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Article 2814 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: petersow@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com (Wayne Peterson)
Subject: Re: Private lives of ideal forms and formulas
Message-ID: <1992Jan17.010339.23347@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com>
Organization: Honeywell Air Transport Systems Division
References: <knbn47INN3ga@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 92 01:03:39 GMT

Eric Silber writes

 Well, if platonism were correct and ideal forms and formulas
 had a life of their own quite apart from the dust and the seasons of
 the material world, THEN one might ask as to the habits and private
 lives of the platonic forms.  Do they get together and chew the fat
 over cups of abstract coffee? Have all the theorems provable within
 every axiomatic system always been proved ( humans only discovering
 the proofs later) ?  In view of what we can see of the physical world,
 e.g. that it evolves, it would seem that NOT-all the consequences of all
 the axiomatic ideals were , in fact, always "there"; they must
 have "come into existence" through some process involving INTERACTION
 of the "ideals" over time (oops, one said "time", so one has trod the
 grounding of the material world, the "ideals" MUST depend upon
 the evolution of the material world for their own existence !)

Try to understand the "real world" without ideas.  That includes the 
ideas of time and space.  Without ideas the phenomenal world is
unknowable.  This implies that ideas precede understanding of the 
"world"  You say that we see the world evolve.  How is that?
Isnt this just a way that we try to understand the world. Things
seem to change and we impose our ideas on what this change
seems to mean.  But dont things in your dreams seem real.  What
happens to these things when you wake up.  They existed in no
time and no space, that is in your mind.  These things had no
separate reality.  How do we know that the phenomenal world
has a separate reality?


