^ You can make all of that make sense by simply shifting your epistemological position to the only ones which truly make sense i.e. phenomenology &/or perspectivism.

To rephrase that in less impenetrable terms:
"Materialism" (or in your case I assume "Scientific Materialism") that is to say 'matter is primary', from a philosophers POV is a deeply flawed assumption. Flawed because there appears to be not one experience in human history that did not occur entirely within the mind.
When one see's say a Dog, one only ever experiences the images and sensations occurring within ones mind. You don't see the photons hitting your retina, only the way your mind as interpreted the data.

However the opposite position "Idealism" (mind is primary) is also fundamentally flawed in the exact opposite way. If our minds are the only "real" things then where exactly are they? And how do we even derive logic and reason if there is not something outside of ourselves which it describes? etc. etc.

Philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre' got around this by defining a new category, "phenomena". We know for certain that "phenomena" exist in some sense because we experience them, the categories of mind and matter then become secondary properties, both only existing as definitions we apply retrospectively to experiences. i.e. stuff happens and then our brains kick in and say "that happened because of X because in the past X has preceded similar experiences" or "that thing looks like other examples of Y so is probably Y".

The problem then is that this appears to come no closer to telling us what is objectively happening in the universe, it's more like linguistic/logical housekeeping. The phenomenologists and existentialists did a superb job of clearing away all of the old invalid baggage about how we try to describe things, but they did little or nothing to solve the problem of Kants "nouminal world" (i.e. the "real" stuff that we are experiencing by simulation in our minds).

Its stumped philosophers for centuries as we don't appear to have any way to ever get at this "nouminal" or "real" world we naturally assume must exist in some way. But....

I reckon ultimately one of the first western philosophers in history nailed the way out 3000 or so years ago. Pythagoras said "all is number" and due to the work of Euler, Riemann and Fourier in particular I think we can now make it stick. (yeh its turning into an essay sorry )

Without wishing to go deep into a subject you could spend half your life on; Fourier transforms are involved in signal processing. It is a mathematical means by which spatio-temporal signals (e.g. the vibration of a string or the movement of a record needle) can be converted with no meaningful loss of information into frequency (analog) or binary (digital) forms and back again.

Mathematically speaking there is no reason to regard the "signal" as any less "real" whether it is in frequency form or spatio-temporal form. It is the same "signal", it can be converted 100% either direction.

So then here's the biggie: Is there any reason why we could not regard instrumental mathematical numbers and operations (i.e. the stuff we write down and practice as "mathematics") and the phenomena in the universe they appear to describe. I.e. when we use man made mathematical equations to describe and model the behavior of "phenomena" we experience like say Physicists do, could we suggest that we are using a form of Fourier transform? And moreover that this indicates an Ontological (existing objectively outside of yourself) aspect to the mathematical "signals".

Or to put it another way, is mathematics itself really real?

The Reimann sphere and Eulers formula provide a mathematical basis to describe the entirety of known existence in purely mathematical terms, but they indicate that pure ontological mathematics itself is more primary than anything we ever experience. It suggests infact that we ourselves are ultimately reducible to Ontological mathematical phenomena (what Leibniz called "Monads").

What we think of as "reality" could then perhaps be regarded as non dimensional (enfolded) mathematics interacting in such a way as to create the experience of a dimensional (unfolded) universe of extension (such as ours).

(R = distance between two points)
Enfolded universe: R=0
Unfolded universe: R>0

Neither is more "real", they are simply different perspectives from which Ontological mathematics can observe itself.

"Reality": R>=0

I've explained parts of that poorly sorry. Its an immense subject and can be tackedled from many different (often completely incompatible) paradigms. I hope at the very lest I have perhaps demonstrated that the Holographic universe theory could have legs if we combine the advances of scientific exploration (i.e. study of matter) with those of Philosophy and neuroscience (i.e. study of mind & reason itself). The latest big theory doing the rounds with neuroscience is that the mind/consciousness is a fractal phenomenon, which plays into what I've been discussing here more than you might think.

Then again maybe you just wrote me off as a crackpot within the first few lines "lawl" etc..

>> ^Almanildo: There, you said it yourself. Treating God as a scientific hypothesis is simply a sophisticated way to say that you demand a reason to believe in it. This reason has to be either some sort of evidence or some logical or philosophical argument. As QualiaSoup points out, the philosophical arguments are flawed. So skeptics seek evidence for God.
It seems like you are trying to evade the question by having it both ways. First you assert that God does have an effect on our daily lives, through points of contact with our world. Then you refuse to treat these effects as potential evidence requiring analysis.


Sure, we have to provide some reason why we believe in something. That does not mean that the reason has to be construed in strict scientific terms. It may need to be in some sense empirical, rational, and all that, and hence capable of being grappled with intellectually, but that does not mean that what is being investigated is open to scientific inquiry in the way that rocks and bacteria are.

Science relies on a rather narrow kind of reason--instrumental reason--and not reason totally or simply. There are other forms of inquiry--such as the phenomenological investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, or Merleau-Ponty--which depend on very different kinds of reason.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'husserl, heidegger' to 'husserl, heidegger, existentialism, nihilism, philosopher, interview' - edited by mauz15

the lyrics in the description are wrong:

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable,
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table,
David Hume could out-consume,
Schopenhauer and Hegel.
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.

There's nothing Nietzche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates himself was permanently pissed.

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say could stick it away,
Half a crate of whiskey everyday.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And René DesCartes was a drunken fart
"I drink, therefore I am."

Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed,
A lovely little thinker
but a bugger when he's pissed.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'monty python, socrates, nietzsche, plato' to 'monty python, socrates, nietzsche, plato, aristotle, heidegger, descartes' - edited by my15minutes