Neither Nor: Notes on Dry Run (On the question of Universals & starting with the Medievals) - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

On the question of universals

• Core set of questions regarding universals: "Do universal categories exist? Are they discovered or invented? If they're not discovered, are they part of perception, or are they part of culture? If they're part of perception or culture, do we have the power to change them? Or are they determined by selection and variation only?"
• Why should we be interested? Because all of philosophy starts with a position on this question of whether or not universals can be assumed and it underlies all philosophy problems, but also most of science
  • nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels; Plato is directly opposed to nominalism
  • the Buddha suggests we need nominalism when we start creating our own stories and those narratives form the basis of our suffering (the non-mundane)
• Summary of the pathway of thinkers who covered universals:
  • "The first is Plato/Aristotle. Then it kicks off again in the medieval line, when Porphyry's Isagoge (200 AD) gets translated by Boethius from Greek into Latin (500 AD). Then it kind of kicks off a few more times. Kant in the 18th century. Positivism in the 20th century."
• But "believing" in one position or another is playing the dogmatic game we wish to avoid. These (and other) dichotomies are false. This is ESSENTIAL. The N/N way considers both positions dangerous and stands for making no choice at all:
  • Should we consider the following (came up for I when she was reading)?
    • Why bother setting out these camps and considering who is in which and how and why they differ, if in the end we know we come out the other side with no position?
    • It seems wise to know these positions, but is there harm in writing them out again, in order to destroy them, given that has to be the end result?
  • and we don't destroy them by using LH logic and argument, we do so by patiloma and anuloma paticcasamuppada, over and over.
  • so we need to negate both nominalism and essentialism/realism/universalism, both nihilism and eternalism
  • You end with this position: "When Platonists set up a dichotomy, we choose the opposite of this, and take it as far as it goes."
• Concepts themselves, labelling and recognizing them, is pleasurable
  • Kant work on the subject
  • related to the L. Smith Evolution paper: https://cogdev.sitehost.iu.edu/labwork/oudeyerSmithTopics16.pdf

Our perceptions carve nature at functional joints that are not universal

• Perception underlies the formation of concepts
  • "If animals have concepts already, then we probably cannot get around seeing in concepts. It's not right to regard concepts as "made-up" or "just words." They may be fundamental to perception, and we are not doubting perception. At least, we are not doubting that perception is occurring and seems to be the only way we can know anything at all."
    • No, we can't doubt perception. That is the source from which we try to reduce surprise, try to build a more predictable, tamable environment. We've gone too far, but that doesn't mean that our biological perceptual system wasn't correctly built in the wild to explore, then exploit through the concepts we've acquired from repeatedly sampling the environment.
    • "I think that what is luxury for the Buddha becomes basic by the time of Nagarjuna. In other words: the Buddha gets advanced dukkha first. He suffers more than most, because he has more pleasures than most, more luxuries, more education. He experiences papanca because he is rich. But many others can relate because he roots suffering in craving, aversion, etc. 700 years later, Nagarjuna takes papanca as basic. I want to say that this shows a shift like literacy rates going up.
      • Important: it is the rich, noble, people who have leisure time that brings them the time/space to develop and exercise abstract reasoning skills.
        • It's like the poor and oppressed remain tweens/ pre-adolescents... they never get to pre-abstract reasoning.
        • these abstract reasoning abilities make all abstractions obvious now
        • I'm thinking...Then as more and more people get the "abstractions virus", more and more people shift into a type of cultural stage of adolescence, exercise their abstract reasoning capabilities, and then we go too far, eventually. We're now a bunch of societies of kids in their 20s, having failed to continue to develop onwards to Kegan's Stages 4/5
• But "not everyone categorizes in the way that we do"
  • THIS is the core point:

• 1. It's unfamiliar. Most people don't have an understanding of this, so we can show how forward- order dependent arising gets built up.
• 2. On the other hand, we take categories for granted as existing, naively in speech. We're naive realists, because we assume the noumenon functions like the phenomenon. We assume reality "is" like language.
• 3. It's at least superficially impersonal. People won't assume they take a strong position on it (even though on an intuitive level it produces a visceral reaction, which is interesting).
• 4. It develops over many centuries, so it's slow and we can see the process of how it gets built up — not like how to make coffee.
• 5. It seems to depend on grammar, which will allow a test of my sense (which lines up with Nietzsche and probably also Wittgenstein) that these problems arise out of language and grammar, and not out of experience.
• 6. The 101 version shows realists siding against nominalists, so we can possibly chart a middle way. Will be interesting if it ends up being eternalism/nihilism as the Buddha faced, but I suspect it doesn't, not in a simple way (if Spade is right).
• 7. Scripts like "universals" were built over the course of generations, not inculcated in six year olds as part of the fabric of the universe."