James is wrong

In order for something to exist, it must be affected - James central tenet

The dimension of Platonic forms are affected by nothing, they are eternal… the dimension of triangleness will never change, beings hallucinate change from these forms, but never change them.

More to the point [perhaps]: Is or is not James affected now?

My point is that there are existentents that we know exist and are not affected by anything

James claims the inverse. That to exist, something must affect.
Thus, existence = “affectance”.

And those Platonic forms do affect, for example, you into writing about them.

Well, if that’s the case, is or is not James affecting now?

Or, for that matter, is or is not Plato?

We are talking about both, so Id say that the answer according to RM must be positive in both cases.

When a star affects us with its light, that is if we observe it, it may not actually be a star anymore, since its light departed millions of years ago and the actual object may have ceased to exist. Or does it still exists, just because we observe it?

are we affecting triangles? The dimension in which triangleness exists? When it comes to people? Are we affecting “jamesness”? The dimension of the eternal platonic form of James? Not sure. But I do know that we are not affecting the Platonic forms of walkingness, or triangleness. In that sense, James is provably wrong.

You didn’t pay attention; RM says something exists if it affects, not if it is affected.
The devil is in the details :sunglasses:
as James would say.

[/quote]
So everything only affects but nothing is affected?

Everything is affected by something because nothing physical exists in absolute isolation to everything else
Entropy is occurring all the time within the Universe even if it is happening too slow to actually be noticed
In order for something not to be affected at all then it would have to exist in a spaceless and timeless void
A spaceless and timeless void by definition cannot exist and so everything is affected well as affecting also

But Platonic forms do exist in a spaceless timelessness void, so it affects, but what is it effected by? Our thoughts about them? That is not how forms are defined, either…

Platonic forms are imagined by the brain which is a physical organ and physical organs exist in space and time. The most famous Platonic forms are numbers but they cannot be known to exist as an abstract concept unless the brain first conceives of them. So if something exists but the brain does not know it exists and cannot even imagine it existing then it cannot be known. As all knowledge and understanding including that of abstract concepts like Platonic forms has to come through the brain

That is the paradox, which came first . The argument for forms goes reversely, they were not conceived by us mere mortals.

Theoretically, in other words.

Well put.

Just as, in a sense, long after Adolph Hitler is dead and gone, he is still affecting any number of Nazis still around today.

And we don’t even know for certain that one or another manifestion of his own particular “I” — what some call the soul — isn’t still around somewhere.

Up there? Down there? In limbo?

That gap between what we think we know about these things here and now and all that would need to be known in order to demonstrate that all others ought to believe the same.

So, it seems true that both James and Plato are still affecting. We just have no way in which to calculate that their continuing narratives reflect that which all rational men and women ought to embrace in turn.

Or, rather, so it seems to me.

And that’s before we get to the is/right world and all the problematic stuff I broach.

On the other hand, I don’t know for certain yet if James is himself “dead and gone”.

Whatever that means.

Death is a transition from consciousness to non consciousness rather than from existence to non existence because when the body dies it still exists in physical form
And all the sub atomic particles it is composed of will carry on existing long after it has died since they have the longest known life span of anything in the Universe

In James model…
Hitler, the dead far away star, and Plato all affected when they existed. The effects of what they affected continued through time and affect us now.
This does not entail they exist now. The photons from the distant star exist. The ideas and events affected by Hitler and Plato live on in chains of effects affecting other effects, and these effects have included the use of the names. So the names continue.
This does not mean they exist now.

Consider:

The basic rule of thumb is that “affect” is almost always a verb and “effect” is usually a noun.

How then does James – re RM/AO – make his own distinction here?

Also, going all the way back to that which brought into existence Existence itself, how would this distinction then have been encompassed?

My guess: We’ll never know.

Where James and I always went off the rail however revolved around my distinction between affectance in the either/or world and affectance in the is/ought world.

We know for example that, given the objective nature of human biology [rooted in the evolution of life on earth], sex, pregnancy and abortion are intertwined in very particular ways when humans interact.

But what happens when these interactions come to effect our behaviors such that we choose conflicting moral narratives in reacting to these behaviors as either right or wrong.

And how on earth this intertwined in his understanding of the Real God?

Explored in a way not ever always up in the scholastic clouds.

Maybe.

But how exactly would one go about demonstrating it?

And, of far greater importance to folks like me, what becomes the fate of “I” in all this?

JSS Definitions:
Affect = n. Action upon, v. to Act upon. The Act of causing change.
Effect = n. End result, v. to produce an End result. The End result of causing change.

Just because ’ the always’ leaves the - not always, or, seldom, does not exclude it.

Therefore, James is nominally-actually wrong, but patently expressly -potentially right.

So he must be beyond judgement.