The project of Metaphysics... and maybe all philosophy
A long look at the history of philosophy shows a commonly recurring theme. It shows the attempt to create/discover some fundamental bedrock of certainty upon which we can build a foundation for all knowledge and wisdom. Some singular truth that is irrefutable and inerrant from which we can derive the other truths of the universe. It's a little analogous to the search for a fundamental indivisible particle, upon which all matter must be bult on. With fundamental particles, it's becoming apparent - or at least currently seems to be the case, that there is no such solid foundations that matter is built on, but instead intricate webs of probabilistic relationships.
It feels as though if we cannot establish a foundational inerrant truth to build our knowledge upon, then somehow by extension all claims to truth are equal, knowledge is impossible or meaningless, and it's simply an "anything goes" situation, where the truth is whatever you decide you want it to be. I feel like there is a step of logic missing between that premise and conclusion. It feels a bit like saying "there's no foundation that is impervious to natural disasters, so you can't build a house" or "all houses are subject to possibly being ruined by natural disaster, so you may as well build anywhere".
Is this a fool's errand?
It feels as though if we cannot establish a foundational inerrant truth to build our knowledge upon, then somehow by extension all claims to truth are equal, knowledge is impossible or meaningless, and it's simply an "anything goes" situation, where the truth is whatever you decide you want it to be. I feel like there is a step of logic missing between that premise and conclusion. It feels a bit like saying "there's no foundation that is impervious to natural disasters, so you can't build a house" or "all houses are subject to possibly being ruined by natural disaster, so you may as well build anywhere".
Is this a fool's errand?
Comments (110)
For me, the one constant seems to be that everyone now agrees that there is an interface between mind and matter. There is just a lot of disagreement over which side has priority, and where exactly that interface occurs.....
Not quite. All houses are subject to possibly being ruined by natural disaster, but I need somewhere to live, so I'll do the best I can. That seems like a good analogy for philosophy. That's where philosophy ends - I'll do the best I can.
Then where does the fascination with certainty come from?
Too many philosophers with too much time on their hands. In this world, everyone knows you put your money down and take your chances. That rubs some people the wrong way.
Quoting Reformed Nihilist
I wouldnt say that Wittgenstein was looking for first “principles”, but rather that thinking which gives a unity to experience. The same is true of Heidegger, Nietzsche and the phenomenologists The search for certainty you have been talking about is the certainty of a particular structural content, and after Hegel that ideal was abandoned for the most part. Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and those who came after took a different approach.
There is a way of grounding experience without making recourse to a particular content , a particular truth. The ground can instead be self-reflexive It can have change, transformation, temporality built into its very premises. It can focus on self-similarity , relationality and harmoniousness rather than perfect identity. It can show that integration and differentiation, sameness and otherness go hand in hand.
The fascination with certainty comes from the nature of fascination itself. Or more precisely, from
the nature of desire. Our way of being is anticipatory. The meaning we see in things comes in part from what we project forward into them with our expectations. So the desire for certainty arises out of of the fact that we are anticipatory beings. We are sense-making.
I guess we differ on Wittgenstein then (or maybe not). At worst, he was analyzing first principles, or maybe in a sense the very notion of first principles. I mean just the title "On Certainty" sort of intimates what I'm talking about. But Descartes and Kant are definitely better examples, which is why I put them first.
I'm much less versed in continental philosophers, and only know Heidegger by reputation (both good and bad), but I definitely got the sense from Nietzsche that his very approach only existed and made sense only in juxtaposition to the "sensible" rules that had been formally derived in the proper way from first principles. I feel like if there were no established tradition of first principles, then there could be no Nietzsche as we know him. Same could be said about Foucault. So it seems like one is either searching for the fundamental certain truths, or disabusing others of the notion of such truths.
Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here, which doesn't make me much different than the continentals that I generally find annoyingly vague. It just seems to me that you can't end up where Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Foucault did (that's an odd triplet), never mind Descartes or Kant, if the presumption that there is a bedrock of certainty somewhere to be discovered isn't part of where you started. Get me?
While I think I agree with the statements you made, I don't see how they answer the question. I'm asking why there is such a large amount of thought and text in the history of philosophy devoted to certainty. I feel as though the question of certainty, if and to what degree it can be attained, if it is binary or on a continuum, and if it represents a state of the world or a state of mind, underlies in some pretty substantial ways, most of the debates in philosophy. If we discarded the idea that certainty, as a state of affairs in the world, was either meaningless or indistinguishable, how would that inform our approach to questions like idealism vs realism? Determinism vs. free will?
But the critique of bedrock certainty began a long time ago, and philosophers like Heidegger were already onto a critique of what came after( for instance , Derrida’s deconstructions of Heidegger and Foucault).
Put differently, they are interested in more than negative critique, in what we can’t do or shouldn’t believe, but are offering positive ideas in their own right, ways of seeing the world in intimate relationships al terms unavailable to those philosophies of certainty. What philosophers like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are doing is showing us a more intricate order hidden within the order of ‘certainty’ that older philosophies offered.
Okay, I think we are saying the same thing, but with a different spin. I'm not lamenting the entire lack of philosophy that goes beyond the notion of the bedrock of certainty, I'm noting the existence and deep and pervasive roots of the notion in western philosophy, and perhaps if I am lamenting anything, it's that it is still incredibly pervasive.
I dont think the central question is why philosophers have desired certainty, but how , in their quest to make sens out of a chaotic world, the notion of certainty appeared to them as something attainable. So the primary goal was never certainty but predictability, and for a period of philosophical history the concept of certainty made sense. as a way to achieve this goal. The rapid and profound successes of the natural sciences in the 17th and 18th centuries , which were based on a mathematical logic which presupposed the certainty of a cognizing subject, reinforced and encouraged the idea of rational
certainty.
Maybe. But there are plenty of places , not only in philosophy but in the sciences themselves , where the notion of certainty is no longer taken so seriously , like postmodern quantum theory , and ecological biology.
I don't think I agree with this analysis entirely. I think that there has been a search for, a belief in, and a feeling of a need for absolutes in philosophy as far back as it is recorded. Aristotle was constantly on the search for first principles, as was Aquinas later. Even in common language, the notion of "proof" and even "knowledge" to the average person implies inerrancy (even though we all know no one is immune to error). I suspect it might be something deeper than what you are suggesting.
Or maybe it’s something shallower than what I’m
suggesting. That is , if you look at the etymological history of terms like ‘certainty’ ‘absolute’ and ‘truth’ since the Greeks, you’ll find that the way people have understood them has changed continuously over time.
So a claim like “there has been a search for, a belief in, and a feeling of a need for absolutes in philosophy as far back as it is recorded” has to be filtered through these changing senses of meaning of such terms over the course of Western cultural history. For instance, today absolute certainty is connected with absolute
objectivity. But prior to Galileo, the meaning of subject and object were precisely the reverse of what they mean today.
I am sympathetic to this line of thought, although I think that ground - ground of all being, or ground of all knowledge - would be a more appropriate word here than certainty. (Of course, those who plump for some such ground will disagree, like @Joshs with his phenomenology.)
There is no reason at all.... to believe in any of it.
I often call myself a pragmatist, so suspecting me of some bias is probably reasonable. Still, every philosopher who denies the possibility of certainty still goes about their life as best they can with whatever limited certainty they can find. Descartes recognized the futility of "I think, therefore I am," as a guide to living.
A snippet from a Catholic philosopher: '[There is a] close connection between moral and intellectual virtue. Our minds do not – contrary to many views currently popular – create truth. Rather, they must be conformed to the truth of things given in creation. And such conformity is possible only as the moral virtues become deeply embedded in our character, a slow and halting process. We have lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity. That is, in order to know the truth we must become persons of a certain sort. The full transformation of character that we need will, in fact, finally require the virtues of faith, hope, and love. And this transformation will not necessarily – perhaps not often – be experienced as easy or painless. Hence the transformation of self that we must – by God’s grace – undergo perhaps resembles passing through something akin to dying.'
Science preserves one aspect of that kind of detachment, through the effort to rise above subjectivity and arrive at an understanding which is true for any observer. But overall, science omits the concern with ethics which is evident throughout the Platonic literature. And finding foundational truths within the objective domain is frustratingly difficult.
Some might argue that we didn't just kill god, we killed truth, beauty and goodness.
In the empirical world, there are no guarantees in regard to final evidence, much less to "ultimate statements or judgments" about the nature of the world and the relationship we may have with it via our knowledge.
It's been established since Newton, explored by Locke, Hume and Priestley (among others), that our innate ability of understanding does not reach such high ambitions as understanding the world nor of being able to give an account for it that we can intuitively comprehend.
It's not impossible that another intelligent species somewhere else in the universe (of they exist), could have such a capacity of understanding which we lack. But we're stuck with what we have, which is plenty.
I don't think he did. In fact, he derived a proof of God based on it, and lived a religious life because if it, at least according to him (I suspect it was post-hoc rationalization, but who am I to say). What you are describing is closer to what I think was CS Peirce's critique (it might have been a different philosopher) of Descartes, referring to his radical skepticism as "sham doubt" or "paper doubt", meaning he didn't actually doubt that he existed until it occurred to him that existing was a prerequisite for thinking, he just imagined doubting. That it was just a theoretical proposition.
Those ideals don't fit with liberal individualism. As soon as you name them, the question comes back, 'whose truth?'
While that's certainly true, is there any reason to believe that there could exist a species that is so intelligent that it could attain an understanding of some aspect of the universe with perfect certainty? Do you really think it is the limits of our intelligence that is the limiting factor?
Not quite sure I'm understanding the distinction you're trying to make. Can you expand?
I don't know. Maybe.
Then again, it might also be the case that in simply having a perspective, intelligent species cannot, as it were, get out of a perspective to view nature from a "view from nowhere", as Nagel puts it, to see how things are without an interpreting mind of some kind.
I'd guess that I could say that such a species could have more certainty than what we can achieve, but perhaps not perfect certainty. However, this is pure speculation.
Philosophers have been enamored with it since the time of Plato at the latest. The certain, the eternal, the unchanging, were felt to be superior to the uncertain and mutable. Nature, the world and our lives in it are subject to change and uncertainty, and so were considered inferior; even less than real. It may be the result of a psychological or religious need people have, I don't know. The result was Quoting Reformed Nihilist
No, it was Peirce alright.
Yup. Reminds me of hypotheses such as that of the block universe, of causal determinism, or of everything being physical, all of which are are so popular nowadays: each maintaining an absolutely certain, eternal, and immutable world, else grounding aspect of it. :smile:
You may want to read Dewey's The Quest for Certainty. He thought the fear of the uncertainty of life led people to seek something certain. What they felt was certain came to be though superior to the world in which we live and our lives in it, which are subject to change. The practical became separated from what was considered "ultimate reality." Knowledge became something separated from practice and conduct. It became something apart from the world, unattainable. Something like God, I would think, or a kind of replacement for God.
Looks like I managed to cut myself off. People may want to take a look at Dewey's The Quest for Certainty, in which he explores the fascination with certainty and explains why he feels its been harmful.
:up:
We're stowaways on Neurath's Boat adapting to its ineluctability (the real) after having overcome the jones for certainty (the ideal).
Been that way for millennia, so...this:
http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~pthagard/Articles/metaphors.pdf
Cool. I love the notion and phrase "sham doubt", but often think it was one any one of Pierce, Quine or Russell, and can never seem to find an easy reference, so I'm sometimes hesitant to bring it up for fear of getting the attribution wrong.
The focus of this thread is solving 'First Philosophy' and thus becoming certain of it. I have done it, and can even match the philosophical logic to it's confirmation by science! Of course, I build on the work of others. I derive the necessary permanent existent of the simplest and only thing, later found to be the quantum 'vacuum' and its overall quantum field, the elementaries made from its fields' quantum level stable arrangements due to the fields' inherent wave nature. You can probably work it out. It's simple, just as the basis of all has to be.
Normally, yes, but there is cause to celebrate and be sure when the philosophical logic matches the most successful theory in all of science! It's no time for humility. Don't fall for "how it looks", although that may work for the run-of the-mill claims, but not so for me or the conclusion that quantum fields exhaust reality that such as Carlo Rovelli finds in one of his books after carefully ruling out other absolutes that have fallen by the wayside..
I'll put a general post together soon, right after dinner, as you would be very interested, indeed, in First Principles/Philosophy. Let us be as positive as we can be, for those finds are rare to come across.
Sadly, claims to such finds are not rare at all, and to date all I have encountered have be vacuous.
Yes, indeed, as I too have had to refute over the last thirty years and more.
Here's the promised gist:
Since there is something, a lack of anything is out, plus there is no sequence in time from nonbeing to being because ‘Nothing’ has no time, nor anything else, nor can ‘Nothing’ have any properties, so nor can ‘it’ be. ‘It’ isn’t, and so that’s the end of ‘it’.
So, given that Something has no alternative, it is everywhere and continuous because it cannot have any spacers of ‘Nothing’ in it. Because it is continuous and never created, it is partless and is thus the simplest state, for a composite cannot be fundamental. As having no parts, the Something is unbreakable into parts as well as being unmakeable from parts, thus it cannot be generated or go away; so, it is eternal, as being ever, and so there isn’t anything else but it. It is permanent. See also ‘Parmenides’, who shocked the philosophic world, and still does, about the One.
The Something cannot be still, else naught would happen; so, we can assign movement to it as a truth, thus it is energetic. Since the elementary particles are lightweights, so does it follow, too, that the Something is a lightweight, just as it has to be, as the simplest state.
Forms from it cannot be new and different from the Something, thus forms such as elementary particles can only become through arrangements of the Something. Since the elementaries are rather persistent, there is a way that these lumps of Something can be made to be stable. We see that they occur at certain rungs of energy levels and not others, which we call quanta, so again, there is something inherent that allows for these steady formations. We see that all the elementary ‘particles’ of a type are identical, this further indicating that they are woven of the same cloth.
Since electrons or photons sent even one at a time through two slits makes an interference pattern, they must have a spread out wave nature, indicating also that they are not pinpoints. While we refer to them as elementary particles, they, of course, are secondary, and so they are elementary only as ‘particles’.
Look up QFT (Quantum Field Theory)!
To continue the philosophy, we can now refer to the Something as the Permanent. What it forms are mostly temporaries, the entire universe, even, although photons don’t seem to decay by themselves and ought to be all that’s sparsely left at the End of the Universe as forms.
Being of necessity, having no alternative, the Permanent requires no creation by ‘God’. Just as we see in the universe, the progression up to now went from the simple to the composite to the more and more complex. Not even the tiny proton can be the First, for it is a composite of quarks.
The Permanent ‘lesser’ simplest makes for the ‘greater’ temporaries in terms of complexity, yet the ‘lesser’ always wins, in a way, because it ever remains, for the ‘greater’ complexities don’t last. Even the elementaries can get annihilated. Still, the Permanent is boring, as we knew the TOE would be, while the temporaries can be interesting.
The religious template of the lesser always having to come from the greater was always a doomed notion, lest an infinite regress ensues, for one, and this is not seen, for two, and the Permanent is of necessity, for three. The notion of ‘God’ fails.
The Permanent is strictly physical because the secondary quanta that are physical are directly the quanta of the Permanent.
We now also know that there needn’t be just one universe, for the permanent ever remains and so it could make another universe. Thus, the Big Bang came from it and not from an impossible ‘Nothing’.
I propose that the Quantum ‘vacuum’ is the Permanent, for its modes of excitations would be what gives rise to the elementaries.
Note that Newton’s absolute time and space have fallen, as well as the notion of the ‘particles’ making the fields. What’s left as fundamental is what is being described here.
We can model the Permanent Quantum ‘Vacuum’ as spacetime points that ever move, these points forming a continuum that we can readily call a field since there is a value at every point. The sums of these harmonic oscillations form a wavering field, each point tugging at the next. In short, the wave nature gives rise to the formation of stable quanta.
A complication is that there are 25 quantum fields modeled, one for each entry in the standard model, these fields all atop each other, some of these fields interacting with other fields, making for one large mathematically complicated overall field. Further mathematical complexity arises from the wanna-be ‘particles’ that don’t have an energy quantum, these being the unstable ‘virtual particles’ that form and go away rather quickly.
Victor Toth says, [i]We decompose a quantum field into harmonic oscillators, since that’s what the field does, with its moving points, though a Fourier-transform, each point now as a quantum harmonic oscillator whose energy comes in quantized units.
The lowest energy state is not zero when we sum for all possible values so we get an infinite result.
When a theory is renormalizable, there’s a mathematically sensible process to discard the unwanted infinities but still account for finite differences, which are responsible for observables. We may sum energies to some finite cutoff value, and use it to compute physically observable values;
in the limit of the cutoff going back to infinity, the physical prediction doesn’t change.[/i]
Well, you yourself used the word foundation (or ground - same thing). That foundation doesn't have to take the form of an indubitable fact, like Descartes' cogito. It can be a system, a method. The important thing is that, according to this view that you question, the edifice of philosophy must have one and only one foundation.
Quoting Manuel
The flip side of having a perspective - shaped by one's temperament, living circumstances, life experiences, exposure to ideas - is that this perspective forms the ground of our being and our knowledge, whether or not we are aware of it and can articulate it as a philosophy. So perhaps, dither as we might, we can't help but gravitate towards some center, like a person stranded in outer space can't move away from wherever their center of mass happens to be.
1. Causality
2. Ontology
3. Identity & Change
4. Necessity & Possibility
5. Space & Time
5 basic ideas that underpin our view of reality (and beyond).
I (identity & change) have to know what exists or doesn't exist (ontology), how what exists are related causally (causality), whether things have to be the way they are (necessity & possibility), and last but not the least where and when it all plays out (time & space).
I think logic is exactly the thing that requires absolutes. The less logical part of you is happy to engage the story of your life without knowing where the bedrock is. Love is the bedrock. Or envy, regret, lust, etc.: the pungent emotions of here and now, that's your launch pad, not particles or what have you. From this vantage point, absolutes are peripheral, fading into the horizon.
This discussion, only fragmented delivered to us set the stage, because we have a paradox here. If what is really really real is an unchanging hole than why does everything exhibit one quality, namely that of change. If movement itself is realy real, how is movement possible withou something fixed relative to which there is movement? Philosophy has tried to come to grips with that paradox, Plato's dualism, Aristotle's attempt at reconciliation in the 'this here', the medieval philosophers who turned to God as the source of that which moves and Descarte's turn to the subject. Certainty is one of those concepts that emerged in trying to get to grips with this paradox because when we have something certain we could define every other thing, concept or experience relative to it. - Whether we were dealing with things, concepts or experiences, was itself dependent on the epoch in the history of philosophy one finds itself in. - Subject and object, essence and substance, phenomena and noumena, all those terms emerge from that endeavour.
As Joshs and Ciceronianus pointed out, philosophy moves and changes. I do not know about the analytics, but the continentals have by and large abandoned the quest for certainty. Joshs would say it was Nietzsche probably, I would say it was Hegel, who lay this quest to rest. There is no 'thing in itself', there is only 'the movement of the concept', the articulation of ever new and according to Hegel more sophisticated ways to try to resolve the ancient paradox. Partly building on this notion, partly out of a counter reaction to it, phenomenology emerged. We have learned something however from this history. Like you state for science, truth in philosophy depends on an "intricate webs of probabilistic relationships". Truth is 'preliminary', the best we have at the time, 'vorläufig' as they say in German, it stakes its claim in advance and has to retract when something better comes along.
That does not mean this preliminary truth can be put forward willy nilly, it has to be acceptable according to the rules of the game played at the time, the 'economy of truth'. Some articulations are taboo, some just fail in the conffrontation with our bodily experience, some get forgotten because we are busy dealing with something else. Truth making, meaning making, is a social affair and the second order rules of argumentation decide what is accepted as true and under what conditions.
See his essay Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.
For the sake of discussion, consider an alternative schema for, let's call it, 'a metaphysics for agency':
^^axiology includes aesthetics, ethics & logic.
Thoughts?
A metaphysics for agency, huh? Logic, empirically constrained (axiology + epistemology)...a bit (too) scientific for my taste but is there a choice?
You misread me, Smith. Not "metaphysics of" but metaphysics for ...
Quoting Agent Smith
Hardly "scientiific" compared to this
Quoting Agent Smith
I replied to this with the same misgivings, IMO, more applicable to scientific concerns than addressed to philosophical (existential) aporia.
I'm not a positivist and I agree with Einstein's sage insight that "imagination is more important than knowledge" (pace Plato re: banishing (silencing) "the poets"). Predictions, after all, are deductions of explicit (and implicit) possibilities, no? Science without (or with "less") fact-based imaginings (e.g. conjectures, predictions, prepared experiments, criticisms, etc) is nothing but religious wankery (woo). Besides, while possibility entails conceivability, conceiveability is not bound by or restricted to following bivalent logic or making grammatical sense that, respectively, excludes impossibilities or nonsense; so, in ontology, I'm referring to the former sense of possibility (modal) not the latter (fantasy).
Sure, it's not as if denying a personal experience or even a kind of bias in philosophical orientation, will help you see things more accurately. I mean, in some cases it might, many times though, one reaches ones point of view through personal experience.
I just don't see how we could even go about trying to find a perspective-less view to see things as they are in a natural state, not affected by any representations. But then are there "things" left at all?
It's very obscure territory.
Well, when you put it that way, imagination does have merit; nevertheless, I feel it's more trouble than it's worth. As for science needing imagination, what about Occam's razor (do not multiply entities beyond necessity)? I see the principle of parsimony as a deliberate attempt to rein in our imagination which otherwise would cause a whole lot of confusion.
That said, consider me a convert to your religion, I'm on board with respect to the general thrust of your argument.
That's why I qualified imagination with "fact-based"; eliminate the fact-free stuff first, then the stuff that doesn't follow logically as a possibility, etc.
:ok: :smirk:
I take this quote to be referring to the notion of objectivity, and it's in regard to this notion that I'm replying.
Well, first off, being myself biased by my own inclinations of thought, the notion of objectivity as "an awareness devoid of a point of view (hence, devoid of selfhood)" for me sort’a converges with the Neo-Platonic notion of “the One” or the Buddhist notion of “Nirvana”. Focusing on the Neo-Platonic notion of “the One”, it is taken to be the (absolute) Good and, as a derivative of this, to embody (for lack of better terms) absolute fairness. Again, not as a deity, for here there is selfhood, but as a completely selfless awareness.
At any rate, my own uncommon metaphysical proclivities aside, here’s my main point:
Complete objectivity for us shouldn’t be interpreted as the practical impossibility (but maybe not impossibility in principle) of obtaining “awareness devoid of perspective or point of view” but as the ideal of an absolute, completely unbiased fairness in one’s judgments - this regarding anything that is judged: issues of human justice (e.g., law), issues of what is and is not real (e.g., science), and so forth.
If this ideal of objectivity, i.e. of nonprejudicial fairness, would be forsaken … well, our relative fairness toward each other (ethics) and in respect to truths (epistemic appraisals of what is real) would go out the window.
Mentioning this because I am, um, biased in favor of objectivity as something which there ought to be more of. Again, not in the absolute sense - which to me would equate to being identical to “the One” or some such - but in the relative sense of the term … Come to think of it, as can equally be said for the ideal of goodness, i.e. of being good.
Basically don't like the bashing of objectivity. :grin: But I'm not saying you were doing this.
It can be a difficult topic. I don't have a problem with the notion of objectivity, namely giving reasons or looking for causes that can be found in nature. What causes something to heat up? The molecules speed up in the object, creating heat. That's an objective property of the world.
As for the idea of "the One", perhaps this can be illuminating in certain instances for the individual capable of having these experiences.
My intuition is not so much that we can't be objective, we can in many instances, but I tend to believe that there is a deeper cause for phenomena which cause things in nature, which we cannot conceptualize. I think this grounds the relations we see, but we don't know or understand the nature of this relation.
Which is why we always keep asking "why" questions.
Personally, I'm doubtful that anyone can. Ecstatic experiences that get close to it, maybe, sure, but - as a personal belief grounded in, granted, imperfect reasoning - not full identity as "an awareness devoid of selfhood, hence literally devoid of ego, hence any type or degree of point of view, hence any conceivable boundary or limit". Experiences are, after all, bounded or limited. That mentioned, to me the idea has a certain logical ring, or appeal. In part having something to do with the ancient Greek notion of logos, as in an anima mundi rather than a literal word. But I'll let that can of worms be.
Quoting Manuel
:up:
The question would be, if these experiences actually tell you something deep about the world or something deep about the mind, which is a part of the world, sure, but not the world itself, in a way.
These issues of loss of ego, I think I can understand them, I've been close to having such experiences. They were quite powerful when I had them, but, I cannot imbue them with more significance than the moment I had them, in terms of me saying something like "the world is essentially spiritual" or "seeing the mind of God" or how fleeting everything is.
I think people can confuse the moment of the experience with some deep truth. But, I may be wrong here.
I'm in full agreement. Happens all the time for all types of experiences, mirages as one example. But, to be fair, Neo-Platonism (or Buddhism, for that matter) isn't about "I've had an experience so there you have it". It's about attempts to coherently comprehend an entire cosmology in a manner that makes sense. This to say, I think way too much weight is placed on the experience factor in these or similar enough philosophies. But that's just me.
Buddhists make a distinction between realisation and experience. It's rather hard to articulate, but there's an article on it here (might be paywalled.) My understanding is that realisation is nearer in meaning to insight; realisations can trigger experiences, and experiences can trigger realisations, but they're not quite the same.
I also think you're right in saying there can be false epiphanies. You can have profound experiences that don't end up meaning much. There's that famous anecdote Russell tells of his associate who was convinced he saw the meaning of it all whilst under the influence of nitrous oxide. During one session he was able to write something down about what he was seeing. Later on he looked at it and it said 'the smell of petroleum pervades throughout', or something of the kind.
Quoting javra
'Detachment' would be a better description than objectivity, I think.
It's interesting. I mean, if anyone take some gas or drug that makes them feel like they're having a deep experience, does that make it any less significant? Not attributing this to you, by the way,
Sure, you may write non-sense - it also happens when people have deep dreams, that is, writing something silly. But I wonder if someone having a "genuine" would not write something similar at the moment of the experience.
But even if it did happen like this, I think this points to a distinction between the moment of experience and the way we reflect on it when feeling "normal", two different "worlds" as it were.
I’m certain that “detachment” makes perfect sense in the context of the Eastern languages where it is thus used. In Buddhism, to my best understanding, detachment intensifies compassion, for example. In English, at least, “detachment” connotes states such as that of apathy to the extent that it is interpreted as antithetical to compassion. Maybe more poignantly, in English, love - from interpersonal to universal - is nearly the opposite of being detached, for it implies attachment to other as that loved.
I get that objectivity has its issues: basically pivoting around objects being physical things - objectivity thereby implying physicality. But there is also the notion of objectivity being equivalent to impartiality, to a lack of bias. With some effort, one can then find that physical things are perfectly impartial, detached from any semblance of ego and its many properties, if one will: Perfectly selfless. Making that sensibly cohere to the notion of impartiality being a good to be pursued for all ego-endowed entities would take quite the shpeal. I know. All the same, I so far find objectivity – in it’s sense of impartiality - to be a suitable term within Western, at least English speaking, context. Think of the notion of blind love: a convenient way of metaphorically addressing an love impartial to - or, one could also say, detached from - outward appearances. Importantly, this while yet being partial / attached to the ideal good of being selfless, at least in relation to that loved.
Plus there’s the common western notion of perfect objectivity being an awareness devoid of a point of view (i.e., an ego or self) – this as is parodied in the statement “view from nowhere”.
Not saying “no”, but expressing why I so far find using the term “objectivity” preferable.
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Will soon be on my way to a New Year’s Eve event.
Happy New Year’s!!! May the new year bring about better things.
Depending on the source you look at, epistemology is often included in metaphysics.
I didn't expect much from your explication, not because of any judgement about you but because, like @Reformed Nihilist, I am very skeptical of grand visions of philosophy. I think you did a good job laying out your vision and I think it is worth talking about. I'm surprised RN or someone else hasn't responded yet.
My first objection is that you have mixed your physics and metaphysics. They don't belong together. That's kind of a knee-jerk reaction. I'll reread your post and see if I have more to say.
Taking an even longer look shows that the attempts are in vain. The fundamental bedrocks philosophers have come up with sofar, be it Popper's falsificationism, Kuhn's paradigms, normal science and revolutions, Lakatos' research programs, or more recent experimental approaches (van Fraassen, Hacking, Rorty, Radder), or philosophical ToEs), are rather a hindrance to scientific practice. Adhering to them as a scientist takes away the irrational grounds on which knowledge is based. Mostly, philosophers of science are frustrated scientists, though they offer nice reading and show signs of intelligence once in a while. They all offer small parts of a picture which just can't be seen in its entirety. Any philosopher claiming to have found a bedrock, has found a small part of the entire rock only. No philosopher, or any other mortal soul, will ever be able to see the whole rock.
Building a foundation for all knowledge and wisdom is even more megalomaniac and supercilious. Ratio fascists, and their relentless efforts to capture thought and action in well described schemes, stand a few steps too far from reality.
Anton Zeilinger claims to have found that the bedrock of reality is randomness, to 3-sigma or more. Do you think the bedrock has to be more than just something simple?
Maybe he's stuck at an airport or on a long vacation.
Quoting T Clark
It's more of a purposeful mix of philosophical logic and science since they seem to agree. What's missing or needs clarification?
We all have our teeny weeny pebble bedrock. For one it are quantum fields of massless 6-dimensional preons interacting by massless gauge fields on a curved 7-dimensional substrate containing a central wormhole as the singularity of creation, for others the bedrock is love, or the gods, others look for salvation in the constellations of the stars or precious stones, still others have randomness to 3-sigma or the observer and the universal wavefunction on many worlds in mind,
and still still other see consciousness as the bedrock. Can randomness be a bedrock? The philosopher who knows how to combine them all has yet to be born.
We can eliminate the complexities and even the composites as being Fundamental, for they would have parts that would have to be even more Fundamental.
The basic fundamentals, the fundamentals from which all is made, cannot be eliminated. as these are fundamental.
True, and so to find the basic we look toward the simplest state.
That is probably the state of the massless particles in quarks and leptons. There are only two kinds of them, the minimum needed to construct all of matter from. Again, dualism in the bedrock.
The quarks and leptons are elementary in the particle realm, yes, but they are not First/Fundamental overall because all the elementaries of a type in the Standard Model are identical, meaning that they are woven by the same type of weave, plus, while they can be rather persistent, they can be annihilated; so, they are secondary. Further, we see that they occur only at specific stable rungs of quanta and so their weave is seen to be all the more as having to be manufactured, and from the same type of cloth. We further see that in the 2-slit experiment the elementaries have a wave nature, and waves fit the Fundamental Arts, as being continuous and having no parts.
In 3D, a wave is a field, and a field simply means that there is a value at every spacetime point. Think of a temperature field or a water field; however, in the classical fields mentioned the lumps of crests/troughs will slosh away and the lumps of hot/cold areas will intermix, but the quantum elementary lumps can continue on their own since they are stable when they don't crash and their field is everywhere. The would-be particles that don't reach the quantum level come and go all the time quite quickly, they being known as virtual particles.
The bedrock is in sight. That's good for now since my lady says it's time for bed.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Go easy on her... And in any case, Gnight! Think I do the same!
:wink:
There's nothing wrong with imagination, or imagining, provided we recognize it as such and nothing more. The same can be said about pretense, or pretending, which I think are closely related. Mere imagining or pretending may soothe, may amuse, may gratify, may even suggest. Taken as more than what they are, though, they may confuse, bemuse, misdirect and may even become exercises in futility.
I'm the soul of futility, Sisyphus' avatar.
I know someone who pretended he had no hands, then ended up acknowledging he had them after all. That's a level of futility even Sisyphus couldn't rival. Sisyphus never purported to doubt the existence of the boulder he rolled up the hill, only to establish it was, indeed, a boulder.
The up and down quark and the electron seem to be the most useful. There are also forces.
So, in short for now, the elementaries are directly the quantum excitations of their respective quantum fields and they can move along their fields like a kink in a rope can move along a rope. Thus, the elementaries are the fields' quanta.
Why is there no Stillness in the quantum fields? Logically, naught would have happened, and physically the uncertainty principle causes quantum fluctuations. So, 'Stillness' is impossible. Parmenides thought that his One didn't have to do anything but he was wrong in that area.
Why not Nothing, as a lack of anything? Well, Something is and 'Nothing' is not. The Fundamental(s) Existent(s) are mandatory, having no option not to be, having no alternative. A partless continuous Fundamental cannot be be made, for there are no parts to make it of, nor can it go away, for it cannot be broken into parts. Thus, 'Beginning' and 'End' for a Fundamental are impossible. Parmenides got this right, saying that his One is "ungenerated and deathless" and even that 'Nothing' cannot even be meant.
So, the elementaries are constituted of quantum fields, and not of any new and distinct substance, which would be not only be impossible but would make them Fundamental by themselves. One cannot get something (new) from from Something Fundamental and one cannot get Something Fundamental from 'Nothing'. A Fundamental is Necessity. 'God' is not required.
Onward next time.
Seem to be, indeed. But they are not. They principle of maximal economy applies to nature. You can construct all with two, the absolute minimum. Nature is dual. There are force fields indeed. The stillness can't exist. Nothing could be freed from the void.
Dunno bout God. Somehow they seem necessary.
Well, protons and neutrons consist of electrons and up and down quarks that trade off with gluons sort of.
So, then, to continue, it makes logical sense that the elementaries have to be arrangements of their quantum fields as their excitations since that's all the fields have to work with. This theory is tested by modeling the field points as harmonic oscillators that tug at the other points, making for the field waverings as the sum of these oscillations, from which, in short, the quantum aspect comes about from the wave nature. The infinities get renormalized away.
The model works, especially for Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED), which is the jewel of Quantum Field Theory (QFT), for it has accuracy up to 11 decimal points and lets us produces devices that work. When an electron goes down by a quantum the electron field interacts with the photon field to produce a photon, making light. So it is that some of the the quantum fields can interact.
There are 25 quantum field types, all atop one another, making for one overall quantum field. The Higgs field is interesting in that its energy is higher than that of the other fields. The term 'zero point energy' is used for the average of a field's energy but it isn't zero.
So now we have the astounding insight that the quantum fields exhaust reality as being all that there is! Astounding progress!
It's more reasonable there 20 massless basic fields, which gather mass by interaction. This insight will get clear when higher energy experiments are done. Muon g2 is a warmer up.
What oscillates if you say that the field is a collection of oscillators?
The number 25 matches the number of entries now in the Standard Model.
Quoting Raymond
The whole field fluctuates from the continuous field points oscillating; the points are not separate from one another; there can't be any spacers of the impossible 'Nothingness' anywhere.
Now, is there anything non physical or spooky going on in the fields? No, because the elementary particles and forces are physical, and since they are the field quanta outright, the quantum fields are purely physical.
So it follows that the universe is wholly physical!
I'm not sure I understand. Why isn't the number 20? Shouldn't there be just two massless base matter fields, one electromagnetic field, sixteen color fields and one gravity field? This could explain the families of quarks and leptons, like quarks once did for hadrons and mesons.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Are the continuous field points fluctuating? How can poits be continuous? What is a field point? A point in space? W
Is there an oscillator attached to all points in space? A quantum oscillator? Is this oscillator attached to the particle? Is a particle the oscillation? So if the oscillator is in its ground state, there is no particle, and there is only the zero point oscillation, and when the oscillator is excited particle is created? But what then excites the oscillator? Other oscillations?
From Wiki:
Given the equivalence of mass and energy expressed by Albert Einstein's E = mc2, any point in space that contains energy can be thought of as having mass to create particles. Virtual particles spontaneously flash into existence at every point in space due to the energy of quantum fluctuations caused by the uncertainty principle. Modern physics has developed quantum field theory (QFT) to understand the fundamental interactions between matter and forces, it treats every single point of space as a quantum harmonic oscillator. According to QFT the universe is made up of matter fields, whose quanta are fermions (i.e. leptons and quarks), and force fields, whose quanta are bosons (e.g. photons and gluons). All these fields have zero-point energy.[2] Recent experiments advocate the idea that particles themselves can be thought of as excited states of the underlying quantum vacuum, and that all properties of matter are merely vacuum fluctuations arising from interactions of the zero-point field.[10]
Many physical effects attributed to zero-point energy have been experimentally verified, such as spontaneous emission, Casimir force, Lamb shift, magnetic moment of the electron and Delbrück scattering.[12][13] These effects are usually called "radiative corrections".[14] In more complex nonlinear theories (e.g. QCD) zero-point energy can give rise to a variety of complex phenomena such as multiple stable states, symmetry breaking, chaos and emergence. Many physicists believe that "the vacuum holds the key to a full understanding of nature"[8] and that studying it is critical in the search for the theory of everything. Active areas of research include the effects of virtual particles,[15] quantum entanglement,[16] the difference (if any) between inertial and gravitational mass,[17] variation in the speed of light,[18] a reason for the observed value of the cosmological constant[19] and the nature of dark energy.[20][21]
Virtual particles are a weird ingredient of empty space. One might even argue that it's the source of dark energy. For sure it has a different effect on empty space as normal, real matter does. The negative energy contributions give negative curvature. It is said that the vacuum fluctuations have a very high energy, while in fact it should be negative.
I think that the approach of having creation and destruction operators is just another way to model the quantum fields. The fields oscillate on their own; it's not like that there are little springy oscillators attached to field points.
What are field points and how can they oscillate? Are it not the excited wavefunctions that show oscillating behavior?
Well, there's no empty space because all is field, and there's no inert space as Newton had it as a background who's only quantity was value. Einstein got rid of Newton's absolute space, achieving background independence, and there is still no space because quantum fields serve as what used to be called 'space' and are everywhere.
Yes, the 'vacuum' energy could be the source of the push of dark energy, the fuel that ever keeps on giving. In the Casimer experiment the 'vacuum' pushes two plates apart.
I'm not sure I get you. There is no empty space?
Field points are just the moving continuous points of a field that can be assigned a value. The excitations of a field oscillate, too, as the sums of the harmonic field point oscillations and can make for a stable lump of stuff called a particle.
These wave functions go along deterministically until someone wants to measure something or until they interact with something else. Whoever wants to know both the location and the momentum of a particles is out of luck due to these not being arithmetically commutable due to the uncertainty principle. I and adding this stuff in just to show that we know more about what goes on.
So, some measurements often only return a probability about a particle's doings, but they are statistically deterministic in that the probabilities add up to one, which is called unitarity. After all, we don't know all the quantum math, plus we can't even then take the whole universe into account, plus the elementaries aren't point particles but are spread out field waves that have a volume…
That means on one side there is a different force then on the other. What's different in between?
All is field, plus 'Nothing' cannot be.
Sorry, it pushes the plates together:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
Well, now it's effable, but what are you interested in?
You seem to imply that field are space. I'm inclined to the view that fields describe the simultaneous histories of almost pointlike particles. Quantum Field Theory claim that the fields are more fundamental than particles and waves, but I disagree. A particle is a funny thing. Empty space is filled with quantum bubbles, but the virtual particles it describes are still situated on empty space. Simultaneously on different parts of space (or zipping below hidden variables, which would make the hidden variables the substance of space). Some of the virtuality is missing between the plates. The hidden variables are confined, excluding some of their modes of being, reducing pressure.
The true "nature" of reality will be ineffible always. Only the outside nature can be seen.
A neutrino walks through a bar.
Well, the foundation has been found; it's the quantum 'vacuum' and its fields that form matter, but that doesn't mean there is some expected deep meaning to it; no meaning is still a find.
To continue, there is the Permanent along with the temporaries that it necessarily forms that are doomed to fade away until more are forthcoming.
The Literature of the Cosmos
The quantum vacuum field waves are the strokes
That write the elementaries’ letters
As the Cosmic alphabet for wording
Of the elements and the forces that
Phrase the molecules’ interactions
Unto the cells’ sentences that make for
The lives’ paragraphs of the species that
Experience the uni-versed story,
In a book from Babel’s Great Library,
The epic tales of the temporaries,
Their glorious triumphs and sad failures,
Amid complexity’s unwinding spring.
We don't know the fundamental fields though. How can we read the Babylon Books properly? Cranking up energy? How can physicists be so blind that they don't see that there is more elemental stuff than quarks and leptons?
Says the bartender:
"Fancy a drink?"
Light-heartedly neutrino says:
"No thanks, I'm just passing trough!"
The great needle plays, stitches, winds, and paves
As the strands of quantum fields’ webs of waves
That weave the warp, weft, and woof, uni-versed,
Into being’s fabric of Earth’s living braids.
Not too much; the math is not complete.