state of consciousness. To take it as revealing to us a deep character of the world is to do the same mistake materialism is doing. So, in order to avoid the mistake of materialism is to recognize this fact, and thus to reject that "event" can be anything ontologically meaningful. Is there any way to escape this vicious circle of confusions between ontological states and epistemic contents and get to an idealistic conception of the world, or is idealism fundamentally unthinkable ?
Brent "The world is made of stories, not atoms." --- Muriel Rukeyser -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/be1fb5dc-4994-10c3-7f59-335bc80bd615%40verizon.net.
