The Road to a Pragmatist Metaphysics

Dear Mehrdad

Very well put!!!I
But why assume that there are not new solutions around the corner? Philosophy evolves too.
I actually present a pragmatist metaphysics with my co-author Jan Soderqvist in "The Global Empire", one of the two new books that will come out in English later this year.
We organise phenomenology as an interplay between eternalism and mobilism, instead of the old Kantain duality of phenomena and noumena. Our point is that the inaccessibility of reality is based on the fact that everything is in flux whereas our perception only works as a sorting process where flows of flux are FICTIVIZED and even eternalized as OBJECTS. We even draw a parallel to Physics where fields and particcles are not so much co-existence as actually ordered: It is the FIELD which is primary and the particle which by necessity must be produced by the observer for the field to become an object (this will shake Physics too, which so far has been based on an inadequate phenomenology!).
The system is called "the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism" and there are five chapters devoted to it. The system has won wide approval among Scandinavian philosophers and scientists, it should be interesting to see how readers in English, Russian and French react to it next year.
The point is that mobilism is what is REAL (as Dino and all Pragmatists would insist, and any modern Kantian who has studied Physics would agree to) and eternalism is an illusion. But eternalism is the metaphysical necessity to be handle the mobilist reality phenomenologically. We MUST create and live with illusions for the world to work. This is why truth can not be absolute, it is PHENOMENOLOGICALLY as impossible as it is to travel faster than the speed of light. But there are differences of QUALITY between different eternalizations. Some are closer to the flows of fluxes than others.
So Metaphysics is a necessity becasue we are HUMANS and not gods. And in this sense, langauge is by necessity an operation of ontology. It would be naive to argue otherwise. And futile. So why the anti-metaphysical hostility? It is perfectly possible to create a creative and useful Metaphysics, it will certainly help Physics.

Ushta
Alexander

2010/1/24 mehrdad farahmand

Hi Dino,
I would say to say 'to be' is positing existence and with that you open up the question the essence and nature of what you assert and describe. Here, physics is occupied with structures, relations, causes, correlations in time. Metaphysics is concerned with time itself, the essence as a construct or a process or a substance, the essence of causality and synchronicity. In other words, metaphysics works with all the presuppositions of physics. In that ontology is different from all other endeavors. It has no presuppositions. It studies presuppositions.
One more point about souls, consciousness, and minds in nature. The question whether it is limited to organic brain and nervous system. There is no good argument that would limit mind to brain and organic matter. Although, that is what we empirically observe. However, we should differentiate the notion of soul, nous, from ghosts. The judeo-christian tradition assumes ghosts that are eternal, a kind of caspar. However, if you study Aristotle notion of entelechy, you will see that for him a soul is a self-organizing creative inherently intelligent (information processing) process that is inherently temporal and it is self-actualizing. From this perspective the universe and everything in the universe has souls. That does not mind it has a conscious mind as we do with perception, sensation, etc as we do. However, it is has a soul. You find the same notions in neoplatonism of plotinus, and in modern physics in the works of Bohm, Weizecker, Heisenberg.
Remember the problem of subjective consciousness is intractable unless we reevaluate our notions of what physicality is at all. You could read a good treatment of that in the works david chalmers and jaegwon kim.

mehrdad