Aristocrat,

Thanks for the feedback, I read it through a couple of times.

One comment I would like to make is that mathematicians who consider themselves Platonists or realists (there is a subtle difference between the two, that I did not want to go into) would not consider themselves Platonist or idealists in the classical, philosophical meaning of the word. Their belief in an independent of our mind world of concepts and relations between them, often only implicit, is restricted to mathematics only. If they claim that, say, the Mandelbrot set exists, the verb exists is obviously understood in a different way than when I say that this chair exists.

Still another kind of existence is meant when a "philosophically sophisticated" theist says that God exists.

It is exactly this ambiguity of the words ‘reality’ and ‘exists’ that I tried to avoid in that sketchy article of mine.

Another possible deviation from what you wrote would be that instead of saying “There are no things in-themselves; only human interpretations” I would suggest that there are no things in-themselves to be known except through our interpretations of physical phenomena (where mathematical models are essential) or "things" that depend on the human factor (culture, emotional or artistic expressions etc) where mathematics is not much of a help.

diver dan,

I think you have put your finger on the weak spot in my article: humans respond to their surroundings not only through rational analysis of their situation, where contemporary science - notably physics based on mathematical models - has been so far the best way of doing that (and I believe that mere survival of our species is not the only motivation) but also through artistic (emotional) expressions and “representations of reality”.

Here I have to concede that arts, aesthetics, are fields that I am not very much at home with, though I know that it is often said that (pure) mathematics can also be regarded as a kind of art.

Aristocrat. It is interesting to find out that I am a neo-Marxist. Never mind that the quotes I posted were from essays written by a Spiritual philosopher, and from two essays which are very much about the power structures at the root of all philosophical points of view, especially in this case Western points of view.

And by the way he completely agrees with the contents of your essay re how everyone projects their own interpretations on to everything that they observe. Indeed he spent an entire life time thoroughly investigating every philosophical proposition that has ever been made by human beings in all times and places.

Properly understood then the excerpts that I posted were/are very sobering assessments from an all-inclusive Spiritual perspective of the state of the humanly created world in 2012. Especially as created by us Westerners who now rule the world. He also pointed out that unless us Westerners (who rule the world) are now destroying the world, and that if we do not have a radical turnabout in our perspective we will destroy humankind, and even all of life on this planet too.

"This is why you get neo-Marxists interpreting the world through their own private rage," says Aristocrat in his lofty manner.

Yeah, I feel rage when I see what Imperial America is doing to our world and where it is leading while the 'intelligentsia' pontificate about whether things exist or not.

Perhaps when the nukes start falling, you will be able to examine this phenomenon and come up with a new interpretation.

Then again, you might be vaporized and others of your ilk might then theorize about an image of you left on a brick wall and argue about whether you still exist or not!

Probably there were people also in the seventeenth century who would ridicule Newton for “theorizing” about such obvious things as why apples fall off trees (unable to understand what gravitation was all about), and telling him “perhaps when a cholera (or some other imaginable at that time disaster) breaks out you will be able to examine this phenomenon and come up with a new interpretation (of falling apples)”.

Dear George,

Excellent article.

Agree... we need to see if reality is concrete or amorphous, articulate or inexpressive, present or hidden, composed or unassembled. Abraham Maslow held it apt that heuristic approaches come to fore when dealing with complexities arising from reduction. In this regard, I think he is a counter-positivist rather than an anti-positivist. Description has its role.

Initially, describing a situation can act as an interim step, a priori to quantitative modelling. I know with my own research into the effects of culture on knowledge discovery, where, structural equation modelling of societal traits can be extremely challenging... Piling-on moderators makes explanations more, rather than less elusive.

Pragmatically, one needs to capture an deep understanding of the data AND relationships. But, does that always work? Perhaps one can contrast the flavours of quarks or isobars on a weather system. Yet, it would be unlikely for one to describe a weather system in terms of quarks and isobars would irrelevant to particle physics. A weather pattern, say a hurricane, is experienced and is deemed real to person in the street.

On the other hand, fundamental particles are more elusive. Herein, can something that does not exist still have a “state”. A null state? If this null state of non-existence complements existence, then philosophically, and, perhaps, as an alternative authenticity non-existence is explicit, but elsewise. What would govern such a relationship? Something, transcendental or is the relationship self-sustaining?

Knowing all that is real, I suggest, is different understanding the fundamentals of reality.No human, not even all humans, does not have capacity to understand all the information in the universe. Yet, perhaps, we have the ability to understand our reality in an elementary way by knowing the connections between mathematics and the mathematical aspects of the knowable universe. Maybe, we can even reliably conjecture, from templates, about the unseen universe, say, postulated galaxies beyond the light horizon.

Regards,

O.

"Maybe, we can even reliably conjecture, from templates, about the unseen universe, say, postulated galaxies beyond the light horizon."

Wow, we have certainly moved a long way from observing an apple falling from a tree, haven't we? That the trouble with humans. They allow their vivid imaginations to intrude upon the simple reality of an apple and an apple tree.

I guess that keeps a lot of academics employed and explains the existence of religion!