[MD] What is SOM?

[david buchanan]

Drimel, Kon and y'all:

Krimel said to dmb:
...Are you seriously claiming that you have not confused ontology with epistemology but rather claim there is no ontology at all? Is this you just being witty or are you saying literally there is nothing.

Ron jumped in with encyclopedic quotes:
In philosophy, ontology (from the Greek ὄν, genitive ὄντος: of being (part. of εἶναι: to be) and -λογία: science, study, theory) is the most fundamental branch of metaphysics. Ontology is the study of being or existence and its basic categories and relationships. It seeks to determine what entities can be said to "exist", and how these entities can be grouped according to similarities and differences. Ontology is distinguished from epistemology, the study of knowledge and what can be known.

In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the object or substance has contingently, without which the substance can still retain its identity. The concept originates with Aristotle, who used the Greek expression to ti ên einai, literally 'the what it was to be', or sometimes the shorter phrase to ti esti, literally 'the what it is,'

Ron added:
I think you can see how ontology itself is an essentialist convention therefore what Dmb is saying is accurate. MoQ ontology (and I'm using the term fundamentally as Ontology is the study of being or existence and its basic categories and relationships) states that be-ing is experience, and that be-ing as an entity separate and distinct is an illusion of that experience. Therefore traditional Ontology is illusionary and a distortion of experience. So that MoQ Ontology is closer to epistemology, the study of knowledge and what can be known.

dmb says:
I did a google search for "ontology of anti-essentialism" just to see what contrary thoughts I might find. There were no matches. Then I tried the phrase, "anti-essentialist ontology" and got a few nibbles, 22 if memory serves. I picked one, found the phrase within the text and found an explanation of the phrase itself rather than just usage of it. How lucky is that? Anyway, it said that the phrase was "illogical" or paradoxical. The traditional meaning of "ontology" is subverted by coupling it with "anti-essentialism" because anti-essentialism is an anti-ontological stance. 

And while we have Krimel's attention, I thought it might be nice to re-quote some of Ron's other find for him. He'll like it because of the author's background in Neurology...

Finally, we come to those who do not recognize a metaphysical problem of existence because they espouse a scientific or scholarly way of thought, like Krimel. These are the scientific specialists, scholars, Gelehrten, and all like-minded types who have dominated philosophy for the past two centuries. For them, the problem of existence has become a matter of cognitive science to be answered through analysis of the brain-mind problem, using techniques borrowed from neurophysiology, linguistics and computer science. The problem itself is not recognized as such because all mental processes are believed – as an act of faith – to be a matter of biology. The placement of the problem of human existence on a metaphysical level is dismissed out of hand because science does not accept the metaphysical as a valid category of knowledge. These types may be labelled as "materialists of the mind" since their one article of faith is that all phenomena, mental or otherwise, are ultimately material in nature and subject to analytic investigation.

The difficulty with the approach to the problem of human existence through cognitive science is that it is never elaborated in a meaningful manner. The principal requirement necessary is to recognize its metaphysical nature. The history of civilization has shown that there is a metaphysical need running through humanity like a recurrent symphonic chord. There exists a state of mind, more precisely, a state of consciousness in which this need is embedded. No satisfaction is to be found in materialist explanations, no matter how much they may be padded with ethical theories. Yet the question of consciousness today is dominated by cognitive scientists whose only concern is to analyze it and explain how it is possible. Laborious dissections of thought (e.g. W. Quine, R. Rorty), analogous to producing a Gray’s Anatomy of the mind, are put forth as advances in its understanding. Cognitive scientists and Krimel would like to show how consciousness is exclusively a phenomenon of the brain, thus establishing it within the framework of the materialist worldview. But by now, it is evident that this will never happen – as William James predicted over a century ago in his Principles of Psychology. While consciousness is being recently more regarded as a phenomenon in its own right (e.g. J. Searle), the approach to it is still analytic and value-free, like Krimel's.

Thanks.



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