What's your ontology?
This was inspired by another thread, where the subject came up. We can think of ontology in a few ways. We can phrase it as Quine did, which I thought was quite good, simply by asking "what is there?"
There are many, many ways to answer this question. Borrowing the idea from Haack, we can say through Lewis Carroll:
"The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —"
Or we can simply say "everything", as Quine did. Nevertheless, I'm not interested in the topic of reference, I'm interested in things not words per se. My own view, which I've been working out is to use Sellar's distinction between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" as a good provisional distinction, or at least a useful heuristic.
I'd say I have a manifest ontology which includes "everything" and a scientific ontology which tends to be agnostic. What there is in the mind-independent world may well be what physics says there is, but physics is incomplete and is subject to revisions that may make any previous ontology obsolete.
The reason for including a "manifest ontology" is because I think our common-sense world is worth talking about, I want to talk about kings and ships and gods and everything else. Otherwise we would have very little to say.
But that's my approximation. So, on to the easy question: what is there?
There are many, many ways to answer this question. Borrowing the idea from Haack, we can say through Lewis Carroll:
"The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —"
Or we can simply say "everything", as Quine did. Nevertheless, I'm not interested in the topic of reference, I'm interested in things not words per se. My own view, which I've been working out is to use Sellar's distinction between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" as a good provisional distinction, or at least a useful heuristic.
I'd say I have a manifest ontology which includes "everything" and a scientific ontology which tends to be agnostic. What there is in the mind-independent world may well be what physics says there is, but physics is incomplete and is subject to revisions that may make any previous ontology obsolete.
The reason for including a "manifest ontology" is because I think our common-sense world is worth talking about, I want to talk about kings and ships and gods and everything else. Otherwise we would have very little to say.
But that's my approximation. So, on to the easy question: what is there?
Comments (137)
Very good OP, but I prefer the not so easy question: what necessarily is not there? (re: members of the empty set)
My own answer: systems.
But it's funny isn't it, everyone is compelled to agree with the Quine quote, but it leaves so much out. Two philosophers could presumably agree on every aspect of how the mind, say, works in practice, but disagree on whether it exists. The question leaves out all the interesting bits; the speculative/conjectural/provisional how answers, and the frames of interpretation of how things are.
It seems to me "What is there?" is an extremely limited question, it leaves out why someone would assent to one thing existing and not another; the "quibbling over cases" constitutive of the quote's construal of ontology is actually driven by a different subject matter; the hows, the frames. The latter, IMO, is the appropriate level of discourse for ontology.
Bascially, who cares whether we say it exists or not, how it works is the important thing. EG, does someone who believes God exists as a social construct and myth disagree with a hardline atheist on the appropriate ontology for God?
Doctrinally, "What is there?" is answered by "How we imagine what there is".
That's fair. But would a framework of yours try to do away with certain postulates, or would you try to keep as many things as possible?
Quoting fdrake
Well, we can speak of God, but he needn't exist: he'd be a fictitious entity for an atheist and the Supreme Being for a believer. Thus we could retain God in a manifest ontology, i.e. at least a mental construction.
Your answer is true, on a person by person basis. My initial reaction would be that of being careful not to do away with things, unless we can show such things to be of no use, which is admittedly a very broad goal. It would be nice to reach some agreement on this area, but it's extremely difficult, given how different we all are.
Could you expand on that?
Like listing some examples, or describing how such an approach works, more or less.
I don't think it's possible to answer that question generically? If you're doing ontology, and how you frame things / your conceptual approach is a driver of the answers you get to ontological questions, there's no higher court to evaluate it in. If you stake yourself on a claim, you're already going to start interpreting things one way rather than another. EG, what could possibly decide whether it's better to say:
Quoting Manuel
God doesn't exist vs God does exist but only as a social construct vs God does exist but only as an idea?
That's the kind of thing that depends on the weather and starting point, right? Questioning the question is utmost importance with ontology.
Quoting Manuel
Yes. I'm not trying to come at this from a place of radical relativism regarding what there is; the "things themselves" are suggestive. And you can't fiat reality away. It's more than the things themselves strongly underdetermine how they are interpreted; so a large part of ontology is finding an appropriate angle of attack on what you're making an ontology of.
EG, imagine these parody paper titles:
Mereological nihilism and the impossibility of community action
The Rhizomatic Ontology Of Tuber Roots (this one's actually got real seminars on it, fuck)
Kant and the Impossibility of Experimental Science
The Irrelevance of Belief to Human Decision Making: propositional content from Aristotle to Gadamer.
The angle of attack on "what is there" strongly influences what is concluded about it. And that doesn't stop there being wrong answers, better answers, worse answers, irrelevant questions...
I don't know if my general metaphysical tastes matter so much; systems (assemblage theory stuff), how questions, frameworks around how questions, questioning the question, emphasis on locality rather than architectonics...
It does. I'm far from confident in what I'm saying, I'm just trying things out. So let me pose to you the following question, given that all of this depends on the "starting point", what would you leave out in your
system? As an example that could frame the conversation, how would you deal with fictitious entities like Frodo or Santa Claus?
Quoting fdrake
I'm assuming The Ontology of Tuber Roots was discussed by some Deleuzian? :lol: One has to keep one's eye's open for the Paris Postmodernists, they come up with the fanciest of ideas.
Let's take that excellent classic, underrated Kant and the Impossibility of Experimental Science. Here things get tricky: how would the phrase after "Kant" form an entity in the world? "and the" don't seem to be entities, "impossibility" can be thought of obscurely such as a squared-circle or the like. "Experimental Science" on the other hand, seems to me to be a concept which we can apply by pointing to instances of it.
I get the point, that "impossibility of experimental science" doesn't make sense. But would the things discussed in such titles eventually lead to mental entities, concepts or what? Taken as titles, only one word in the title speaks of entities "tuber roots", as I understand them. Well, "Kant", "Aristotle" and "Gadamer" were persons, which I suppose are concepts (?) as well.
And apologies if this type of talk sounds totally crazy, confused or unintelligible, I want to see how other think these things out, if at all.
I'm not following the "If no mind then no X, then X is a member".
I believe this could apply to say particles or cells. God, for those who believe in him. Seven seems to be mind-independent, somehow.
Not so much with "The American Way", that seems to me to belong to persons and their ideas. Absent all people, "The American Way" doesn't seem to have any meaning to me. Sure, you could say the same thing about atoms, and that's a hard problem, but a bit less obscure.
Quoting tim wood
Which is quite paradoxical. We think we know what many of these terms and ideas mean, but as soon as we subject them to scrutiny, we find out we have much more to say than what we initially thought.
Yes! And I found it ridiculous even though I love Deleuze. I find shitting on Deleuze from afar distasteful, what I found distasteful about the seminar - though it is wonderfully Deleuzian in form - was that Deleuze's metaphysics was being taken as simultaneously a metaphor and an explicans for tuber root branching processes.
Quoting Manuel
I wouldn't want to say Frodo doesn't exist, because we're speaking about them. I think Frodo exists as a fictitious entity. I think that works because people believe in Frodo, and don't seem confused over whether the Lord of the Rings is real etc. I like Austin's analysis here (the pragmatic distinction between existence and reality). As a rule of thumb I don't like "exists" I prefer "exists as", specifying the mode in which something exists.
I also wouldn't want to say "Frodo exists" in most contexts. Because then it sounds like "Frodo is real", and that's just delusional.
I think Santa Claus is quite different from Frodo, Santa Claus is embedded in the rituals of social custom in a way Frodo just isn't. Parents invest in convincing their children that Santa Claus exists, they don't with Frodo. They exist quite differently.
But they both seem to be part of social customs, and they're both not real... So perhaps in some umbrella term way they both exist as social constructs!
Quoting Manuel
I think perhaps you're focussing on the paper title statements and what entities they quantify over and whether the nouns in them have referents [hide=*](for some sense of "have" furnished by a conception of "exists")[/hide]. That's one way of interpreting existential commitment (a Quinean way), and you can find what someone's committed to from what statements they make ("to be is to be the value of a bound variable"). Another way is to imagine what must be the case for someone to act how they do, believe what they do, irrespective of the propositional form of the statement. Like when someone says "I do" in a wedding, that entails a host of things exist in a myriad of ways - like a partner, wedding as a social custom, romantic relationships, courtship, contracts, rituals... But none of those are quantified over in the text of the speech act.
I agree, this distinction is fundamental and it can help constrain us in some manner. If something is mind dependent, it seems to me that one is less constrained: one can add or subtract to an entity anything you deem reasonable, which other people may disagree with. Mind-independence, on the other hand, seems to follow from the evidence, we can't assign any arbitrary equations to particle physics.
And yes, what constitutes a reasonable game is very elastic. Someone like Rosenberg would play a game that only like three people follow, for example.
To be clear, I think Foucault is fine and Deleuze is quite creative, though I still think that some of the observations made by Sokal and Bricmont merit a reply. Deleuze is instrumental, for example, in the novels of Michael Cisco, who is totally unique and mind expanding. But I can't extend being charitable to Derrida or Lacan. I know others will strongly disagree, but it's just not for me.
Quoting fdrake
I think that is reasonable. I'd maybe switch around "real" and "existent", we could say Frodo is a real fictional entity, that is, you find him in Lord of the Rings as a character. But he is not an existent entity, not a person you could signal out as being Frodo from Lord of the Rings. I don't know enough about Santa Claus to say much about him, in terms of his origin story. But saying they are social constructs makes sense to me.
Quoting fdrake
Yeah, I'd like to avoid commitment ontologies actually. What I think there is may change as I learn new things or change.
I'm more sympathetic to thinking that beliefs need not be propositional, although we need to speak about these things to get a better idea about them. At any one moment, we have a myriad of "dormant" beliefs, some which are possibly impossible to put adequately into words.
Are entities only the ones we can name, like river, phoenix or bed? What happens with such things like "and", "despite", "furthermore", "but" and such words. They don't imply entities. Yet I said I wanted to talk about things and not words.... Oh well...
Thank you. It's the product of constantly being embarrassed by talking to people much smarter than me. And much conceptual anguish. All the time. :)
:up:
Inferring what exists from what we do seems backwards to me. Like "If you wanna know what exists, look at what people do!". But like... I wanna change what I do based on what I think. I'm sure the two can be reciprocally interrogated - what people do, what there is. And perhaps that inference, from practice to commitment, is a very sophisticated move in such a reciprocally determining game, but it doesn't tell you anything the original practice doesn't.
You made some comments about the manifest and scientific image, in those terms commitment ontologies feed the manifest image into an ontology, whereas it seems philosophy when it's working well can be a bridge between the scientific and manifest image as well as a handmaiden in both domains.
Quoting Manuel
:up:
I know the feel. I feel that way about Lacan too!
I think of ontologies as metaphysical tools. I envision my trusty tool box. I have a problem, I open it up and pull out the one that's most useful in that particular situation. Example - I'm an engineer, so in my work life; knowing things, knowing what I know, and knowing how well I know them is important. A scientific world view often works well for that. On the other hand, a scientific world view has significant weaknesses. It focuses our attention tightly and things tend to be left out. See the ongoing discussion of mysticism.
This is an ontological judgement and, as such, it's already working within a defined ontological framework. Not to be all meta and all. That's the problem with, one of the problems with, ontology. Where do you stand?
I agree!
I don't think it's a problem, it's a cost of doing business.
Agreed. But then the problem is that people don't recognize that. They think that the right place to stand is self-evident.
If we were to stick to that standard, we'd probably still be living in animism, or something along those lines. It's somewhat akin to that saying "you only see what you know." From that, it simply follows that if we don't know, we won't see.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, that's a noble goal. We still can't get rid of our common sense, like seeing the sun rising and falling, or thinking we are the the center of the universe, but now we know better. What's frustrating is when despite the enormous progress in physics, specifically in the quantum domain, we learn almost nothing about manifest reality. It's better than nothing though.
Aye! I think much of "manifest reality" isn't physical strictly speaking; as in you don't gain too much knowledge about a social institution from the thought that its office buildings are made of atoms. Much comes from the arrangement and interaction of things. I think there's more stuff in the scientific image than physics, eg the social sciences, neuroscience, genetics, engineering, anthropology. The widespread focus on physics as the discipline of knowledge that deals with fundamental reality seems pretty weird to me!
That sounds very much like pragmatism, along the lines of William James.
The issue is what to do with entities that initially may appear to be of little use, such as speaking about Pegasus or Alchemy. Of course, one can reply by saying those are useful in certain contexts such as mythology and history, respectively. Then I'd only add, that while that makes sense, I'm skeptical of believing in innumerable contexts for every term, perhaps finding out how we organize such talk can help us see how we think a bit better. Or perhaps it's a waste of time.
Yes, we are often left to speaking about many areas of life in terms of mysticism. Alternatively we can read novels. Which is fine and nourishing and reassuring. I suppose my interests at the moment is giving visibility to knowledge or the manifest image, in a manner that is roughly intuitive. This often leads to discussions of phenomenology, clarifying a bit how different aspects of our consciousness interact with the world.
100,000%.
Sometimes in other forums, philosophy of mind sections are literally only about neuroscience. It should then be called brain philosophy, which is fine. But so far as I can see, current brain science says very, very, very little about the mind. Which is strange, admittedly. Still, if we "reduce" mind to brain, we lose out on almost everything.
I sometimes ask, in all sincerity: give me one example of how a brain state produces a qualitative state, such as seeing the sky or a tree. Nothing fancy. I'm not asking them to tell me how I'm able to see the universe through a telescope. They can't give one example. How is this philosophy of mind?
I suspect something along these lines are correct in relation to entities, meaning such words "and", "but", don't tell things us about the world. Which is interesting and should highlight what you said, the mind-dependent character of words. They're important for sentence structure but of course, sentences and the world are two quite different things, or so it seems to me.
Existence is a major problem. The only property I can't think away from the world is extension. Everything else is very much subject to our mental architecture, specifically manifest, experiential qualities.
What would an answer to that request be like? I mean how would you know you've had such an answer. I could say - your occipital cortex starts a chain of neural firings which, on average, lead to reports consistent with what we describe as 'seeing a tree'. Why isn't that an answer, what's missing?
The general idea would be, that by your reporting that neural firings in the occipital cortex are consistent with me seeing a tree, you haven't said how is it possible that neurons could possibly resemble or explain being in a state such as "seeing a tree".
Simply put: a neuron looks nothing like green or brown, it doesn't smell anything and by itself, it sees nothing. So there is a gap between quantity like number of neurons involved and location of brain module and experience.
I'm not denying that consciousness arises from the brain, it clearly must. I just don't think we know how it could be possible that it does, as is the case.
The difference is between experience and non-mental matter.
Though, to be fair, effects do things that go way beyond there cause. Water being the effect of interacting molecules goes beyond out theoretical descriptions of it, in terms of what we can do with water, how we interact with it, etc.
But that would be sensing the neuron, not the tree. You're asking how sensing the tree produces the feelings you have. The answer is that the external effects from the tree fire nerve endings of various sorts which trigger other neurons, the collection of which, coupled with the feedback you get from your further interaction with it and your social environment, is what it is for you to experience seeing a tree.
What I'm not getting is why that isn't a satisfactory answer. Oddly though it seems as if were I to say "light hits the neurons on your occipital cortex and they turn brown", that would somehow satisfy you. But then who looks at the brown neurons and how?
I mean, first off, in manifest reality, you need intentionality, you need to be in front of a tree for those effects to come into play. If you had no intentionality or "aboutness", there would be nothing to produce the effects, or being more accurate, there would be too many factors coming in to distinguish anything from anything else.
No, neurons turning brown or looking like trees wouldn't explain how the brain does what it does, you are correct. But I'm speaking of the mental, what you are seeing right now, as you read these letters and whatever examples come to mind as you think of a reply. You are saying that this is caused by neurons, I don't deny they play a crucial part. Ok, when someone loses functionality in Brocas area, they can't speak. So Broca's area causes speech or is intimately involved. But there's much more to speech than what can be accounted for by looking at Broca's area, or vision for that matter in the occipital cortex.
The issue would be how rich the reply is, given how little we understand about brains. There is much more complexity in manifest reality than what can be said by appealing to causes in the brain. There seems to be a massive gap in our knowledge when we go from the brain to our picture of the world.
Also "knowing a tree", "speaking of trees", "classifying trees" aren't explained by anything in current brain science. I can't be much clearer than this.
My ontology is pluralist, I suppose (but also a cop-out of sorts). There is a vast variety of individual things and substances. I think metaphysical pluralism can account for differences in time and space as well as differences in kind, which monism and other taxonomical accounts rarely offer. This also entails nominalism and individualism.
Agreed, but there's perfectly adequate models of intention in neuroscience.
Quoting Manuel
No (although it is). Right now I'm asking you to explain why you think it isn't. You seem to have offered nothing but your incredulity at moment. I mean, it seems completely implausible to me that electron go through both slits at once (or whatever it is they do, I'm no physicist), but I don't refute the physicist with that argument.
Quoting Manuel
Yes. Fortunate then that Broca's area is networked to thousands of other areas responsible for modelling those other aspects.
Quoting Manuel
This just seems like a bare assertion. Can I ask what your expertise or understanding is in neuroscience against which you're measuring the complexity of manifest reality to reach such a conclusion?
Intentionality is assumed in these models. While it is perfectly true that the mental is a physical phenomena, I think it's a big mistake to forget that the brain is a construction of the mind as well. It goes both ways. We have to stipulate what the brain is, what parts of the body are directly relevant to the brain and so on. For example, are the eye's part of the brain?
It is crucial to remember that we also have another structure that resembles the brain, but is not conscious:the gut brain, containing as much as 500 millions neurons. But as we know, the gut brain is not conscious.
Quoting Isaac
Absolutely. And I have said many times that the consciousness arises from the brain. I've never denied it. If you think that seeing a tree and all that goes into such an act, such as belief, perception, categorization, psychic continuity and so forth is explained by saying, it's because of actions in the brain, you've said almost nothing. Priestley, Reid and many others knew as much already hundreds of years ago, if not much before that, so it isn't particularly new.
If you think that by studying the brain, we will understand not only seeing trees, which includes all of what I mentioned (categorization, psychic continuity, etc.) then I think you're mistaking different aspects of reality. You have to assume these things before doing any science.
Quoting Isaac
I think it is an evident mistake to think that you need to do neuroscience to do philosophy of mind at all. If what you say is true, then Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Russell, Strawson, etc. haven't done anything.
But then this boils down to different assertions: I say that the complexity of manifest reality cannot be explained by neuroscience, we simply know way too little. We don't know how something as simply as C. Elegans does anything and we've mapped all 302 neurons. A human being is a bit harder than a worm: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK154158/
But then you'll reply that all this will be explained by neuroscience, that I am only making an assertion. That manifest reality is explained by processes in the brain is another assertion, which again, says almost nothing about all the stuff we do with our minds. So, we're stuck.
Then the only option available is for you to study neuroscience. I'll focus on manifest reality. There need be no clash, I don't think.
Interesting, but where is the cop-out? I don't see it.
I tend to enjoy William James quite bit when he talks about this things, but I'm more sympathetic to monism.
What do you mean by individualism in this account?
There is agreement. There is disagreement. And the simple fact that neither one matters, itself does not matter. For they both proceed apace as if they did. And that is all that matters.
Damn man, that's actually a very nice quote, not gonna lie. :)
Thank you, and a tip 'o the hat to a mocha venti on a long drive back from the big city. :blush:
:up:
My ontology is likewise mostly negative: not so much about the kinds of things that there are, but about the kinds of things it wouldn't make any sense for there to be -- things that make no experiential difference in the world, or things that are simultaneously one way and also a contrary but equally real way depending on who you ask -- with the kinds of things there are being something or another in the complementary set to that, to be answered more specifically by science rather than philosophy.
I do have some further thoughts on how to think about the relationship between something being, something doing, something being experienced, something being done-unto, and something experiencing, all in terms of function, but that's not really a question about which kinds of things do or don't exist, just what it means to exist at all.
I think a pluralist and nominalistic account of the world leads to individualism in the political sphere. The individual is the only valid classification worth considering, mainly because the existence of groups and other taxonomies can be seriously questioned.
Ah, there is much that can be said about these matters. I'd tend to agree that thinking in terms of the individual is most parsimonious and classification in general can be fiendishly difficult and very much up to debate. If this is on the right track, as I suspect it is, how do you move from one individual to another?
As for pluralism, is there a minimum in terms of how many entities you allow or does this not enter into your worldview?
One makes bread by sifting flour and mixing it with yeast and heating the result. A cook who doubts the existence of flour and yeast will get nowhere.
But ontology encourages just such doubt. Hence, ontology is antithetical to cooking.
A similar argument can be offered for anything useful. Hence, ontology is antithetical to anything useful.
To continue the Carollian reference,
One ought beware that one's ontology is not a boojum. A system, a taxonomy of being, a pluralism of individuals; in each case, what will never be met with again? When one treats ontology as a list, some stuff is necessarily not there.
Quite. One wonders where ontology is useful, apart from in philosophy circles.
I understand that view. I don't necessarily think it need entail someone doubting the existence of flower or cooking. Not if your a realist about experience. Maybe someone like Dennett might take some issue with that. Rosenberg certainly would, for him it's only bosons and fermions. I don't think a life of bosons and fermions is interesting by itself.
The idea is not so much a list, but carving out what belongs where. Frodo belongs to fiction, that doesn't mean he is not a real fictional character. Likewise, H20 is what science describes, but it's not what we encounter when we deal with water in our everyday, which is what belongs in manifest experience.
As to what doesn't belong at all. That's a good question. Which is why I'm seeking different views on the matter. But again, I see where you are coming from.
And so it begins.
AI. Ethnoscience. Common sense understanding.
What do we say about numbers or ideas?
That's overwhelmingly possible. But I learn, hopefully. :)
See how the evil vampire who is actually a nerd living in his mother's basement reins in ontology to the needs of his individualistic worldview.
All I want is to give structure to my ignorance. It's clear that you obviously know your philosophy quite well.
All I can say is enjoy.
Doubt does indeed stop a lot of people from doing things. But there is a whole 'nother class of people who don't let a little thing like doubt stop them from whatever.
Maybe one day you’ll learn to face my ideas instead of the little effigy you’ve constructed in your fantasies. Until then consider my name as your trigger-warning.
There's nothing to face.
Yet here you are evoking my name. What bothers you about my individualistic worldview, so much that you need to call me names?
Quoting Manuel
What is it that you think stipulating/remembering these two issues helps with?
Quoting Manuel
Who said anything about explaining it by saying 'because of actions in the brain'? Your contention was that no-one could give you an example of...
Quoting Manuel
You did not ask how the entire process works. If I asked how a car works, a description of the fuel, the engine, the wheels...etc is usually taken to suffice. It's not usual to say that this description is inadequate because it doesn't go into the sociol-political history of the motor manufacturing industry. You're using 'explain' in a very weird way which seems reserved entirely for talk of the connection between brains states and mind.
Quoting Manuel
What on earth would give you the impression that I think studying the brain can yield an understanding of all that? What, in fact, makes you think that any sane person would think that?
Quoting Manuel
You can do philosophy of mind without understanding neuroscience if you want to. My question had nothing to do with merely doing philosophy of mind. You made a specific claim - that neuroscience had no explanation of "knowing a tree", "speaking of trees", or "classifying trees". In order to see that a field has no explanation of something you must have conducted a fairly thorough survey of that field - I was just asking about the manner of that survey.
Quoting Manuel
Indeed, but not one anyone is, or would, make, I think. So we're untroubled by it's lack of support.
Quoting Manuel
What happens when you look at an fMRI scan then? When your 'manifest reality' includes neural scans, psychological experimental data, EEG and microprobe readouts, saccade diagrams, the actions of lesion patients... What then? You talk as if cognitive scientists are non-human, that the stuff we look at is somehow apart from this 'manifest reality' and we have to, what, invent our own language so as to not pollute yours with what we've seen?
Personally, I don’t find that anything “breaks” when you say that mental states are physical states. Example: “She slapped him because she was angry”, “She slapped him because
So I prefer Isaac’s view. It doesn’t have to deal with the problems of dualism. Such as: if “seeing a tree” is an experience independent from the physical state, how does it influence it and seem influenced by it? Same with “anger”. How did the emotion move the arm (I would simply say that the emotion is precisely the neural event that moved the arm)? I also prefer minimalist ontologies so that probably plays a role.
Quoting Manuel
If someone understands everything there is about the physical state of someone seeing a tree but has never seen a tree themselves, does that person “understand seeing trees”. I ask because this caused a lot of confusion on another thread. There are 2 uses of the word understand here. The former means comprehension of facts. The latter means having an experience. The former is used for example in “You don’t understand calculus”. The latter is used in “You don’t understand pain”.
Sorry. I was reading into what you were saying much more than what you did. I thought you were coming from a Churchland perspective. Alex Rosenberg would argue in this manner.
Quoting Isaac
I don't see the problem. When you look at an fMRI scan, you're trying to find connections between different activities in the brain and whatever the stimulus may be. Establishing that is far from trivial as you know.
The data given by such devices can offer interesting clues as to how the brain processes information, for example Stanislas Dehaene work, shows that it takes .500 seconds for something to register into conscious awareness half the time, this proves that the vast majority of what goes on in the brain does not reach consciousness. I think that's interesting.
Not at all. You don't need to invent any language. If you are speaking about seeing a tree, I can say I saw a tree and you can speak about into terms of neurophysiological processes in the brain.
I mean, you could do that. But it would be very strange. You'd eventually describe everything we do in neurophysiological language. I don't see how that helps us much by way of dealing with other people in ordinary life.
Quoting khaled
I agree with Strawson's Real Materialism: everything that concretely exists is physical, including experiential states. On this view there is no difference between a "physical state" and a "mental state", because the mind is physical. When we speak of mind, we are simply stressing the mental aspects of physical reality.
How would you describe this ontology, as in what entities would it postulate?
I don't follow.
No? Why would I do that?
Quoting Manuel
I could just do this as I have been.
But if this is what you think then why were you asking “how” neurons produce experiences?
You said: "She slapped him because she was angry”, “She slapped him because
You said it's the same thing.
Quoting khaled
I think in terms of different levels of abstraction. Manifest reality is the ordinary level of everyday life. Neuropsychological explanations are a higher level of abstraction.
What I have in mind when I ask that question is that it seems to me that a lot is left missing. You can say that stimulating X and Y area of the brain is the same as seeing a tree. I think that while in principle you could stimulate the brain to do this, we know way too little about the brain.
The how question is related to emergence. What is the relationship between neurons and seeing color, or smelling wood, etc.,, etc.
I never got an answer. What's your ontology? :)
Could you say a little more? Saying love in and of itself is a bit confusing.
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting Manuel
Apologies for the delay in responding.
In sum: We cannot agree on 'what there is' because any determination – ontological commitment – reflects our interests/biases or some domain with which we're engaged. Thus, the history of incommensurable, divergent, metaphysics. I've pursued, therefore, an inquiry based on what we must agree on rationally: the Principle of Non-contradiction. (NB: Even dialetheism or paraconsistent logic implicitly accept the PNC axiom in so far as such systems deny it.) From there I'm working through, or working out, an apophatic modal-metaphysics (or negative ontology à la "negative theology"); and once 'what necessarily is not there' (i.e. the impossibles) is determined as a principle? category? set-membership rule?, I speculate that the remainder – whatever is not determined 'impossible' as such – is 'what there is' (i.e. the possibles [re: irrealism, actualism ]), no doubt as Spinoza (or Einstein) would say, sub specie aeternitatus.
Two links below from an old thread, same topic, unfortunately without much engagement by others with my speculations.
(i) denial of impossible worlds –
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/351534
(ii) elaboration on 'non-necessary facts' –
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/352403
Thoughts?
Yea. And I’d still use the former. Since they’re the same thing anyways I don’t have to explain the neurological state that is anger when simply saying “angry” will do.
Quoting Manuel
So your objection is more empirical and fundamental. I don’t know much about neurology so idk if it’s founded or not.
Quoting Manuel
What exists? Why stuff of course! In other words I’m a monist. I think the only things that exist are physical though I hesitate to use the word because it’s basically lost all meaning. “Quantum wave states” have no position, speed, defined mass, color or smell but we still call them physical.
As presented in those threads, it's a bit difficult for me to follow. I mean, if you accept say, the Many Worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics, then that's one thing: what would be included in these worlds is very hard to say, we can't go into another world to see what they may or may not contain. I'm assuming that in these other possible worlds airplanes could not be made completely out of the stone, such as the one's we have here. Likewise for other such postulates.
I'm not good at logic, sadly. So I don't follow what you mean when you say:
"the world is not the world' (i.e. nothingness, absolute absence / nonexistence) is an impossible world, or a way the world necessarily could not have been ...
..... if impossible worlds do not exist, then 'the world is not the world' does not exist; and if 'the world is not the world' does not exist, then possible worlds exist; therefore possible worlds necessarily exist."
That is, I think you could stipulate possible worlds based on Everett's theory. Or it can be used as a heuristic to come up with thought experiments: if we were further away, or closer to the sun, we could not exist.
I think the difficulty in these topics is attempting to separate what belongs as a construction of the mind as opposed to what's there absent us, which is extremely difficult, maybe impossible.
I think I do follow your facts argument though. I'd agree in so far as the world is not made out of facts, but of different kinds of things. We use facts to attempt to describe these things, but we can phrase these fact in many different ways.
In part, yes. Why stop at neurons? Hammeroff says that consciousness is due to microtubules located inside axons. Apparently these microtubules react to quantum states. I don't understand this. But it could be the case. So while we are saying that neurons cause a specific reaction, it could be that what's responsible for us seeing a tree are actually quantum events.
Sure, you can say that. It may be true. It doesn't reach the level of psychology or of manifest reality: saying that quantum events cause me to see a tree may be true. I can't talk about intentionality, the status of fictional objects, how social institutions differ from apparent order in nature, how consciousness binds objects as belonging to one group or another, etc. So these are just different domains of enquiry, or so it seems to me.
Quoting khaled
Here we entirely agree. It's a better alternative than substance dualism. So it's does not say much, but how so many different events can be made of one type of stuff is pretty crazy to me.
There are contingent ways the world could have been (i.e. contingent versions of the world), or can be described (i.e. narrated, measured, mapped, modeled), that are constituted by contingent facts.
There aren't any 'non-contingent (i.e. necessary) facts in this ontology' – which I'd attempted to sketch-out reasons for in my previous post.
Also, by contingent I mean 'always can, but not necessarily, be otherwise or not all'.
[quote=e.g. contingent versions / descriptions of the world][i]Nixon could have been impeached, removed, prosecuted and died in prison.
You could have been raised speaking Mandarin.
Nature can be described via poetry.
Nature can be described via ecological systems.
Time can be described phenomenologically (re: duration).
Time can be described chronometrically (re: clocks).
This post could have been posted a decade ago and written in Swahili and read by someone other than you.[/i]
Etcetera ...[/quote]
These belong to the set of what there is.
I think I understand your point a bit better. So things and the world could have been otherwise. These possible worlds belong can be thought of as belonging to a class of potential descriptions for each particular world.
When you say there are no necessary facts for this world. Do you have in mind something along the lines of: had the variables during the big bang been a bit different, we would not exist?
If that's roughly on the right track, then what could not exist in any possible world? I'm thinking that circular triangles are impossible, irrespective of the world. Unless you'd go along the lines of saying, we lack the cognitive capacity to think of such an object.
It's quite interesting.
Yes.
'Necessary, or non-contingent, facts' – as I pointed out – because such notions are contradictory (or contain inconsistent predicates or they're unconditional-unchangeable). Btw, I use "possible world" to mean contingent version / description of this world – not some separate, other world or worlds.
Quoting Goodman, Fact Fiction and Forecast
Casual plagiarism.
Quoting Isaac
Maybe one part of "what's missing" is regarding the scope of useful condensations of the information. On a day to day basis you don't have access to someone's brain, but you do have access to someone's behaviour.
That raises the question of how to admit the utility of folk psychology heuristics without making them the be all and end all of one's philosophy of mind. So, whatever symmetry there is between brain events and psychological/intentional events can surely be leveraged both ways without reducing either domain to the other in all contexts? Two examples:
EG 1: if I associate a class of behaviours (say tunnel vision in panic attacks) with a class of brain events (decreased correlation of emotional processing flows with cognitive flows and disruption of function of the visual cortex), I can still use some folksy descriptors of tunnel vision "extreme focus on one thing, significance of mild threats elevated, misclassification of events into threats" even if "focus", "significance", "threats" and "misclassification" are really somewhere between metaphors and models. Even if the models are wrong, they're still useful ([s]Tukey[/s] Box).
EG 2, if I learn my partner "hates garlic", that gives me some of their behavioural tendencies and lets me incorporate that into how I treat them. If I'm a hard reductionist or eliminativist or one of those brands, that doesn't stop me from believing "my partner hates garlic" in whatever metaphorical/analogical register mental events lay (to be later mapped to neural ones) and acting upon it.
Again, how are you reaching this conclusion absent of a thorough survey of that which neuroscience does, in fact, know about the brain?
Also, if seeing a tree were more than certain neural activity, then what is the more that it would be? As has already been pointed to...
Quoting khaled
Nothing is made clearer by invoking some 'missing piece' from the neurological explanation. If anything the situation becomes more complicated. Much like introducing magic into a novel, once you've allowed your main character to read minds, or travel in time, or pass through walls to get them out of some tricky spot you're left having to support those possibilities with an increasingly unstable system of props and caveats. I can't think why anyone would want to bring that upon themselves. We have a clear connection between the brain and all mental events (via scans, lesion studies, probes...) so far every mental event has been linked to a neural one. We could say "ah, but they're only linked, it does not prove that one just is the other", but why? If we can explain the existence of these mental phenomena, and their relationship to the brain, using the simple argument that one just is the other, then why would we want to avoid doing so. What does it gain us?
You're not any less able to talk about social institutions, poetry, politics etc. even if we adopt a model where all these things can be explained by the interaction of neurons, to do so entirely would be too complicated to even contemplate. The weather can be explained in terms of movement of air molecules, but it's a lot easier to talk about pressure gradients and temperature. But to ignore or contradict such detailed models where they do have some use would be equally daft.
Quoting Manuel
Then I think you've also misunderstood the Churchlands' and Rosenberg's arguments. Perhaps cite the claims you have in mind, might help explain where you're coming from.
I think Goodman's irrealism is quite good but it seems not to have had that much of an impact in philosophy. Not that I think it's all correct, but his argument has merit.
What that quote says is important: we would not want to muddy our enquiry into the nature of the world with literal unicorns or dragons a much else.
But how do we determine what's not part of the world? We are part of the world, so it's hard to eliminate ourselves altogether from any given picture. That's always been a problem for me. We can say physics tells us about this and I won't protest in the least. But there is the problem of how we discover these things and how we are lead to postulate what we do.
So even physics is tied to the physicist in some manners.
I cited the fact that we have mapped all 302 neurons in C Elegans. We don't know why the thing moves. I don't think that is very promising for our prospects in neuroscience.
What more is there to seeing a tree than the movement or excitation of certain neurons? What I take the tree to mean, how I categorize it, how I relate to it, etc. It comes from the brain all right, but these things are assumed, not discovered.
There's the problem also that neurons might be the wrong place to look, in that case we might have to look at microtubules. But then it goes down to the level of physics. You would not be wrong in saying that seeing a tree is nothing more that the complex behavior of quantum phenomena. I don't think that says much at all.
My answers aren't satisfying to you, or they are evasive, but I can't think of something else to say. It seems evident to me that science can only say so much. We don't know what 95% of the universe is made out of, we call it "dark matter" and "dark energy", but we have no clue what it is. What makes you possibly think that neuroscience is in a better state?
That's a hard topic. I'd guess that some aspects of folk psychology can and have been incorporated by the sciences. Others like "belief", "intentionality" and related concepts may not be reducible to science at all.
Quoting fdrake
That's a useful way to think about it. It's not possible to get rid of such a vocabulary. There's too many words to find a corresponding scientific concept to.
Yes, I think that's true - in that it's missing from a neurological account. But that would be a matter of translation wouldn't it? The question the folk psychologist should be asking of the neuroscientist in that context is more like "but what does that mean for me?". The accusation would be "You've not translated that", rather than "you've not accounted for something".
The difference I see between the two is that in the first we have a (hopefully) faithful relationship between the two via an accurate translation (as both your examples show), in the second there's scope for all manner of additional entities to be created and manipulated. If X neurological process just is Y folk psychology, then we have a good translation. I think the problem comes when there's common element in the framings. Say, for example something as basic as causality (which exists both in folk psychology frames and in neuroscience ones). Here, if neuroscience shows that A follows B but the nearest folk psychology translation would have B follow A, I think we have a breakdown of translatability. There's little that can be done to rescue the folk psychology of B following A because the concept of how one thing follows another is common to both frames so can't have any function applied to translate it.
(I'm thinking particularly of models of socially mediated perception or emotion here, as examples)
One could say that B(folk) needs to be translated to A(neuroscience, and vice versa to keep 'follows from' intact, and I don't think that's necessarily impossible... just not sure how the folk psychologists would take it.
It seems to me that there's a fundamental difference between the inclusive project of relating folk psychology to neuroscience (an admirable task) and the conservative project of upholding folk psychology against neuroscience. It's not always easy to tell who is doing which at first blush, but I'm not yet ready to be so charitable as to assume all comers are of the former persuasion (but maybe that's just my general captiousness - bringing a sledgehammer to the castle tour again!)
We do. It moves because some external trigger sets off a chain of neural signals which evetually lead to acetylcholine being released from motor neuron cells into the neuro-muscular synapse which causes the protein channels to open in the membrane of the neighbouring muscle cell. The resultant ion diffusion alters the structure of tubules within the cytoplasm of the cells causing them to contract. So it moves.
I can't think where you're getting the idea from that we don't know why it moves.
Quoting Manuel
I can't make sense of this sentence, I'm afraid, perhaps you could rephrase it?
Quoting Manuel
Really, that seems wildly dismissive of all the work physicists have done. Why would you say it doesn't say much?
Sure. You're speaking about stimuli and reaction. I'm talking about will. We can stimulate many organisms to do one thing or another, that doesn't tell us about the will, or why it moves from one side to the next. In the case of human beings, when we speak of will, science either denies it exists or tells us nothing about it.
You can speak of stimulating a finger to go up, but it's very different from moving your finger. It's a bit like Wittgenstein once asked:
"What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arms goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?"
Quoting Isaac
I take it that as human beings, we begin with consciousness. What do I mean by such a word? Simply this: the words you are reading, the thought that comes to your mind when I speak of a "tree" or a "pink elephant", the keyboards you can choose to focus on as you type in your keyboard, the light coming out of a window, etc.
I take it that, skeptical games aside, this is evident. Nevertheless these words have meaning as you read them, you can think of a pink elephant in your mind, perhaps weakly perhaps vividly.
You already know that a tree is not a building, nor a piece of plastic. When you go outside and walk, you can pick out a tree and not confuse it with a streetlight and so on. This process of putting things in proper context, of categorizing it accordingly, of understanding that you see a tree is something already given in consciousness.
You can't take these things away and study the world "value free" as it were. It always accompanies most thoughts about things. This can't be studied by looking at the brain because it's always presupposed. It's like trying to think away a mirage on a hot desert day, you know it's a mirage, but you can't take it out of your head, it's still a phenomenon for you.
Quoting Isaac
Democritus based on a good observation said that: " The Intellect speaks first: There seems to be colour, there seems to be sweetness, there seems to be bitterness. But really there are only atoms and the void."
The basic point would be similar, all is atoms and void. One could say that our understanding of atoms has gone way beyond anything Democritus could have dreamed of.
But that's talking about the constituents of matter magnified to such an enormous extent, that is seems to be highly unlikely that physics can say much about mind. It says a lot about matter and the other stuff the universe is made of and is amazing for it.
However Democritus finished that famous quote by saying: "The senses reply: Poor Intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat."
Physics is amazing, while saying almost nothing of mind. Neuroscience is extremely useful, while not being able to say much about the self, psychic continuity, etc.
I'd like to claim originality for that idea, but it comes from a brief paper by Strawson: https://www.academia.edu/37649217/Dunking_Dennett
How do you know those are two different things?
Quoting Manuel
No. https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=neuroscience+of+volutary+action&btnG=
Quoting Manuel
No. Wittgenstein's aphorism asked the question (albeit with an implication), yours answered it.
Quoting Manuel
Indeed. So how does philosophy magically duck that problem then? The very theorising you're doing right now, the one in which you're trying to dismiss the role of neuroscience is itself replete with the already-embedded assumptions by which you conduct any such theorising. Either no study can say anything at all or you must concede that it is, after all, possible to say something useful about the mind despite the fact that one is using a mind to do so.
Quoting Manuel
Why would your assessment of the likelihood be of any use here. You're not a physicist. If a physicist thinks it likely their subject can say something about mind but you don't, what merit would there be to following your judgement over the physicist's? They should surely know their own subject's capabilities better than you.
Quoting Manuel
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=neuroscience+of+self+identity&btnG=
You seem consistently to confuse a subject's not saying anything you like the sound of with its not saying anything at all.
Are you implying they are the same? It seems to me crystal clear that they're vastly different. Having you're finger move by an electrical shock is the same as you willing to move the finger? Press you palm with any object and watch your fingers move. Afterwards move your fingers by yourself. Is that in any way the same thing?
Quoting Isaac
Again. It is stipulated. And from that perspective, one can study however one wishes. Either we have free will and you can find some way to see if neuroscience as anything to bear on the subject. Or we lack it and we go to neuroscience to prove that we don't have it.
In either case it's stipulated.
Quoting Isaac
I'm mentioning specific things: "self", "psychic continuity", "categorization", etc. What's given in experience and must form a part of it for us to form an intelligible world at all.
Of course there are aspects in which neuroscience reveals some things about cognition: the example of Dehaene and how long it takes us to become aware of stimuli in the environment.
Or Libbett's experiments which show our brains activate before we do something consciously.
Neuroscience has managed to show which areas are responsible for speech production as well as areas associated with speech comprehension Wernicke's area. And so on.
So I don't see why you imply that I'm saying that "no study can say anything at all".
The topic of self, psychic continuity and categorization are still with us thousands of years later. But that doesn't touch the point: we could not theorize at all if did not have these things as given. When we speak of the self, at no point do you lose consciousness or stop categorizing, it's always there on every topic.
You'll say that now we know what causes speech or vision, it's X part of the brain that's the cause. But X part of the brain is not part of what we experience as consciousness. We experience speech and vision as manifest activity, not non-mental processes. That these non-mental processes are essential for speech or vision, no one could doubt, but we have linguistics and vision science, which are different than neuroscience. Why do we have these fields? Why don't linguists just study the brain and forget about sentence structure?
Quoting Isaac
Which physicist would be crazy enough to say appeal to physics to explain the mind? Who? Sean Carroll? Carlo Rovelli? Brian Greene? Brian Cox? Art Hobson? None of them says anything remotely close to that all. Perhaps you'd like Carroll's The Big Picture, he covers plenty of philosophy as well as many areas in science, quite sympathetic to Dennett too.
I trust physicist for physics. Not for psychology.
Quoting Isaac
If that's how you interpret it, fine.
Those things being different doesn't imply that they're not both caused by stimuli and response. Having a finger move by electric shock is different to fainting, but that doesn't mean one of them has to be modelled differently in terms of causation.
Quoting Manuel
How is it stipulated? One can quite coherently ask the question of whether we have free will from a neuroscientific perspective. We could look for signals driving physiological events associated with decisions (like moving an arm) and see if they are accounted for by preceding signals. How's that 'stipulated'?
Quoting Manuel
You're assuming the contents of your experience are features of collective experience. I have no idea what you mean by "psychic continuity", I don't feel like I have a consistent 'self' and for me 'categorisation' is distinctly post hoc. It's monumental arrogance to just assume whatever world view you happen to have is somehow foundational to any enquiry just because it's how you happen to see things.
Quoting Manuel
Right. an issue which affect philosophy and neuroscience equally. so I'm not seeing why neuroscience is being singled out as the one unable to talk about those things.
Quoting Manuel
Because it would be extremely complicated to do so. I've already answered that question, and so has @khaled in a separate post. Why are you still asking it? the existence of a simpler way of talking about something doesn't prove the more complex way is false, just, you know, more complex.
Quoting Manuel
We weren't talking about explaining the mind. You said..
Quoting Manuel
Now you disingenuously change the claim to physics 'explaining the mind'.
Quoting Manuel
It's not an interpretation. I've supplied evidence of hundreds, if not thousands, of papers from well respected, peer reviewed journals talking about the subjects you specified.
Causes and effects are one thing: If a person sees a flashlight, there pupils will dilate. That's a clear sign of cause and effect. That's something we normally wouldn't do in normal life, put a flashlight in front of your eyes. If for whatever reason, you choose to look at a flashlight, you are using your will to continue looking at the flashlight. That's different from causes and effects.
Quoting Isaac
Do you believe we have free will, experiments aside? If you do, then you'll look at how that's possible using neuroscience. If you don't, like Sam Harris, he'll look to neuroscience to prove his point.
Quoting Isaac
Psychic continuity is what Locke described: when we look at an object at time t1, we take to be the same object at time t2. In other words, when you go outside and see a bird in the sky, you will continue to see it as the same bird through out the time span you are looking at it. Maybe I'm a total Martian, but I can't help but recognize the tree outside my window as the same tree the next day. I can't get rid of it if I wanted to.
I'll grant you the "self" argument, people are different in these regards.
You're telling me that when you visit a place for the first time, you don't already know what a river or a statue is? You take time after seeing a place to think to yourself that's a tree and not a light post?
Quoting Isaac
Good, we agree here.
Quoting Isaac
Apologies for my verbal faux-paux, I sincerely did not intend to do that. But the point remains. I don't know of a physicist who claims that physics tells us anything substantive of the mind, that was not already obvious years ago: that it's physical.
Quoting Isaac
I've given examples already of neuroscience saying things about how the brain interprets information.
Just stating how it seems to you at first glance doesn't really help, obviously the argument moved past what appeared to us to be the case at first glance a long time ago. The earth seems flat at first glance. So with...
Quoting Manuel
...what is preventing some preceding cause resulting in the effect of your continuing to look at the flashlight and triggering a sensation that you have 'chosen' to do so?
Quoting Manuel
That's just talking about confirmation bias. Again, how is philosophical investigation somehow immune from confirmation bias in a way that scientific investigation is not?
Quoting Manuel
OK - we call call that object permanence in cognitive science. There are entire books written about it. So I'm struggling to see how you can support the idea that the cognitive sciences cannot investigate the matter.
Quoting Manuel
Yep. Hence not "always there on every topic". Your list of 'common' assumptions is growing thin.
Quoting Manuel
Why would I be telling you that? I'm a grown adult and all of that object recognition work would have been done in early childhood. Do you think we're born knowing what a statue is?
Quoting Manuel
No, the point was that physics (and neuroscience) cannot tell us anything about the mind - you've since retracted that to 'not much, now it's just "I don't know of any" - at least we've now reached a conclusion that we can agree on - you don't know of any physicists or neuroscientists that have have said anything you personally find to be substantive about the mind.
Object permanence highlights the point that was already obvious to people like Locke. It doesn't tell you how it arises, nor why we have it. You can call that "saying something" if you wish.
If statues and trees and everything else were subject to "learning", we would still be debating what they are.
I said:
"the complexity of manifest reality cannot be explained by neuroscience, we simply know way too little."
"brain science says very, very, very little about the mind"
Also "knowing a tree", "speaking of trees", "classifying trees" aren't explained by anything in current brain science.
I said that physics says virtually nothing about the mind.
Now you are mis-interpreting me.
By all means, continue with neuroscience and physics. I'm not stopping you.
What kind of argument is that? It amounts to nothing more than "if you don't see things the way I do there's nothing to say". Well then I have to ask what exactly you thought you were going to get out of posting on a public forum?
Quoting Manuel
They are synonymous.
Quoting Manuel
Again, what reading have you done on object permanence to be able to judge what it does and does not have to say?
Quoting Manuel
Why?
Quoting Manuel
Nope, it's those exact claims I'm disputing.
What I am looking for? Many things. Mostly ideas connected with innatism and strands of rationalistic idealism, I'm interested in that so I'd like to find more literature on it. Politics too, specifically international relations, would like to find more sources I have not been able to find. I'm also interested in seeing how other people think. I also find people's differing ethical views quite illuminating.
Quoting Isaac
I've read some of it. It's intriguing to find out when a baby gets these intuitions and the variety they may have among them in terms of what's the upper limit for gaining these capacities.
Quoting Isaac
Concepts, our common sense intuitions arise from our genetic makeup, somehow, which is why, aside from philosophical discussions of language, there are no real disputes as to what trees or streetlamps or statues are. These are innate. When it comes to science, the kind of thing you're studying, there you do need to figure out what's relevant, what's not relevant to a particular study.
That takes considerable effort as you know, so it would make no sense to say that coming up with scientific theories is completely innate. If it were, it stand to reason we would already know how the world works, mind independently.
Quoting Isaac
I don't think we are going to proceed much more here. It's equivalent to trying to show a determinist we have free will or vice versa. Or trying to argue with a materialist that idealism is true.
This has veered way off the OP. Which was for people to discuss what they think there is.
:up:
I'll try and recontextualize.
Response to @Isaac:
Quoting Isaac
Translation + stress testing of the bridge translation builds. Like Barret's work on emotion - to a large extent a sustained attack on the idea that we should think of emotions as distinct, inherent natural kind categories which our brains simulate, and replacing that view with something more like emotions are an inflection/contextualisation of a state of arousal (how intense is the body+mind's state) and valence (how pleasant/unpleasant is the state). EG rage would be high arousal and unpleasant, but so would terror, and the difference is context.
Yes. And the inverse question induced by the translation; said the neuroscientist to the folk theorist - does this make any difference on a day to day basis? Does this make a difference therapeutically?
I think that's true, the difference between "translation" and "accounting" I imagine comes from the overall framing of the issue that someone has, though.
Recontextualisation of issue:
I think perhaps the dispute is related to an ontology induced by existential commitments of activities talked about earlier. One way of framing the issue is that if people behave as if there were a thing, and that behaviour wouldn't work as it does without it functioning as if there were a thing, does it make sense to say that thing exists in some sense? [hide=*]I realise that's a bit different from looking at what entities are existentially quantified over in statements[/hide]
There are persuasive arguments for that - if something behaves as if a model of it were true, then the model can be treated as real/held to be true/is true. Like F=ma or something like that. If the system involved works in accordance[hide=**] (accordance is doing a lot of work here, pay no attention to the body in the closet)[/hide] with F=ma, F=ma is true for it. So that system's behaviour generates a commitment to that it acts in accord with that description of it.
What would the difference be for something like: "celeriac makes my partner feel sick", giving the behavioural inference "they would not buy something with celeriac in it", that being true, and thus my partner's feeling sick acts explanatorily like the m in F=ma does?
It seems like a hard needle to thread; the pragmatic utility and predictive ability of those commitments vs things like "feeling sick" having a dubious place in the scientific image.
What I think an important distinction people often miss in these discussions is the map and the terrain. A lot of it may come down to "what" exactly are properties. If mental states have properties like a photon or a gluon has properties, that would be an odd conclusion because that is saying mentality is just a brute fact of existence, quite the opposite of what materialist conceptions would like to think. Thus, often materialists unintentionality fall into ontologies that posit mentality as somehow fundamental.
The opposite is when it is all map and no terrain. Stephen Hawking once said famously:
I think you raise quite an interesting point. That's an open question, does matter, at the fundamental level have mental properties? We are aware of matter having mental properties, when modified in certain ways in some biological creatures, especially us, but we don't seem to detect it in physics.
But then, what we take to be a fundamental feature or property of the mental, consciousness, is not fundamental after all, it could be. It's hard to make sense of such a proposition.
On the other hand, it could be an emergent phenomenon, not found in the "lower levels". If it is, it's also hard to make sense of that. In either case, what you point out is problematic to solve, if at all possible.
Yes. I should not have forgotten the duty on the part of the scientist, as you say
Quoting fdrake
I think you're right here, it's really important to keep in mind the wider goals of science and one of those has to be to report back to the folk conceptions and processes. I know it's an unpopular position, but I'm not a "science for science's sake" kind of person, we do science for a reason, it's as much politics and social jostling as any other aspect of human affairs.
Quoting fdrake
I think we're kind of forced by our grammar to go along with that - "X doesn't exist", "then what is the subject of that last sentence?". The problem perhaps, arises in importing the connections between those 'things' into that behaviour. It's too binomial, perhaps, to say behaviour either works or doesn't, it could work better or less well?
Quoting fdrake
Likewise here. I think this crosses into some of the issue I have with the binomial properties (true/false, known/unknown) being used as if they were a different type of property to their graduated cousins (works-fails, believed-doubted). If something behaves as if a model of it were 'true' then it should, I think, be treated as if it were true. But as I use the terms (which I accept is idiosyncratic) what we're really saying is that a model works. The difference being that another model can work better, whereas one cannot be more true.
Not sure if I'm nitpicking though (there was that body you asked me to ignore, after all, and here I am doing a bloody autopsy on it)! It definitely works as framing if one allows for graduation in place of (what I'm reading as) binomial binning.
I think, in that latter sense, science is actually doing nothing special (or at least nothing unexpected). We do it throughout our childhood. I used to think all sorts of things that we might call my own personal folk science, and I updated those models as and when they failed me. My folk ontology was being updated by conflict with the world throughout. And more often than not the process was no less fraught!
We don’t have to agree on it. There will be all kinds of interpretations and answers to the question “What is being?” Many will be incompatible.
But we don’t have to agree on the concept of life either. Yet we’re alive. We don’t have to figure out the ultimate meaning of life (or agree on it), yet we’re all living our lives in some way or other.
Quoting 180 Proof
“Must” we agree? What’s so great about absolute, universal agreement anyway?
If you can determine what is “necessarily” not there, then why do you give up on determining what is?
Either way, we’re back in the same conundrum: what we determine as the “impossibles” is a matter of interpretation too. If you’re using agreement as a criterion, you’ve only shifted the subject from something (being, existence, thereness) to nothing (non-being, absence, emptiness). Lack of agreement, value and interest-laden interpretation, and biases sweep in here as well.
What’s interesting to me is the question itself and how its been answered, tacitly or explicitly, for thousands of years. Yes, this is the history of philosophy but also (insofar as thought/beliefs/attitudes/outlook shape actions) a history of human behavior— political, religious, scientific, technological, economic, artistic.
I’m not so interested in settling on a necessary, concrete answer or definition — for exactly the reasons you mention. But even if we want such an answer, or want to formulate a new one, wrestling with the current and past evolution of the question (and its answers) will be key.
I don't "give up on" anything. As I wrote above in the post to which you're referring, Xtrix:
Quoting 180 Proof
and perhaps you didn't read further down this page to this follow-up wherein more explicitly I address "what there is".
Quoting 180 Proof
Fine. We “can’t agree” about being, but supposedly we “must agree on” PNC? Why?
It’s still simply moving the same problem to another topic, regardless of whether “giving up” is accurate or not. That is, determining what’s “impossible.”
There’s also the question of why we should care about agreement.
(1)
Without agreeing on (conforming to) the PNC, ?the principle of explosion reduces discursive reason (e.g. your question) to glossolalia – jabberwocky (L. Carroll). As Freddy says: "I am afraid we are not rid of [Limitation] because we still have faith in grammar."
(2)
[quote=Ibn Sina]Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.[/quote]
:fire: :eyes:
Quoting Xtrix
Maybe we shouldn't. Many don't care, yet some do. Reasoning begins with agreement – e.g. grammar – and it's argument / dialectic that negotiates whether or not discourse ends in agreement. My concern is with discursive beginnings (grounds), that is, where we must begin in order to make sense with – translate (G. Steiner) – one another.
I think people get along just fine without these logical principles, and far too much power has been given to them. It’s like arguing that we speak correctly only because we’ve absorbed the rules of grammar. I don’t really subscribe to that point of view, but I know it’s influential.
“Logic is an invention of schoolteachers, not of philosophers.”
My ontology:
1. The physical/material world exists.
2. Anything and everything else, a big question mark!
Keeping it simple and perhaps a tad bit too stupid. :kiss:
C'est la vie! C'est la vie!
You could start a great epic with that assumption, though. Except it might all end up being for nothing. Pointless adventures.
Time = Energy = Logic
Space = Number = Math (Arithmetic)
Chaos = (Time + Space)
Dimension = Space^2
Information = Chaos + Space (Matter)
Evolution = Chaos + Information (complexity)
Consciousness = Information^2 (emergence)
All = Time.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most fundamental thing possible in my mind is Time which in my mind is also synonymous with Energy itself. Since Energy can not be created nor destroyed. Without it nothing can happen, so all things are contingent on Time to even exist or continue existing.
The second most fundamental thing is Space itself which is the other side of Time.
Information emerges from the interaction between Time and Space (self-interaction).
I would also add that an inseparable aspect of Time and Space is Logic and Mathematics respectively (Time holds Logic, and Space holds Number or magnitude).
Also Space can be reshaped to yield other Dimensions from which more complex possibilities are allowed. I believe that this is all that is needed for our or any universe to exist, all viable universes must have these things, for there to be things.
That which exists has an effect and/or affect.
Does motion have an elementary role within your ontology?
Is the distinction to the effect that manifest ontology = via the senses and scientific ontology = via reasoned understanding based upon experimentation?
Is it true that when you make your cognitive journeys, you lead with skepticism?
If you are skeptical to some degree, do you ever apply it to your manifest ontology?
This question attempts to examine the possible existence of crosstalk between your two sets of ontology. If it exists, then perhaps your cognitive journeys feature an oscillation between the two sets:
Skepticism about what your senses detect sends you to science and, conversely, skepticism about what science detects sends you to sensory experience.
All of the above = my attempt to explain why I ask if you lead with skepticism.
No. Although it is tempting to put forth such distinctions, as it looks neat and saves us from doing more work, I don't think it holds up.
There is plenty of understanding and experimentation done in the manifest image, and the scientific image ultimately rests on whatever sense data tells us about the phenomena of the world.
Quoting ucarr
Depends on what you mean by skepticism in terms of scope and depth. A healthy does of skepticism is good, but figuring out what "healthy" amounts to is not easy.
Anything stronger than that would be self-defeating, and there are no definitive answers against skepticism, even after thousand of years.
Quoting Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
I see that your two ontologies, as inspired by Sellars, stand in a somewhat parallel relationship to each other. Do you think their interrelationship important enough to work out a detailed characterization? As Sellars says, scientific imagery comes after manifest imagery, thereby suggesting a conceivably important relationship.
Quoting Manuel
Skepticism, as I'm using it here, means withholding judgment on principle until rational examination (and possible experimentation) are conducted. Accordingly, examination evaluates skepticism just as it evaluates truth claims.
I borrow Sellars' terms because I think it's a useful distinction, but aside from that, I'm not a fan (nor do I dislike him), and he has not he been an influence on me, despite his important contributions in epistemology.
Quoting ucarr
That's a very hard question. It seems to me that, if I look at any ordinary manifest object, whatever science can tell me about it, falls considerably short of my experience of that object. I assume this points to our rich cognitive constitution and how much it adds to the world itself.
Given this, I don't think that a detailed characterization can be given: one can always add more aspects of experience (phenomenology) to a manifest object.
When possible, the way we are happens to coincide with some aspects of the way the world is, when these interact, we have a possible science. If not, we don't.
Quoting ucarr
This sounds to me like reasonable skepticism, so, I have no reason to disagree here.
What about those things that don't exist but have an effect/affect?
Quoting ucarr
The ability for a thing to move is afforded by Time itself. Without time a thing would be incapable of changing it's position, state or anything else. Nothing can even exist without Time maintaining its existence in the next moment whether it moves or not. Time affords existence and change (the only constant in the universe).
Quoting Manuel
I think your above response gives a substantial & thought-provoking answer to my question.
If there exist human attributes parallel to the natural world, then, to some extent, humans are not entirely of the natural world, and thus science of the natural world cannot reveal & explain those parts of human. Moreover, human composition is only partly natural. As to the other part, is it super-natural?
Did you intend to imply the above?
If there are parts of the world fundamentally unlike human, then human science faces parts of the natural world it cannot understand.
The two above disjunctions are rooted in the notion that human science can understand variance by degree, but not by fundamental category. I can understand, scientifically, a frog. Like me, it's a protein-based, water-dependent sentient. I cannot understand, scientifically, a conjectured, immaterial spirit.
Note - Human can embrace immaterial spirit, but that entails non-scientific acceptance of a body/spirit duality.
Not at all. I think there is an unfortunate trend to associate the word "nature" and "naturalism" to mean whatever science says there is. But there is clearly more to the world than what science says there is (art, morals, politics, human relations, etc.)
But why should art, morals, human relations and so on not be considered natural things: things of nature? On this view, nature is everything there is, the opposite of reductionism, while not steering into supernaturalism, which is not even clearly stated.
Quoting ucarr
I think this is the case regardless of how like or unlike us, the world is.
Quoting ucarr
We soon enter into the terminological, rather than substantive by this point. You can call nature "immaterial", "material", "neutral" or anything else, the term does not affect our understanding or ignorance of the world, I don't think.
Three claims:
The motion of a material object is associated with a positive interval of time.
A positive interval of time supports duration.
When a material object moves across a positive interval of time, it examples duration, and thus you have dimension.
Conclusion:
Time, via duration, supports dimensional expansion WRT space, time, motion.
Questions:
Can time exist apart from the physics of material objects in motion?
If we imagine that it can, does the passing of time in isolation consume energy?
If it doesn't, does it follow that the inertial force attached to material objects is caused by time, a non-energy phenomenon?
Is time an independent, physical phenomenon, or is it a cognitive construct of the perceiving, human mind?
If it is the latter, then, as such, is it an emergent property of material objects?
Four Claims:
Time, within the perceiving human mind, conceptualizes duration that, in turn, organizes material objects in motion as dimensional expansions.
Energy = the ability to move
Energy+motion+duration (perceived time) = the dimensional expansion of our 3D environment
Our physical ontology is rooted in the triumvirate of energy_animation_duration
When I write "natural world," I'm not referring to science & what it claims. I'm referring to earth as humans find it upon the awakening of their consciousness. Earth, our home, as I understand it, is a given. As such, it is, axiomatically, what is there to be perceived, experienced and, if possible, known.
Science, as I understand it, consists of a highly organized collection of procedures for perceiving what is given i.e. the natural world.
Quoting Manuel
I don't believe science excludes art, morals, politics, human relations, etc. from its domain. Consider, for examples, ethics_morality studies in philosophy; political science; psychology, anthropology.
I've never heard any scientist attempt to exclude the above from the domain of the natural world.
Do you believe humans to be entirely of the natural world (as I've described it here)?
If you do, then you don't believe humans have attributes that don't intersect with the natural world out of which they are created.
It's true that some humans embrace beliefs inscrutable to science (material/spiritual duality), but that's a very different statement from saying parts of human nature and parts of the natural world do not coincide.
It depends on how rigorous or loose you want to be when using the term "science". Yes, there is "political science", but it's very far from the "hard sciences" (physics, chemistry, biology) and it is questionable to think that it is science in any useful sense of the word.
That aside, yes, I would agree with you characterization of the natural here.
Quoting ucarr
Your phrasing here is a bit difficult to follow. I think that for whatever reason, we happen to have capacities to do some sciences, such as physics and biology, in these domains, some internal cognitive capacities do manage to capture some aspects of the external world, but not others, which I can't even name.
I believe we have a rather rigidly determined nature and this is what allows us to view the world we we do. But as a consequence, others aspects of the world, we don't have access to.
But we should be grateful for this, for without these restraints, we wouldn't be able to form any picture of the world at all.
I think there's reason to believe we've undergone change in the past. We might be more malleable than you think.
We have, as have other species. The biggest changes emerge rather quickly, instead of slowly over long stretches of time, as is often believed.
We could conceivable go through another mutation that endows us with some different mental faculty. It is possible. But I don't think we are too malleable. Rather, we are malleable within rather strict parameters, which to us, look quite wide.
I read that they've looked for a mutation that would explain what happened to our species 50 to 60 thousand years ago. They haven't found one yet. That has spurred speculation about alternatives to mutation to explain it.
Quoting Manuel
I don't think it would necessarily require a successful mutation. Hunter gatherers who are exposed to numbering, time measurement, and maps make the leap to understanding. It may be that there are people among us now who grasp or sense things others don't, we just haven't encountered the right circumstances to bring those oddities out into the open and see them as strengths.
Interesting biases we each have. :grin:
In this thread, do you propound a premise that claims something like saying “the natural world contains parts inscrutable to science”?
Furthermore, is it your view that science is a distinctly human contrivance involving more than simple observation & imitation of natural processes?
I ask these questions because, if so, then there is an unbridgeable gap or break between human identity & the natural world.
By assuming humans are direct products of the natural world, along the lines of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, I don’t see how this unbridgeable gap could exist, unless humans, in your ontology, are NOT entirely products of the natural world.
If it is your view that human is only partly derived from the natural world, then explaining the unbridgeable gap, as opposed to merely declaring it, requires an elaboration of that human source of identity that is not a part of the natural world.
Is it your belief that human identity is a combination of natural and not-natural parts?
:cool:
[quote=Alice in Wonderland]If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?[/quote]
Yes.
And I don't think there is an unbridgeable gap between human identity and the natural world. Human identity is something we have to deal with, it's a phenomenon of nature, realized in human beings, of which science can say very little about.
I believe you are using "naturalism" in a sense that excludes things like "selves", "identity", "free will" and so on. I don't think so.
Take Hume, clearly a philosopher respected by most scientists and surely a naturalist. He is famous for his discussion of identity, among other thorny topics. It was his contribution to the "science of man".
But, as you may be aware, he admitted defeat, he could not solve these issues. Though he made fascinating observations and posed difficult problems.
I use the term similar to him. Or Galen Strawson.
You are referring to Hume? What did he admit "defeat" about?
On the topic of the self and the continued existence of external objects.
It's in the Appendix of the Treatise.
Oh.
Quoting ucarr
I don't see how you arrive at your above interpretation from my claim directly below it.
The gist of my current inquiry into your understandings about the limits of science re: understanding the world into which we humans are born i.e. our natural, earthly world, takes focus upon what I suppose to be a necessary break in the connection of human to natural, earthly world.
I've been supposing this gap between the two explains the scientific limitations you describe.
My underlying premise is that human, as a product of natural earth, has no gap separating it from natural earth, unless human, in addition to natural earth, has another source for its identity.
I say this to make clear I assume all attributes of human identity (including "selves", "identity", "free will" and so on) have their source in nature.
My other underlying premise is that science is the only judge of truth.
Quoting Manuel
Are you claiming science is one type of inquiry amongst a multiplicity of types of inquiry?
Do you believe some humans, via inquiry, know things about themselves & the world that cannot be examined & verified by science?
Do you believe there are types or sets of claims that are non-scientific?
Do you believe there exist humans who make non-scientific claims about themselves and the world, and, in so doing, make claims that possess truth derived from inquiries correctly vetted & verified non-scientifically?
If your answer to the above is "yes," then I believe it's a radical claim that draws a boundary around the scope of science WRT searching out & discovering the truth about our natural, earthly world.
I don't posit a gap between human beings and the rest of nature. In so far as you include all these topics (identity, etc.) as belonging to nature, I agree.
The third claim, I don't agree with. I don't think science can say a lot about truth in relation to literature or art or culture. It says a bit, but not much that is illuminating. Could that change? Perhaps, but I'm skeptical of this.
Putting these "high level" topics aside, yeah, I think science is a much better source of reliable information than any alternative, religious, spiritual or mystical.
Quoting ucarr
We enter into semantic territory here. You can use the word science, to mean "good" or "useful", as in "that person has his cooking down to a science" or "that politician has his negotiation tactics down to a science", but I don't take these claims to be theoretical.
So, if we put the semantics aside, yes, I do think there are things which science cannot tell us much about, namely, international relations and inter-personal relations (among other topics), they are simply too complex. Physics works so well, in part because it deals with the simplest structures we can discover.
It's not clear that saying "this is a non-scientific truth" is helpful. I prefer to say that science does not say much about X, Y or Z.
Do we really?
I suspect you invoke "semantics" here in order to lay a foundation for evasion.
Quoting Manuel
In your interpretation of the above examples, "good" or "useful" are not sufficiently specific, and I think you know that. Your examples are a way of saying someone achieves their goals by following a process or set of rules in calculations or other problem-solving operations. The emphasis is upon logical, focused efficiency in getting to the goal. This definition is much closer to the scientific method, and thus the examples are not loosey-goosey applications of what "science" denotes. Moreover, your examples are clearly about applied science, not theoretical science, so, of course, such claims are not theoretical, thus denying such fails to add additional distance between the examples & science.
You give no reactions to two important words I used. "Claims," formally speaking = proposition. "Inquiry," formally speaking = experimentation. The formal versions of the two words, as you know, are firmly rooted within science. My hunch is that you wish to avoid committing to a position that says humans conduct inquiries culminating in claims that are emphatically non-scientific.
I make the above conjecture in relation to
Quoting Manuel
in order to argue that international relations and inter-personal relations et al are, as you know, studied with methods not easily characterized as non-scientific.
Quoting Manuel
If you think elementary particles & their interrelationships are simple, it must be the case you've merely glanced at studies of these phenomena.
We may differ in our experiences and our intuitions and that's fine.
Quoting ucarr
Which is why I said the word "science" can be used in various ways - as it is in fact used.
Quoting ucarr
If that is what you take the scientific method to be, OK. I wouldn't disagree that it has those components, but clearly the results and depth achieved in physics are very different from the results achieved in sociology.
Quoting ucarr
No, I did not know that the "formal versions of the two words... are firmly rooted in science". I don't know what this means.
So if I claim that Putin is a war criminal, I am making a scientific proposition? It seems to me I'm giving a moral opinion, to which, I'm sure many people would agree, and other would not.
If I inquire into the causes of the invasion of Ukraine or the invasion of Iraq, I am doing experimentation? That's sounds strange to me.
Quoting ucarr
If you read what you quoted, I never said that the work done in international relations (IR) is "non-scientific".
It can be good research or bad research, and you may call it "scientific" if you wish.
I hesitate to call work done in IR as "scientific", not because there isn't good work done in the field, I think there is, but because most of it, especially the "theory" division or IR, is pretty awful and has virtually no relation to what happens in the world.
So if I say that IR is "scientific", I think that lowers the achievements of physics and biology. But it does not follow that if something isn't science it's bad or irrational.
Quoting ucarr
What phenomena is simpler than physics? It studies (for instance) what happens to a particle as it goes through a slit. That is much easier to study than a human being, which is composed of trillions of particles.
Physicists can ask hard questions about simple things, using complex mathematical formulations. In human affairs, we are mostly guessing: just read the news.
Science also relies on the imputation of identities to natural particulars and kinds; for example a particular tree or species is itself distinguishable from all others.
Yes, and this is quite an interesting case you point out. I'd even argue that this is even slightly more philosophy than science, in so far as we are using concepts to stipulate a class of objects in nature as being different from each other, which we then categorize as TREES, ROCKS, FLOWERS, and so on.
After we do that (and it's done virtually automatically), we can begin to do the more refined empirical work which science deals with such as, what is this rock composed of or what biological phenomena interacts with this tree such that the tree has X and Y property, and so forth.
It's merely a matter of emphasis: I would add that picking out a TREE by the features we pick out it by, is very curious. We don't, for instance, consider the dirt the tree is on to be part of the tree, but nothing in nature should prevent us from doing this.
Having said that, yes, you are right. It is an interesting fact about the way we do science, that we do manage to extract very particular information about specific configurations of matter, and discover all kinds of stable relationships between members of the same group of thing. So I think your point is a better illustration than mine.
I know it sounds like stoner talk, but it's nonetheless intriguing.
That's true maybe on the electronic level, but could we not say the dirt is not part of the living growing tissue of the tree, or not part of the self-organizing organism?
Indeed, keeping it simple (& stupid) always helps - black & white thinking simplifies to the point where living becomes child's play. No one would/should hold that against anyone who does live a life like that - our brains can't handle the (alleged) complexity that inheres to reality. Sooner or later, analysis paralysis sets in and you'd wish that you had never encountered the words "it's not that simple" and the like.
I suppose we could, but, if the tree isn't placed in dirt it cannot grow.
I see you are a diplomatic person who shows consideration for others.
As I go forward, let me check my language lest it become rife with combative ambition.
What I've Learned
If inquiry doesn't include signature procedures including math models, research, testing of tangibles, compiling of data & analysis, it may not be science proper. Orthodox science is specific to the degree it has limitations of application.
A spectrum of human experiences are resistant to scientific investigation and sensible persons, including scientists, have no problem with that.
One shouldn't be a geeky extremist.
Sure man, it's something that took me (and continues to take) time to figure out. One may disagree with a lot of what the positivists believed in, but clarity in language use, ends up being important, otherwise one starts to say things one doesn't clearly believe.
I have nothing against science, it is the greatest intellectual achievement of human beings. But with that, you get a lot of things masquerading as science or exaggerating the expertise of certain professions.
I think one should be on guard in these situations.
:victory:
Any object is either a collection of objects or it is a non-composite object (empty collection). There seem to be no other possibilities. And we have a rigorous theory that can in principle describe the compositional structure of all those objects: set theory. Which also happens to be the foundation of mathematics.
The maid was with the wife.
Ergo,
The murder was committed by someone else, a third person was in the house!
[quote=Novacula Occami][i]Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate (Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity).[/quote]
[quote=Dr. Theodore Woodward]When you hear hoofbeats behind you, don't expect to see a zebra.[/quote]
:snicker: