Thread: Argument for the existence of Platonic forms

I think the examples might need to be more specific to actually apply. For the 'good' example; instead of good and evil use murderers and non-murderers. Everyone in this post-apocalyptic society murders (or has murdered) others, yet still there is the possibility that someone born in the future will not murder. Does a possibility exist?

For the purple example; perhaps the physical properties of the world are not different and the wavelength that we might associate with purple exists, but for some stroke of luck no structures evolved to reflect purple or refract white light into that particular band. No one sees purple but the physical properties of purple light still exist. Is there such thing as purple? If people who had once seen purple were put into this purple-less world, does it exist then?

Still with these the answers are dependent on whether something in the mind (or memory) is the same as an external thing. It also poses another question, does the future exist?

If none of the feckless cannibals are non-murderers but they are capable of conceiving of a person who is one, does a non-murderer then exist in form but not substance?

Also Mario, thoughts are not brain cells. Thoughts are more correlated to brain states. In reality, thoughts do not exist (under your own definition) unless you believe the past exists in the physical world (which it might). A thought is the perception of a brain state that happened just before the state that integrates the perception. You are perpetually 'observing' what your physical state of being was with all your external and internal stimuli a moment ago. Therefore, as soon as the thought comes in to being it no longer exists.

Sound is a human construct. So is wavelength, amplitude, frequency, oscillation. They are conceptualizations of states of being that you can't talk or even think about without using the same and more human conceptualizations.