Does your position hold up if you eliminate a goal-directed participant in the system and instead acknowledge that things in the universe - including ourselves are emergent?
Your perspective is consistent with religious and traditional scientific perspectives that everything in the universe is ruled by God-like laws. The laws characteristic of physics and biology owe their appeal to their religious pedigree.
When you state that the ship's "atoms really are glued together" there is the inference that something or someone is doing the gluing. Ships are built by people who might use glue, but without a goal directed participant there is no glue. A natural object, like a constellation, is not static and "held together" but is dynamic, perhaps over time getting swallowed into a black hole.
Remove the idea of a goal-directed organizer who makes sense of the "behavior" of defined objects, including The Ship and what remains is truly mind-independent. The persistent categorizations and "relationships" you rely on for your argument, disappear.
Us humans are unfamiliar with the perspective that nature and everything in the universe is emergent and not "organized" from the top down. The behavior of atoms is not "coordinated" but emergent in ways that are still, at their core, deeply mysterious.
Humility, characteristic of some religious traditions, is required to acknowledge what scientists have been revealing. The universe exists with or without us and certainly doesn't conform to our simplistic ways of thinking.
Exactly where did you get the idea that *all* nominalists/conceptualists think there is no mind-independent structure "out there" in the world?
Also, just because janitors of philosophy created certain categories doesn't mean we have to buy into them. E.g. they claim that "Hume is an empiricist, as opposed to a rationalist", but Hume didn't talk about himself that way at all, he never painted a dichotomy between rationality and observation, and indeed, it's quite insane to paint oneself as one or the other; actually rational people embrace both evidence and reasoning. Did Plato actually call himself "realist"? Or is this an interpretation created for him by janitors of philosophy?
Definitions of categories aside, “Realism / Platonism” makes no sense to me
“Atoms do not appear to be isolated from each other; they are connected in the world. Even if our minds disappear, atoms still behave relative to other atoms—meaning, their relationships are mind-independent.
The geometry of the ship is also objective. The atoms stand in a particular spatial relationship with each other, regardless of our concepts. The form/arrangement really is “out there.”
The realist has an excellent explanation for the persistence of The Ship. There is some objective, abstract pattern of a ship, and even if the atoms change along with the planks, the form remains the same. The structural pattern is not physical, yet it is mind-independent.”
Regarding your first example:
What is the structural pattern then, if it’s not “physical”? Atoms that are “connected in the world” must be connected by some means, and that means must be “physical” if it manifests in physical atoms.
And regarding the second:
There is a perspective where the geometry of a ship is also physical, as in it is the physically manifested relations between the physical parts of the ship. There is also the perspective of the geometry which is conceptual, as in a blueprint held in the mind of a ship and its geometric relations.
But then where is the “structural pattern [that] is not physical, yet it is mind-independent”? As far as I can see that’s just an extra category that’s arbitrarily asserted, but never precisely identified.
Et tu, Brute? I'm a long time silent follower and admirer of your work. I would like to point out to you, that our current ruling intellectual / political / cultural / financial elites are (some unknowingly) the followers of the Platonist school of thought. Of course I would never discourage anybody from any sort of research. Just be aware where it might lead, especially if you are not particularly pleased with the direction they are "nudging" humanity.
Does your position hold up if you eliminate a goal-directed participant in the system and instead acknowledge that things in the universe - including ourselves are emergent?
Your perspective is consistent with religious and traditional scientific perspectives that everything in the universe is ruled by God-like laws. The laws characteristic of physics and biology owe their appeal to their religious pedigree.
When you state that the ship's "atoms really are glued together" there is the inference that something or someone is doing the gluing. Ships are built by people who might use glue, but without a goal directed participant there is no glue. A natural object, like a constellation, is not static and "held together" but is dynamic, perhaps over time getting swallowed into a black hole.
Remove the idea of a goal-directed organizer who makes sense of the "behavior" of defined objects, including The Ship and what remains is truly mind-independent. The persistent categorizations and "relationships" you rely on for your argument, disappear.
Us humans are unfamiliar with the perspective that nature and everything in the universe is emergent and not "organized" from the top down. The behavior of atoms is not "coordinated" but emergent in ways that are still, at their core, deeply mysterious.
Humility, characteristic of some religious traditions, is required to acknowledge what scientists have been revealing. The universe exists with or without us and certainly doesn't conform to our simplistic ways of thinking.
Exactly where did you get the idea that *all* nominalists/conceptualists think there is no mind-independent structure "out there" in the world?
Also, just because janitors of philosophy created certain categories doesn't mean we have to buy into them. E.g. they claim that "Hume is an empiricist, as opposed to a rationalist", but Hume didn't talk about himself that way at all, he never painted a dichotomy between rationality and observation, and indeed, it's quite insane to paint oneself as one or the other; actually rational people embrace both evidence and reasoning. Did Plato actually call himself "realist"? Or is this an interpretation created for him by janitors of philosophy?
Definitions of categories aside, “Realism / Platonism” makes no sense to me
“Atoms do not appear to be isolated from each other; they are connected in the world. Even if our minds disappear, atoms still behave relative to other atoms—meaning, their relationships are mind-independent.
The geometry of the ship is also objective. The atoms stand in a particular spatial relationship with each other, regardless of our concepts. The form/arrangement really is “out there.”
The realist has an excellent explanation for the persistence of The Ship. There is some objective, abstract pattern of a ship, and even if the atoms change along with the planks, the form remains the same. The structural pattern is not physical, yet it is mind-independent.”
Regarding your first example:
What is the structural pattern then, if it’s not “physical”? Atoms that are “connected in the world” must be connected by some means, and that means must be “physical” if it manifests in physical atoms.
And regarding the second:
There is a perspective where the geometry of a ship is also physical, as in it is the physically manifested relations between the physical parts of the ship. There is also the perspective of the geometry which is conceptual, as in a blueprint held in the mind of a ship and its geometric relations.
But then where is the “structural pattern [that] is not physical, yet it is mind-independent”? As far as I can see that’s just an extra category that’s arbitrarily asserted, but never precisely identified.
Et tu, Brute? I'm a long time silent follower and admirer of your work. I would like to point out to you, that our current ruling intellectual / political / cultural / financial elites are (some unknowingly) the followers of the Platonist school of thought. Of course I would never discourage anybody from any sort of research. Just be aware where it might lead, especially if you are not particularly pleased with the direction they are "nudging" humanity.
I welcome the next steps in acknowledging the individual’s right to interpret as they see fit.