Colin McGinn - What Are The Things of Existence?

How many different kinds of 'things' are there? What are the fewest number of things that can characterize existence and do so exhaustively? In other words, what are the most basic building blocks of everything we see and know? From what things can all that exists be constructed? Are things needed beyond the physical?



Colin McGinn is a British philosopher.


Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[cainarcher]

Colin is one of the coolest dudes Robert interviews. He's quite balanced, not strict materialists nor into that whole religious stuff. He just tries to connect the dots and that's it.

[sharmitoboylos]

You know, it’s such a pleasure to hear really brilliant, thoughtful people like this guy and Robert talk about the big questions this series deals with. It’s reassuring to know that people like these two dudes exist. That we’re not all ignorant tribal angry reptilian brains. Just most of us.

[jamesruscheinski]

The value category, especially moral, is interesting; it also has the possibility to bring together other categories.

[Snuclear]

Just to sum this up… I’ve no idea what the categories are

[mickeymoon]

Wow! I never thought of the abstract as a separate category because I never thought that hard about it. And I never thought about scientists' dismissal of a separate mental category as unproven metaphysics is itself an unproven metaphysical claim. I learn so much from this interviews.

[SimpleBach]

My consciousness is all that exists as far as I can tell.

[maverick]

The value category is very real. Humans laugh at jokes, and lower animals have their brands of play. Birds have their own "purposeless" music, and so do dolphins and whales. The maternal instinct is a value category, because the mother can recognize vulnerability and defencelessness. And there's a real reason why flowers are attractive for insects, birds and humans.

[PetraKann]

In physics particles are not different fundamentally with fields.
A particle is a narrow manifestation of a field. A local perturbation in the field.

(Waves)

[LaurenDove-xx]

“How many different kinds of 'things' are there? What are the fewest number of things that can characterize existence and do so exhaustively? In other words, what are the most basic building blocks of everything we see and know? From what things can all that exists be constructed? Are things needed beyond the physical?”

There is only one “thing.” The only substance that exists in the universe is “light.”

Everything arises from Still Light. The vacuum is the fulcrum of motion. What we call “physical” is simply motion.

L. Dove
Arbiter - Universal Law

[benjamintrevino]

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

HP Lovecraft

[caricue]

Most of the stuff that Colin McGinn would put in separate categories would go just as easily in sub-categories. The first category has to be whether the thing in question can act causally on another thing that exists. If a thing can't interact with other things, then there is no way you could know about it, so it is imaginary at best.

[clemsonalum]

This guy was interesting could talk to him for hours

[soubhikmukherjee]

To say that philosophy is nonsense is itself a philosophical statement.

[fractaorganism]

the many categories of reality are subsets of the four fundamental categories of the physical, mental, abstract, and the divine, transcendent, or holistic. ken wilber's AQAL model clearly provides the map for these categories and their sub-types, embodied in truth-body, beauty-mind, goodness-culture, and justice-systems.

[grnDestiny]

What’s the highest frequency wave in the highest spectrum that can be made?

[alanbrady]

The simulation theory would be a theory of everything if it was true

[ChuckBrowntheClown]

Genesis 1:6 and God said let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters. Possibility of showing a gravity field.

[matishakabdullah]

My consciousness tells me that I exist and everything else is also only recognized to exist in my conscious mind but nothing of matters resides in my conscious mind.

Neither philosophy nor science or mathematics can help me to prove the existence of things outside of my consciousness so I used to (and perhaps everyone else too) assume and has been taking for granted that the universal matters outside my consciousness do exist.
Fortunately for me, by guidance of Allah - The Almighty Creator of the universe - after reading His Book of Revelation - alQuran, now by certainty I know that the universal matters do exist because He has created them. In fact He was created me, my consciousness and gifted me with faculties of hearing, seeing and objective and subjective feelings.
Now I'm trusting that everything I observe isn't an illusion but a reality. Sciences are reals - the studies of AyatuAllah - signs of the existence of All-Living, The All-Independently Self Subsistence, All-Knowing and All-Powerful Creator.

[bananacabbage]

Fields and particles are just different features of quantum field theory. Physicists don't try to get rid of them. They replace them with a deeper concept that embraces both. This was settled 100 years ago.

[AlmostEthical]

Colin's plurality could be organised if plotted as a tree chart, as in taxonomy. He already noted that the mental depends on the physical, so physical things would be at the base of the "tree", along with information (instead of Plato's eternal abstract) because matter must have some kind of form and forms must be applied to matter. The physical domain includes particles, fields etc and the mental domain could branch off to value, emotion etc.