Is Quality An Illusion?
When I google "quality vs quantity" the results have more to do with the economic maxim that producing good quality commodities in fewer numbers is a better strategy than mass producing poor quality ones. This isn't exactly what I had in mind in respect of quality vs quantity; nevertheless, it does give us a hint that there's a difference between quality and quantity.
First off, what is quantity? For me, quantity implies the mathematical i.e. it involves, in a broad sense, geometry (shapes) and/or arithmetic (numbers). What quantity/math offers is precise and definitive comparisons. As an example, take a person who wants to compare the weights of two objects, A and B. Without numbers, he wouldn't know which, A or B, is heavier/lighter with the error being inversely proportional to the difference between the weights of A and B (the closer the weights of A and B are to each other, the greater the odds that the person will make an error). The moment we mathematize the problem, we can know that, say, A weighs 1.68 kg and B weighs, say, 1.67 kg (precise) and there can be no doubt that A weighs more than B (definitive).
Secondly, what is quality? Again, for me, quality is those characteristics of an object that allegedly can't be mathematized i.e. qualities can neither be geometrized nor can be translated into numbers. Here I 'd like to point out that, as the title of the OP says, quality, viewed as distinctly non-mathematical could be an illusion.
Why do I say that quality, viewed as distinctly non-mathematical could be an illusion?
Take color for starters; for simplicity I'll stick to red, blue, and green, the primary colors. These three colors appear different from each other but the difference boils down to mathematics: red has a wavelength of 650 nm, green had a wavelength of 550 nm, and blue has a wavelength of 450 nm. Simply put, the unique colors we perceive as red, blue, green are nothing more than numerical variations in wavelength.
Next, consider beauty. Beauty, as per the received view, is also a quality. There's the symmetry theory of beauty that states that faces we find beautiful are those that have good reflection symmetry and that's another quality that ultimately is about geometry.
One question:
1. Can everything be reduced to mathematics? Is quality an illusion?
First off, what is quantity? For me, quantity implies the mathematical i.e. it involves, in a broad sense, geometry (shapes) and/or arithmetic (numbers). What quantity/math offers is precise and definitive comparisons. As an example, take a person who wants to compare the weights of two objects, A and B. Without numbers, he wouldn't know which, A or B, is heavier/lighter with the error being inversely proportional to the difference between the weights of A and B (the closer the weights of A and B are to each other, the greater the odds that the person will make an error). The moment we mathematize the problem, we can know that, say, A weighs 1.68 kg and B weighs, say, 1.67 kg (precise) and there can be no doubt that A weighs more than B (definitive).
Secondly, what is quality? Again, for me, quality is those characteristics of an object that allegedly can't be mathematized i.e. qualities can neither be geometrized nor can be translated into numbers. Here I 'd like to point out that, as the title of the OP says, quality, viewed as distinctly non-mathematical could be an illusion.
Why do I say that quality, viewed as distinctly non-mathematical could be an illusion?
Take color for starters; for simplicity I'll stick to red, blue, and green, the primary colors. These three colors appear different from each other but the difference boils down to mathematics: red has a wavelength of 650 nm, green had a wavelength of 550 nm, and blue has a wavelength of 450 nm. Simply put, the unique colors we perceive as red, blue, green are nothing more than numerical variations in wavelength.
Next, consider beauty. Beauty, as per the received view, is also a quality. There's the symmetry theory of beauty that states that faces we find beautiful are those that have good reflection symmetry and that's another quality that ultimately is about geometry.
One question:
1. Can everything be reduced to mathematics? Is quality an illusion?
Comments (58)
Well, you can quantify colour variation in terms of wavelength, but colour is more than wavelength. You’re quantifying a one-dimensional relation by assuming all other relational structures are identical. Likewise, you can quantify a judgement of beauty in terms of geometrical symmetry, but beauty, too, is more than symmetry.
Quality refers NOT to what cannot be quantified, but to what isn’t quantified in any relation. So, when you quantify a colour in terms of wavelength, its quality refers to the variability in any potential relation to it.
So, no - quality is not an illusion - it only appears to be from a reductionist perspective. I think perhaps everything can be reduced to mathematics - but not all at once.
For example; there are two loaves of bread in my fridge. One is stale and the other is fresh. Which is the better quality? If I want to make a sandwich - the fresh bread is better quality. But if I want to make bread and butter pudding, the stale bread is better. (And it really is - stale bread will retain its structure, whereas fresh bread turns to mush.)
The quality of the object is not inherent to the object, but to the suitability of the object for my purposes - and is therefore, a matter of judgement. It's like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a terrible book, but just the right thickness to level my bookshelf. In that regard, it's the best book I've got.
Reality consists of relations and non-relations. Quantity is a type of relation and quality might refer to non-relations. Ontic structural realism says that there are only relations - relations between relations between relations etc. I think it's ok for there to be relations between relations but relations would be undefined if they were ultimately not grounded in non-relations. Relations and non-relations are inseparable, so it's no wonder that a quality like color is related to a relation like the wavelength of electromagnetic waves.
I think that quality is a concept which extends into all areas not just maths. However, I think that it goes beyond beauty. This can be superficial and quality is about depth as well. The most obvious example that comes to my mind is if someone wrote a philosophy book, written in the most exquisite language but lacking in sufficient knowledge would it have quality? Certainly,I would see it as rather lacking.
Obviously, the idea of quality has some kind of subjective criteria. For instance, certain literature is viewed as literary fiction. I know many people who find this fiction rather pretentious. I have mixed feelings and read some of this but can see that it is not necessarily of better quality than some fiction which is not ranked as literary fiction. So, I would say that the whole idea of quality is about certain standards, which are socially constructed.
As luck would have it, I'm currently reading that exact book - I'm on the 30th chapter and, to be honest, I find the book a challenging read. Anyway, below is what the Wikipedia page on Quality (philosophy) has to say about Robert M. Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
[quote=Wikipedia]In his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig examines concepts of quality in classical and romantic, seeking a Metaphysics of Quality and a reconciliation of those views in terms of non-dualistic holism.[/quote]
The key concept (non-dualistic holism) in Pirsig's book has been underlined for your convenience. Take the dualistic notion that lies at the very foundation of all life, to wit hot vs cold: it's said that life found a home on this watery-rocky planet we call earth for the simple reason that it's neither too hot nor too cold thus allowing life-giving and life-sustaining liquid water to exist.
Take a closer look at what hot and cold are. From a dualistic point of view, they're distinct from each other - opposites, yin and yang as it were - but physics (science), the paradigmatic case of the mathematization of the universe, unites these two dualistically distinct qualities under one banner viz. temperature. What our ancient forefathers thought were two separate qualities (hot vs cold) turns out to be simply variations in one same quantity (temperature).
Given the above, it would seem that Pirsig would've made a convincing case for non-dualistic holism had he resorted to mathematics i.e. he should've chosen quantity over quality to make his case.
Quoting Peter Paapaa
I was turning the matter over in my mind when it dawned on me that unlike colors which are simply different wavelengths of light, there are some aspects of human experience that can't be explained in terms of quantity. Take for example the emotions of love and anger; the former is modulated by oxytocin while the latter by adrenaline. These two emotions are effects of two different biomolecules, the difference between these biomolecules irreducible to mere variations in quantity. In other words, love and anger are qualitatively different; however, the intensity of these emotions probably are just a matter of the concentration (quantity) of the respective biomolecules. All this under the assumption that biochemists and physiologists are correct of course.
Perhaps if we dig a little deeper and get down to the level of quarks, even emotions can be translated into quantity - the number/mass of quarks in a given biomolecule. I wonder if biochemists and physiologists have ever thought along these lines. Gestalt? Possibly. At this point I'm taking a tentative step outside the borders what is known to science (and me).
Quoting counterpunch
[quote=Wikipedia]To construct an item with structural integrity, an engineer must first consider a material’s mechanical properties, such as toughness, strength, weight, hardness, and elasticity, and then determine the size and shape necessary for the material to withstand the desired load for a long life[/quote]
All the characteristics (underlined) that define structural integrity are quantities.
Too judgment requires quantification to determine whether better or worse for "...purposes..."
Quoting litewave
Name a quality that can't be/hasn't been viewed as a relation. Nothing springs to mind. I'm approaching the matter from the position that once a relation is in place, quantity automatically enters the picture
Quoting Jack Cummins
I'm going to focus my reply on subjectivity. Both you and @counterpunch have raised the same point. Do you have any good reasons to come to the conclusion that subjectivity somehow isn't quantifiable? Name something which you think is subjective and non-quantifiable (can't be translated into numbers (arithmetic) or shapes (geometry)].
Fiction can't be translated easily into shapes. I know that it written in alphabetical shapes but it would be absurd to try to quantify it in this way. It involves stepping into the mythical perspective and this involves specific meaning for different individuals. Individuals are likely to approach idifferently according to their personal experiences. I don't think that it would be possible to quantify the whole realm of storytelling at all.
Firstly, because you haven't provided me a concrete case of a real-world object that can't be quantified, let's exclude all the elements in fiction that are borrowed from reality.
That leaves us with only the completely made-up elements in fiction. Interestingly, we come to the realization that fictional things are simply uninstantiated combinations of real objects e.g. a unicorn (imaginary) is a horse (exists and quantifiable) and a horn (exists and also quantifiable) and ergo, by extension, unicorns are quantifiable
But fiction isn't just about objects. It's about people and their psychological truths. To just view the people as objects would be a very flat level of understanding the whole scope and meaning of literature. Even if you think of the romantic relationships it would be a mistake to think that this is just about beautiful bodies, because so much is about the emotions.
Red color. How is it a relation? Surely it is related to electromagnetic wavelength of about 650 nm. But what is red about number 650 itself? Or about a wave function?
Quoting TheMadFool
Quantity is a relation, it means how many things there are. Or if you meant to say "once a relation is in place, quality automatically enters the picture", I agree. There can be no relations without non-relations (qualities) and there can be no non-relations (qualities) without relations.
Red = 650 nm wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum. Red is a quantity or in different words, the quantity 650 nm (wavelength) is perceived as redness.
Quoting litewave
This is where there's a subtle difference between you and me. Relations and non-relations can be put under the rubric of, for lack of a better word, relations with non-relations having a value of 0% and the strongest relation having a value of 100%
Quoting Jack Cummins
You're barking up the wrong tree. Sorry. I don't view people as objects in the sense that they're to be treated inhumanely. In saying that people are objects I mean that they are, all said and done, material in nature.
I am certainly not suggesting that you think that people should be treated as objects. From what you have written in your many posts it would not make sense.
However, I do feel that you are dismissive the whole aspect of psychological truths in fiction. Just because people in fiction have bodies doesn't mean that fiction can be understood in that way. What I think you are doing is applying the philosophy of reductive determinism to fiction and literature, and this misses the whole purpose of most novels.
Well, for all I know I could be holding the wrong end of the stick here. I'm simply considering the possibility of an underlying quantitative (mathematical) structure to the universe. To be frank, I don't quite understand why you chose fiction to make your point. As far as I can tell, fiction seems kinda out of place in the discussion if only for the reason that the brains creating and absorbing fiction could be quantifiable i.e. fiction (creating/encountering it) could simply be, for instance, concentrations of certain neurochemicals (chemistry) and if not that they could simply be intricate electrical (physics) phenomena.
I think you’re missing the point, but given that it’s a very difficult point, no blame. The mention of non-dualism is highly significant. This is an attitude which is writ large in both Hindu and Buddhist philosophy but is hardly encountered in Western philosophy. I'll come back to that.
I think there's a consensus that Platonic dualism was responsible for the eventual fracturing of Western philosophy. Platonism, it is said, posited a duality - a division - between the ‘ideal realm of forms’ and the illusory domain of sensible perception. This is understood to be the origin of the division that emerged at the beginning of the modern period when Galileo, Newton, John Locke, et al divided the world into primary and secondary qualities, and Descartes into mind and matter.
Galileo, let us recall, was very much impressed by the Platonic notion of dianoia, the certainty afforded by mathematics - the 'book of nature' was written in it, he said. And the primary qualities were just those that could be described in terms of mathematical physics - mass, acceleration, force, and so on. This breakthrough was a major aspect of the 'scientific revolution'. It was just this division that enabled Galileo to break away from the archaic teleological conception of Aristotelian physics.
On the other hand, the secondary qualities were all attributed to the domain of the mind - color, taste, etc. The mind itself was thereby subjectivised and relativised and implicitly bracketed out of the picture. This in turn lead to the view that only what is measurable in mathematical term is ultimately real - which is modern scientific physicalism, now become the mainstream opinion in the secular west.
So getting back to the roots of this division, which resides in the differentiation of pairs of opposites - black and white, phenomenal and noumenal, real and imaginary, mind and matter. It is easy for thought to operate in terms of these opposing pairs - thought operates by abstraction and contrast. Much of this, however, is implicit - it is woven into the way we think, and so, very hard to see. It's like the spectacles you look through, which, of course, you don't see, but see with. I'll refer here to another new age book, contemporary with Zen and the Art, namely, Frithjof Capra's Tao of Physics, which goes into this issue in quite some depth, particularly his discussion of Bohr's 'complementarity' which was in some ways comparable to taoism (indeed Bohr incorporated the Ying Yang symbol into his family coat of arms).
Quoting TheMadFool
The subject - the mind that makes judgements, that names things and categorises things - is never itself the object of analysis - for the obvious reason that it’s not ‘an object’ at all. Which is another way of stating Chalmer’s hard problem of consciousness. (See It is never known but is the Knower, Michel Bitbol.)
Getting back to non-dualism. Non-dualism is not so much a philosophy, as a meta-cognitive framework, a stance, attitude or way of being.
In Indian philosophy, the terms for non-dualism are Advaita (Hindu) and Advaya (Buddhist, less well-known.)
Linguistically, the root of both terms is 'a' = negative particle, equivalent to the English 'un'; and 'dvai', meaning two or divided. So, 'not-two' or 'undivided'.
And what is 'not-two'? Why, that would be 'self-and-world'. In Buddhist terms, the self and the world 'co-arise' in a relationship of dependency.
That of course jars with our modern realist mindset, because we know that 'the world' pre-exists us and that humans have only been around for a few hundred thousand years. But that itself is also a construct, an interpretive framework which is itself mind-dependent. (This is the hard part. Most of Schopenhauer's writings on 'vorstellung' are about this point. Kant also helps here.)
In any case, in the non-dualist framework, the apparent divisions referred to above no longer hold sway; the world is no longer divided up that way. That is what Pirsig is after in his 'metaphysics of quality'. The division between 'fact' and 'value' is overcome, or rather, never manifested in the first place, in this understanding.
[quote=The Buddha]By and large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "non-existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one.[/quote]
Kaccayanagotta Sutta.
You just used the mind that makes judgements as an object of analysis to conclude that it cannot be an object of analysis. I don’t get it.
Quoting Wayfarer
I thought we were trying NOT to split things into objects and subjects here.
Grab your right hand with your right hand, and get back to me.
Because we are illusionary and singular in our self, physical, intellectual, emotional, material or everything else, it is purely within out minds, not in existence. What is in existence that we subscribe labels and understand our perceptions with, are separate to our understanding and beliefs of them because we do not have access to existence itself.
A lot of the previous discussions go into other fields and mix up what things are. Color is not real, it's in the mind, it's what we perceive from conscious awareness, the same goes for everything we sense and think.
This may seem a reductionist concept to many but it is based on what we can know and why we can know it.
I don't know why you want to quantify everything. It seems like a prejudice of mathsism.The reason I began talking about literature and fiction is because I believe that this is an area in which there is a whole debate as to whether quality is an illusion.
When you saw my unedited response to Madfool it should have read as mathsism rather atheism. I think my phone changed mathsism, possibly because I have invented it.
I don't know if that would have altered your reasoning of my comment. The actual question of the thread is whether or not quality is an illusion and I don't think that this should be a question exclusive to maths or hard science. Most of the thread introduction was about maths, but with some discussion of beauty. The end question was about whether everything can be reduced to maths and I am saying that it cannot.
While I agree with your geneology of the origin of the modern scientific split between objectivity and subjectivity, I don’t think one even has to go down this path in order to point out the problem with claims that the empirically observed world is completely quantifiable.
In itself calculation is qualitative. To count is to abstract away all else from the items to be counted in order enumerate. Counting is a special kind of activity designed for a purpose, an activity that requires a developmental grounding in object permanence, reciprocity , etc. And beyond a simple noting of ‘same thing different time’ , operators such as addition, substraction , multiplication introduce new qualitative concepts to mathematical
logic. Even if we were to ignore this fact and subsume all of mathematical logic under the heading of simple quantification , we would be left with a single
meaningless category to describe all of reality, that of numeric relationship. What makes a scientific description useful is not that it makes everything else about the subject matter it describes other than an empty counting disappear, but that it finds a way to unify an internally differentiated phenomenon. If differentiation is itself reduced to nothing but quantitive difference, then the world vanishes. quantity without quality eliminates the world it would purport to describe.
I'll be the contrarian: what can't be described scientifically can't be described, it can only stimulate an experience in oneself and someone else without really comprehending anything. It's a distinction between purposeful and reflexive experiencing, not quantity and quality. The word "description" doesn't apply because the unconscious can't describe something. Qualitative and quantitative descriptions are at least currently in the same category, as epistemological approximations, including aesthetics and ethics. "Without meaning" must mean "lacking some experiential element which I can't satisfy myself that I've described", so use of the word "describe" is fallacious. I hope you enjoyed my anal logical positivist argument lol
Positivism, overt or covert, is the default view of a lot of people. Many of them don’t understand what it is, so there’s not much use criticising it when you have to explain what it is your criticising first. It’s like explaining a joke. Generally I just let it go nowadays.
Isn’t quantification simply an act of measurement itself?
What is it that allows for precise measurement ? It seems to me that the only requirement is that whatever it is that we are submitting to measurment must remain self identical during the measuring. The self-identity is itself a quality with respect to the calculation that proceeds from it. That is, the objects we measure are defined entities with attributes and properties. They are not themselves numeric. They form the basis of enumerations. Quarks. gravity waves, apples are all qualitative with respect to bow we manipulate and relate them to other qualities mathematically. Of course , a quark is assumed to be qualitative in a different way than a subjective feeling. The quality of being a quark is not only self -identical over time, but supposedly publicly available ( to intersubjective experience).
A personal feeling, by contrast , is said to be private. One could count episodes of the experience of a particular feeling but it couldn't be counted publicly.
I suspect what the OP really want a to say is that the universe is like a clock, a static set of numeric relations between qualitative components.
But you have to admit I'm getting at something: the "is-ought divide" might be erroneous from the standpoint of well-considered decision making, its more of a divide between is-ought purposefulness on one side, where the qualitative and quantitative are complementary, vs. reflexive arationality. Is Einstein trying to get in contact with his touchy-feely arational side? Not a meaningless activity in any possible sense, but I don't think that should be the basis for moral judgments about what we ought to do. What is should be the basis for what we ought to do, and we should positivistically pursue improvement in our comprehensions of what is if we want to be ethical. Poor ethical judgment is essentially inept assessment of what is, on whatever level it takes effect, not inborn deficiency in pursuing what ought to be.
Of course. But it's the modern emphasis on 'the quantifiable' as being the only true existent which is at issue. As I said, and I think you agreed, this is one of the cardinal attributes of modernism - that only what can be measured can be 'taken into account'. To be measurable is to be real. When you make a statement, or frame a proposition, the response always is: 'show me the data. Validate it in respect of some outcome.'
Of course, in the humanities and social science, qualitative factors are important. Maybe this is why they're called the 'soft sciences'; because they are dealing with human subjects, then quantitative analysis can only get you so far. But note also that it's in sociological sciences that the replication crisis is especially acute.
Contrast that attitude with, for example, Buddhist philosophy. This has a definite place of 'the immeasurable'. (Actually, being Buddhism, which loves lists, there's four 'immeasurables', which are loving-kindness or benevolence (maitr?/metta), compassion (karuna), empathetic joy (mudita) and equanimity (upek??/upekkha). Now, are such qualities 'objectively real'? I can't see how they can be. You can't measure or detect something like compassion, other than by inferring it from another's behaviour. So is compassion something real? Or subjective? Or inter-subjective?
Naturalists want to explain compassion in naturalistic terms (naturally :-) ) There's even naturalists who want to naturalise Buddhism (like Owen Flanagan, 'The Bodhisattva's Brain'). But this overlooks the inconvenient truth that one of the epiphets of the Buddha is 'lokuttara', meaning literally world transcending (root loku- world, and uttara, superior to, above). Of course, any such notion is outside the cognitive horizons of naturalism, so has to be ruled out as a matter of principle. The domain of naturalism is generally taken to be such that it can't admit of anything deemed transcendental (which is a polite way of saying 'supernatural'. This is the subject of another current thread on Naturalism.)
Quoting Enrique
Einstein has a kind of religious sentiment, which is echoed in many of his famous aphorisms - often articulated in letters or conversations with his friends. One of my very favorite of his bona fide sayings is this one:
[quote=Einstein]A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.[/quote]
I would sign off on that as a universal truth.
As far as the 'is/ought' divide - I see that as one of the salient characteristics of modernity, as I said. Maybe it's an inevitable result of history. When European culture cast off its religion, what was left was a sense of the immensity of the Universe, devoid of anything resembling intent or intelligence, within which life arose as a result of the fortuitous combination of atoms.
I could argue that quality remains for both the religionist and the atheist. The difference is that the religionist wants to ‘fix’ the quality as THE intent or THE intelligence. Atheistic philosophy began from a hunch that such a view of intent and intelligence as devoid of history doesn’t present us with a very remarkable notion of intellect, since it is being in history that gives knowing its intimacy with itself. Strangely enough, even the Darwinian idea of living complexity and human knowing as a self -ordered stream of fortuitous events is in its way a more intimate view of being human than the ahistorical religious view.
The philosophical problem with Darwinism - and this has nothing to do with its veracity as a scientific theory - is that there can only ever be one ultimate in it. And that ultimate is survival. It’s the only meaningful criterion in Darwinism qua philosophy. As soon as you begin to question the meaning of surviving - which is something that only h. sapiens can do - then you’re out of the scope of Darwinism, per se.
You are grouping the entire world into math and not-math (let's throw in science and not-science; fact/value; true/false). If you imagine that language does not have just one way to end that sentence: Quality is those characteristics of _______" and then finish the end of that sentence with any practice we have in: pointing out a good horse, knowing a good joke when we hear one, understanding what is "good science", believing, measuring, thinking, seeing, understanding, etc. Each having its own characteristics of what makes a good example (or an example of that it all) or to say, all the judgments, distinctions, what matters, how it matters, etc. in the ways in which people learn their lives along with language (and so not convention, or agreement, or any type of singluar justification).
Quoting TheMadFool
The relation of these facts to the ability of sight is taken as a lesson to impose uniformity onto all our measures of difference. You've told us what color is, but nothing about how we count color? point to it? and why we can't do either of those, but we want to, and, why? And each of our practices have different ways of, say, being rational, having an example to attain, skill, criteria for identity, even "seeing" something, say beauty.
Quoting TheMadFool
There are differences between pretty, attractive, and cute; there is what gives us pleasure, what we value, and what has forms and means of judging (photography, modern art, literature); the last part are the things which matter to us when we describe something as beautiful. This is not opinion or personal taste (there are means of sculpting, and judging and discussing sculpture).
Quoting TheMadFool
Yes, and, no; not and still matter to us in the ways they do/have in our lives.
Quoting TheMadFool
What an illusion is, is to strip a practice of its ordinary criteria and picture it based on only one; it creates the impression one has found a problem and solved it at the same time.
What I want to draw your attention to is that duality is qualitative in charcter by which I mean they're non-mathematical e.g. when Heraclitus and Laotze spoke of opposites like hot and cold they took them to be distinct from each other - they were literally poles apart for these two thinkers.
Only in the mid-1800's did scientists demonstrate that hot and cold are simply perceptual correlates of a single underlying phenomenon, to wit different levels of kinetic energy of the molecules in objects; this, to my knowledge, requires quantification (of kinetic energy of molecules) i.e. from a mathematical standpoint, hot and cold are kinda sorta unified as one; in other words, the duality hot vs cold is an illusion. I suppose by the same token all dualistic concepts or the so-called opposites are just a matter of being at different points on a discrete/continuous mathematical scale.
Yes, but it’s only fair to look at Darwin in a larger philosophical context. Even though I assume he didn’t read Hegel, darwinism belongs to the Hegelian era. If we look at heirs of Hegel and Darwin , such as Marx , Nietzsche , James and Piaget, we see that survivalism has been replaced by perhaps a truer interpretation of the dialectic: not survivalism but becoming, fecundity, diversification. Piaget’s darwin-inspired project intended to bridge the gap between science and religion without leaving naturalism. The direction of cognitive evolution is from a weaker to a stronger structure. It is a continual
self-overcoming which becomes ever more meaningful
as it becomes ever more integrally diverse within itself. q
I'm a latecomer to this thread, and I haven't read all the other posts. But your question is pertinent to my personal worldview : Enformationism, which assumes that everything in the world is a form of Generic Information, including mathematics, matter, & mind. In that case, "Quanta" are material things that we evaluate in terms of mathematical qualities (values), such as Mass. However, what we call "Qualia" are the mental/mathematical evaluations themselves, which we experience as ineffable Feelings.
When expressed in language, we refer to those values as "Meaning". And, for the observer, meaning is relevance to Self. It's a relationship (in mathematical terms, a Ratio), which we basically Feel emotionally (chemically), but eventually rationalize into words (meta-physically). Which is what we call "Reasoning".
So, Qualia are not mere meaningless or erroneous "illusions". They are instead, emotional mental feelings of significance or relevance (positive or negative). In that sense, they are all we ever know about Material Reality. Qualia are perceptions, that we convert into non-verbal Meaning (ineffable feelings), and then into conventional verbal communication of Information.
This is just a quick sketch of my understanding of Qualia. I may try to develop it further, as I get the time to evaluate the murkiness and misapprehensions of the sketch into communicable information. :nerd:
Generic Information :Information (ability to enform) is Generic in the sense of generating all real forms from a formless pool of possibility : Potential ; the Platonic Forms.
http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html
Ratio of Evaluation : Students understand the value of a ratio A:B is A/B. They understand that if two ratios are equivalent, the ratios have the same value. Students use the value of a ratio to solve ratio problems in a real-world context. Students use the value of a ratio in determining whether two ratios are equivalent.
https://www.onlinemathlearning.com/value-of-ratio.html
Note -- In the ratio A : B, "A" can stand for the observer, and "B" for the thing observed.
A" is usually set as "1", and the object as a range from "1 to 0". The numerical expression of that evaluation is the value of that object to me. The value, in turn, can be converted into feelings, or money, or size, or weight, depending on the context.
PS__The Quality we call "red" is a sensory evaluation of the spectrum of light frequencies, which fall into the range of 430 terahertz, relative to the overall speed of light. The brain converts the Quanta of frequency into the Qualia of Red, which is a feeling.
I think there's a danger of conceptual over-reach with Darwinism. It is a biological theory about the process of speciation, but due to historical and cultural circumstances, it has become a kind of secular religion - not because of its content, but because of the role it plays in telling us about ourselves.
Quoting Gnomon
You know, I'm beginning to agree with you. :gasp:
I have always struggled with the concept of dualism and the last time I gave it any consideration led me to the conclusion that it's about opposites and the interplay between them. By opposites I refer to things such as hot and cold, good and bad, up and down, true and false, etc. which are either contraries or contradictories. As examples, hot and cold are contraries because both can't be the case but both can be false as when the temperature is moderate (lukewarm, tepid) and contradictories can't ever be both true and neither can both be false e.g. the proposition "god exists" and "god doesn't exist" both can't be true and also both can't be false (at least one and only one has to be true while the other is false).
Robert M. Pirsig, in his book, discusses the "dualism" of the classical and romantic view, with the former roughly corresponding to science/technology and the latter being an artistic perspective. However, this, technically, isn't dualism hence the quotes around dualism in the beginning of this paragraph. Dualism proper is, as I understand, about opposites and is definitely not, in my humble opinion, about perspective which the esteemed Pirsig takes great pains to unpack in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance. Would you call a student's perspective as contrasted with a cop's an example of dualism? No, they're simple different ways of looking at an issue and are most certainly not what we would consider an instance of dualism for a students and cops aren't opposites.
What say you?
Quoting TheMadFool
I disagree. If you look at the SEP entry on dualism you might see that it's not really a theory about such opposites as heat and cold, dark and light, and so on. In Plato's philosophy, the duality, difference or division was between the soul and the body. That duality would not even be intelligible to modern science, given that such notions as 'soul' are alien to it. But Plato's rationale was tied to idea that nous (intellect) saw the forms (essence) of things, which exist separately to their particular iinstances. (Aristotle was to modify this however the result was still a form of dualism, namely, hylomorphism.)
It is true that dualism can be suggested by the juxtaposition of opposites, but I don't think that dualism is merely that. Dualist philosophies of various forms grew out of contemplation of nature and the human condition and encompass an enormous range.
As I tried to explain in that earlier post, the 'fact-value' division, first articulated by David Hume, was, in my opinion, very much a consequence of the development of Western culture arising from this earlier Aristotelian form of dualism, which was the precursor to Descartes' mind and matter dualism. That's what I take Pirsig to be commenting on.
Have I ever mentioned the Cartesian anxiety quotation? 'Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other"' - Richard Bernstein.
I'm pretty sure that the motivation behind Zen & the Art is precisely the remediation of that anxiety. There's a long chapter on the 'Cartesian Anxiety' in The Embodied Mind that @Josh mentioned up-thread.
Quoting TheMadFool
But, consider the well-known Zen aphorism: 'Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers.' (as recounted by Suzuki) The point of this aphorism is that the student's perspective changes as the practice and insight matures.
Sorry, as you can see, I'm having a hard time.
Unicorns are only quantifiable within a particular qualitative or relational structure - horse plus horn does not necessarily equal unicorn.
Mathematics appears to be purely quantitative, yet it, too, relies on a qualitative structure that is integrated into our potentiality, and applied as we relate to the sums.
I will return to a joke I remember from school: ‘one plays one equals window’. All this does is mess with the qualitative structure of mathematics - which we often take for granted.
This is what seemed to trouble Einstein so much about quantum physics: the need to write ourselves back into the scientific picture in order to make sense of the world. To recognise that the potentiality of human self-consciousness is the qualitative structure necessary for science to even make sense, let alone achieve anything.
Quoting Possibility
Well said! Hits the nail on the head.
To be honest, I'm not saying they are; I'm, as they say, clinging to a mere possibility. By the way, I want to bounce something off of you. My OP provides a rough sketch of the scientific consensus on color and as I mentioned red is 650 nm, green is 550 nm and blue is 450 nm with other colors falling on a continuum. Our eyes detect these colors and our brains perceive them as well. Color perception then can be construed as measurement of the component wavelengths of white light. Assuming a measuring instrument (here the eyes) must parallel the object being measured (here components of white light), isn't it reasonable that the perception of color is mathematical for that which is being measured is. A similar argument can be made of the spectral, not binary, nature of all perception. In short, our brains do handle numerical information, at least at the sensory level.
Maybe the choice of words can be pinned down to woolly thinking but, setting poor judgment aside, I daresay a lot of philosophy has, at there foundations, nothing more than mere possibility and a good number of philosophers have clung onto that sliver of hope and built rich and profoundly entertaining mindscapes upon it.
I think here there’s a lesson lurking under the surface, but I’ve done all I can to point it out.
Indeed you have. Much appreciated. If god exists, god bless and if he doesn't, good luck to you. I'll reply if I can think of anything worth spilling ink over. Ciao.
Well, I’m not one to dismiss possibility...
‘Mathematically describable’ doesn’t eliminate the notion of quality, though - we still have to interpret a mathematical description in a qualitative relation to the world - as thoughts, words or actions - in order to do anything with it.
A computer’s input and output is qualitatively structured - but the information system is quantified and reducible to a binary instruction code of 1s and 0s. Human consciousness is the other way around: our input and output are quantifiable, but the entire system operates in a qualitative relational structure. This ensures the most effective use of energy/information resources across the system to achieve homeostasis. The human system of information is reducible to a four-dimensional instruction code of attention and effort known as affect. That’s pretty complex for a basic code.
Only beginning? I thought you were on board from day one. :joke:
“When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.”
? Robert M. Pirsig,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Yeah you can say colours are illusions, that what matters or exists independently of us, are the wavelengths. But that's precisely not the quality people have in mind when they say look at the blue sky or the yellow dress. Reference to light waves as a confirmation that you are also seeing a yellow dress will end up in puzzled looks, and correctly so.
I think it is clear that quality and quantity are extremely different. We happen to emphasize two very different features of the world. We disentangle some of them by calling them "qualities" or "appearances" or "properties". We have another innate faculty, which for some reason which isn't clear, happens to pick out abstract natures about things, we call these "quantities" or "numbers".
What's 1 or 2 after all in relation to something in the world? Well, if you're going to apply quantity to something in the world, you are hollowing out a phenomenon, because you could be talking about 1 or 2 in relation to a coconut or a tiger or anything else you imagine.
So I don't see how quality is in any way an illusion.
Numbers are quantities, but shapes are qualities. Two similar triangles have the same qualities, the same shapes, but they may be of different sizes, quantitatively different.
For a more general distinction, I think quality and quantity are different aspect of pattern-matching:
The first thing we need to do to structure our experiences is to identify patterns in them. To do that, we need a pair of concepts that I call "quality" and "quantity", which allow us to think of there being several things that are nevertheless the same, without them being just one thing: they can be qualitatively the same, while being quantitatively different.
Any two electrons, for instance, are identical inasmuch as they are indistinguishable from each other, because every electron is alike, but they are nevertheless two separate electrons, not one electron. In contrast, the fictional character Clark Kent is, in his fictional universe, identical to the character of Superman in a quantitative way, not just a qualitative way: though they seem vastly different to casual observers, they are in fact the same single person.
If two people are said to drive "the same car", there are two things that that might mean: it could mean that they drive qualitatively identical cars (or as close to it as realistically possible, e.g. the same year, make, and model), or it could mean that they drive the same, single, quantitatively identical car, one car shared between both of them.
With these concepts of quality and quantity, we can describe patterns in our experience as quantitatively different instances or tokens of qualitatively the same tropes or types. Out of this arise the notion of several different things being members of the same set of things ("qualities" as I mean them here mapping roughly to the mathematical concept of "classes", an abstraction away from sets, and "quantities" as I mean them here mapping roughly to the mathematical concept of "cardinality", an abstraction away from the measure of a set or class). And with that can be conducted all of the construction of increasingly complex abstract objects that can be built up from sets, encompassing basically everything.