Part I, Philosophy, III - Classification. Apriorism
“According to Herr Dühring, Philosophy is the development of the highest form of consciousness of the world and of life, and in a wider sense embraces the principles of all knowledge and volition. Wherever a series of cognitions or stimuli or a group of forms of being come to be examined by human consciousness, the principles of these configurations are necessarily the object of philosophy. These principles are the simple, or the hitherto supposedly simple, constituents of which the manifold of knowledge and volition is composed. Like the chemical composition of bodies, the general constitution of things can be reduced to basic forms and basic elements. These ultimate constituents or principles, once they have been discovered, are valid not only for the immediately known and accessible, but also for the world which is unknown and inaccessible to us.” (p 42)
This is, Engels says, an, almost, word for word account of what Duhring says. These principles, according to Duhring, are derived purely from thought, and not from an examination of the real world.
“Philosophical principles consequently provide the final complement required by the sciences in order to become a uniform system by which nature and human life can be explained. Apart from the fundamental forms of all existence, properly speaking, philosophy has only two subjects for investigation — nature and the world of man. Thus we find our material quite spontaneously arranged in three groups, namely, the general schematism of the universe, the science of the principles of nature, and finally the science of mankind. At the same time, this succession contains an inner logical sequence, for the formal principles which are valid for all being take precedence, and the objective realms to which they are to be applied then follow in the degree of their subordination.” (p 42-3)
The question, then, is where do these principles come from? According to Duhring from thought, but thought is a process, and, like every such process must have some initial conditions, material to work with. If that initial material does not come from the real world, then, where does it come from? Does it come from the mind itself? But, that would require that the brain already had this material hard-wired into it, in which case where did that coding come from? Moreover, Duhring, himself, has said that “the realm of pure thought is limited to logical schemata and mathematical forms” (p 43)
So, Duhring is left with only one logical answer to the question, which is that there must be some set of such principles existing out there in the ether, independent of Man and Nature, that are waiting to be discovered, in the same way that explorers discovered America. Except, rather than these principles existing in material form, as with America, they exist purely in the realm of ideas, as abstractions, and it is from these abstractions that all reality is, then, constructed. The closest parallel to this, today, is, probably, the concept of the mathematical universe, as with a computer simulation.
But, as I have described, elsewhere, if we take the computer simulation model, it puts human beings, including Duhring, in the position only of being a part of the simulation. As Tegmark, himself, says, “Mathematical existence equals physical existence, and all structures that exist mathematically exist physically as well. Observers, including humans, are "self-aware substructures (SASs)". In any mathematical structure complex enough to contain such substructures, they "will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically 'real' world".
(Tegmark, Max (November 1998). "Is "the Theory of Everything" Merely the Ultimate Ensemble Theory?". Annals of Physics.)
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