Rasmussen’s Paradox that Nothing Exists
Joshua Rasmussen offers a cosmological argument that begins with a paradox. To start he offers two principles. The first is:
The Principle of Universal Explanation (PE): everything must have some explanation (in terms of something else).
The second is:
The Principle of Unexplained Existence (PU): reality in total cannot have an explanation (in terms of anything beyond itself).
These principles, however, lead to a contradiction that leaves us with the conclusion that nothing exists. Take the standard argument that Rasumussen offers:
1. Everything must have some explanation (PE).
2. Reality in total cannot have an explanation (PU).
3. Therefore, there is no reality in total.
4. If anything exists, then there is the total of all that exists (reality in total).
5. Therefore, nothing exists.
Within his argument, Rasmussen defends PE by saying everything we are exposed to in this world has an explanation. While we do not have proof that this is 100% always true, no counter-examples come to mind. Our lack of evidence against the principle provides evidence for the likelihood of truth. In short, the premise is backed by the idea that this is most likely the case because all of our experiences thus far support the principle.
I find that the probability-based reasoning that leads us to accept the Principle of Universal Explanation can also lead us to deny it. The conclusion that nothing exists is absurd and extremely unlikely. The existence of some reality is guaranteed just based on the idea that these words and claims seem to exist. If something seems to exist then it is seeming to exist in a form of reality. As a result, we know that at least some reality exists. Furthermore, this evidence that something exists is much more probable than the principle of universal explanation being true. In fact, for the principle of universal explanation to even exist, some reality has to exist. Because Rasmussen shows the contradiction between these statements, we have to either accept that PE is true or that the conclusion, nothing exists, is false. The probability of the conclusion being false is much greater than PE being true; therefore, we should deny PE. We are justified in using this deduction based on probability because Rasmussen used the same sort of probability deduction to defend PE.
The Principle of Universal Explanation (PE): everything must have some explanation (in terms of something else).
The second is:
The Principle of Unexplained Existence (PU): reality in total cannot have an explanation (in terms of anything beyond itself).
These principles, however, lead to a contradiction that leaves us with the conclusion that nothing exists. Take the standard argument that Rasumussen offers:
1. Everything must have some explanation (PE).
2. Reality in total cannot have an explanation (PU).
3. Therefore, there is no reality in total.
4. If anything exists, then there is the total of all that exists (reality in total).
5. Therefore, nothing exists.
Within his argument, Rasmussen defends PE by saying everything we are exposed to in this world has an explanation. While we do not have proof that this is 100% always true, no counter-examples come to mind. Our lack of evidence against the principle provides evidence for the likelihood of truth. In short, the premise is backed by the idea that this is most likely the case because all of our experiences thus far support the principle.
I find that the probability-based reasoning that leads us to accept the Principle of Universal Explanation can also lead us to deny it. The conclusion that nothing exists is absurd and extremely unlikely. The existence of some reality is guaranteed just based on the idea that these words and claims seem to exist. If something seems to exist then it is seeming to exist in a form of reality. As a result, we know that at least some reality exists. Furthermore, this evidence that something exists is much more probable than the principle of universal explanation being true. In fact, for the principle of universal explanation to even exist, some reality has to exist. Because Rasmussen shows the contradiction between these statements, we have to either accept that PE is true or that the conclusion, nothing exists, is false. The probability of the conclusion being false is much greater than PE being true; therefore, we should deny PE. We are justified in using this deduction based on probability because Rasmussen used the same sort of probability deduction to defend PE.
Comments (198)
I'd say these principles are needlessly strong. For example, the moderate PSR often talked about in contemporary metaphysics only extends so far as saying that all /contingent/ facts must have an explanation, but does not ask for an explanation of a plain everything: that is, axioms of logic, or the principle itself, or what not.
Furthermore, there are even more tamed versions of the PSR, like the one advocated by Pruss and Gale, that says that instead of every contingent fact having an explanation, every contingent fact has a possible explanation, i.e. an explanation in a possible world. This is known as the weak PSR, the WPSR.
Quoting lish
This seems like shifting the burden. Isn't it Rasmussen's task here, first and foremost, to show why /everything/ has an explanation? Showing why /some/ things have an explanation does not seem to be a sufficient basis to generalize that /everything/ has an explanation unless the sample size of what we experience is a representative sample size of /everything that existed, exists and will exist/, which sounds like a terrible transgression on epistemic humility.
Moreover, playing this game will simply let Humeans win by default, since, while Humeans may not deny the examples of explanation presented, they will understand them in terms of temporal regularity contra causal relation, and, in virtue of the principle of no necessary connections, will make no further commitments: the kind of commitments you need to generalize regularity into causation, or causation into universal causation.
This is not to say Humeans strictly are /correct/, rather, that their opponent must do a lot more to motivate their position.
Quoting lish
This seems like an odd mix of an inductive argument with something that looks like a proof by contradiction. Perhaps this is going through something like a Moorean shift where the probability of the conjunction of the premises is less likely than the denial of the conclusion, in effort to deny the premises?
In either case, this is poorly set up precisely because PE is so strongly-formulated that a lot of causality proponents can reasonably commit to causation and explanation without PE, for instance, counterfactual causation, the PSR, the WPSR, so on.
In short, I simply find no issue with rejecting PE, but I'm not sure what this is supposed to prove or in what way is it meant to be enlightening. It seems that a lot of metaphysicians, regardless of their position on causality, will gladly reject PE, so it does not seem to be a very powerful anti-causal argument. If not, then what it is? What kind of thing is this argument trying to establish if not something trivial and uncontroversial?
How secure is this premise? Why can't reality in total contain its own explanation?
So particular things get particular explanations and universal things get a universalising explanation.
The hidden bit in the logic is that explanations are "another thing outside the thing". But the container is also a kind of thing. Reality might have contents, but it also needs a container.
Even the null set at the foundations of maths requires the brackets that contain the no things found within.
How can pull reality itself in existence? What fundamental physical law can do that? And if you know, where does that self creating structure come from? Is not every infinity of turtles, every eternal universe, every von Münchhausen structure submitted to divine creation?
I'm not sure, but it seems that you might be making a distinction between everything having an explanation and everything having a cause. Is that true? Please believe I'm not being ironic when I say this - can you please explain why that would be true. I can't see any difference between the two. As for causation, it is has been a commonplace for more than 100 years that it is not true that everything has a cause. I don't mean that it is fully established or not controversial. I just mean it has been proposed seriously by eminent philosophers, e.g. Bertrand Russell.
Quoting lish
I'm not even certain what this statement means. To me it is self-evidently false. The world is full of things for which we don't have explanations. Explanations are human things. Reality is not human.
Quoting lish
It is not clear to me that "reality in total" is even a thing. Seems a lot like objective reality. Is it the same thing? There are good arguments that the idea of objective reality is not a very useful one.
But the explanation will be incomplete as such, because it cannot include its own relation to reality in the explanation itself.
The whole "nothing exists" premise is already defeated by the simple fact that something indeed exists. So any argument that arrives at such a conclusion must have employed false premises.
Now false premises can be useful. They are justification for taking the opposite as being true.
So my own position would be that everything was possible. What needs explanation is why reality - as realisable actuality - is the something that it is observed to be.
That leads to the structuralist thought that not everything can be actual because many of those possibilities would conflict and cancel each other out. So reality does contain its own explanation, its own cause. Actuality is the path integral - the sum over all possibility that limits an everythingness to a somethingness.
If everything could actually cancel, there would be nothing. And we know that isn't true. So we know that everythingness was both limitable, and yet not a complete elimination of the possibility for a resulting somethingness.
But that doesn’t explain the whole, only what it can produce.
I’m not defending the ‘nothing exists’ conclusion, in case you were wondering. But I do think people approach this argument from different awareness levels, without realising that what they assume is meant by ‘reality’ - in your case realisable actuality - is on a completely different level to what others assume, and there is structural process in between.
Quoting apokrisis
The way I see it:
All possibly exists, possibly not.
Everything potentially exists.
Something actually exists.
Quoting apokrisis
But this structuralist thought is not contained in the explanation, but in our relation to it. Without a relation to your position as conscious observer, or mine, there would be little structure to your explanation that everything was possible. We tend to take this for granted in these discussions.
Self-explanatory: Self-explanatory
To be fair though, most explanations are such that they rely on something exterior, usually more basic, to that which is being explained e.g. Why is the sky blue? Rayleigh scattering.
This gives me an idea. If explanations must always move in the direction from the complex to the simple, there'll come a point when we'll have hit a wall, the simplest, which would need no explanation at all.
LQuoting apokrisis
A wormhole is a physical hole. So holes exist even in voids.
But what's the explanation?
Axioms in arithmetic. 'Hinge propositions' in some versions of philosophical logic / metaphysics.
I think we need more focus on what constitutes an explanation in the terms of the OP. I can explain why I was leaving the shop with goods in my bag having made no payment. I can promise you that it will not be a simple explanation, let alone the simplest. But it may, despite being complicated and implausible, be true.
Here is an explanation why heavy things fall to the ground. It's because they are made of an earthy substance and earth by nature attracts earth. Now isn't that simpler than what we are told nowadays? And can't you see and feel the earthy mass of such things for yourself? It's self-explanatory. But, alas, that's not good enough. Still, it's an explanation. We have found greater insight and more beautiful explanations in dropping all talk of earthy natures. But at no point did anybody discover the non-existence of earthiness.
Some things (should) explain themselves.
Read below for more...
I don't think a visit to the grocer is going to be complex enough to deserve that label. Complexity should be a function of not how many participants are involved, but of how many laws/principles/rules are at play. To illustrate, this (129.0387349573383219773 × 934883459281.93874236583) is not complex.
Anyway an explanation is such that they tend to be done in terms of constituents/parts when the target of the explanation is the whole: phenomena are explained with chemistry or physics, at an atomic level that is.
Axiomatic systems like mathematics typify the method of starting off with a few simple building blocks, establishing some ground rules, and then exploring the structures and networks we can construct therefrom.
Some things, yes. The universe can explain itself. But not where it came from. How can it explain that?
Quoting lish
As it says in the Tao Te Ching:
Quoting Lao Tzu
Not according to QCD. Instead the interior is a "proton sea" of quantum fluctuations.
In my systems science/hierarchy theory view, the whole is produced by what it produces. The whole shapes its parts - it contributes the downward-acting constraints. But the parts then construct the whole - they contribute the upward-building material being, the suitably shaped "atomic" components.
So it is a bootstrapping or cybernetic causal model. And if it sounds unlikely, it is at least less unlikely than creatio ex nihilo. :grin:
Quoting Possibility
I don't follow your point. But given that I'm taking the internalist perspective of Peircean logic and semiotics, I would have thought that our position as rationalising observers of nature is covered by that.
(When I say "everythingness", that is a placeholder for logical vagueness - the everythingness that is both and everything and a nothing in standing metaphysically for an Apeiron of unstructured potential.)
Even if wormholes existed for real, they would still be a path connecting two moments in time, not a nothingness.
Is that true at the level of metaphysics? Don't fundamental concepts there become grounded in the logical manoeuvre of a dichotomy?
What is it to be discrete? Well, it is to have the least degree of continuity. What is it to be necessary? Well, it is to have the least degree of chance about it?
Etc, etc. The dialectical argument, the unity of opposites, that lays the self-justifying foundation for any kind of rational thought about the structure of existence.
Quoting Agent Smith
A dichotomy does that by instead constructing opposing pairs of limits. So the discrete is one ultimately simple extreme, and the continuous is its dialectical "other". And then what can actually be must lie in the space thus created inbetween.
Actuality becomes then the more complex thing of a mixture. All actual things are relatiively discrete, or relatively continuous. No thing can be absolutely discrete or continuous. They are just more of the one than the other in a spectrum of variety fashion.
There would be a hole in space, connecting two spaces that wouldn't be connected otherwise. There would be a hole of nothingness between the two spaces.
What's the difference between everything and reality in total?
It's a classic example of a cunning arrangement of words that a philosopher thinks can oblige reality to be or not be. I call it "magical thinking". Recite the magic formula, and the the world will do your bidding.
You've been watching too much Star Trek or Dr Who. But even if such a macroscale connection between two spacetime locales could be sustained, it wouldn't be a hole in spacetime, it would be a connection. It wouldn't be a void-like nothing, it would be an extreme energy something.
In between the walls of the hole would be nothing. Time might stand still on these walls, but in between is still nothing. A hole of nothingness.
Quoting apokrisis
:fire:
But that was my point. :brow:
From your reference -
And we haven't even discussed dark energy or the cosmological constant yet.
So if you want to argue for relative states of emptiness, sure. But if you want to sustain your donut argument as evidence that actual voids exist, then its a hard no.
Even the psuedo-scientific attempts to imagine macroscale wormholes accepts tremendous energy would fill them to keep the walls from collapsing - some suitable source of negative energy, or phantom energy, or some other made-up shit.
I wish this were more widely recognized. A succinct formulation of a key idea.
Quoting 180 Proof
This is why conversations with you never get anywhere.
Clearly the OP is about metaphysical nothingness and not the relatively lack of some concrete thing - like the bit of dough that you noticed was missing from the centre of your donut.
( And where I come from, doughnuts didn't even used to have holes, as it happens. They were piped full of raspberry jam and whipped cream.)
But I meant to oppose nothingness to everythingness as the path to the “less than nothing” that is a logical vagueness.
So sure, negative space might seem part of that train of thought. But holes in donuts are an overly concrete conception of the issue. They make a “void” seem like an accidental absence rather than a causal suppression of the possibility of an actualisation.
Modern physicalism - rooted in QFT - says everything happens (in probability space) but almost everything also self-cancels. We get left with the decoherent and renormalised path integral.
So my view weds the Peircean metaphysics and the quantum maths. Or at least attempts to.
You seem to be stuck with classical logic and classical physics. But who could really tell when a whole sentence without hieroglyphs and formatting tricks is a stretch.
In a sense, I think it is a summary of all the things I've written about on the forum. At bottom, they all have this in common.
Not "stuck", the classical suffices to make my point. I just prefer not to overthink the (existential) question, apok.
Is the balance between over-thinking and under-thinking defined somewhere, other than in your personal opinion? What criteria are we applying here - on, for gawd sakes, PF?
If you are not here to further the OP discussion but simply to voice your discontent with the existence of such a discussion, well ... any number of threads deserve your censure.
Things like "Pseudo-scientific" and "made-up shit" can 't hide your obvious ignorance. I'm not talking about macroscopic 4d wormholes. I'm talking about microscopic 5d holes. You can look right through the 5d bulk. There is a litteral hole in 4d space.
Metaohysical BS.
Piling speculation upon speculation doesn’t increase the soundness of the speculation. Let’s just establish that there is a compactified and overlooked extra dimension first.
I mean I have nothing against speculation. But you are treating it as if it is some constraining fact I ought to be taking note of.
QFT may be BS if taken literally - reality as a stack of particle fields. But it is a mathematical framework with observables measured to an indecent number of decimal places. So it is BS that works in an everyday practical fashion.
It needs to be taken seriously. As does GR.
But 5D wormholes? Even if they exist, they still wouldn’t support your claim that they are where one finds a “true nothing” in nature.
Inside and around the 5D hole resides the true nothing. Through which you can look. A hole in space, like a hole in the wall.
That's exactly where it's NO BS.
1. No force is acting on the object
2. Two opposing forces (+x and -x) are acting on it.
?
So even in Newtonian mechanics, that is rather unlikely.
Think of a pencil balanced on its point or a ball on a dome. There you do have such a balance. And it’s going to be upset by the slightest perturbation.
What’s the relevance to the OP?
[math]0 = (+x) + (-x)[/math]
Nothing = Something + The Anti-Something
Nothing isn't really nothing. So, if you encounter something, don't think that's not nothing. It's still a bit hazy for me.
I haven't met operator valued distributions yet...
1. Nothing exists.
2. Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it.
3. Even if something can be known, it cannot be communicated.
4. Even if it can be communicated, it cannot be understood.[/quote]
Nothing = Infinity
Infinity = everything.
Yeah, I guess so. That's the prevailing wisdom. Infinity is an asymptote: we can get close to it, never reach it (King Tantalus).
I get that, and it sounds interesting. This ‘upward building material being’ is a qualitative variability, in my view - there is no certainty of what constitutes a ‘suitably shaped component’ until it contributes to the whole, and is then subject to those downward-acting constraints.
So you may have a complete system theory, but not a complete explanation. Pi, for example, is not an explanation.
Quoting apokrisis
I am partial to Peirce, but even in his theory, our rationalising position is assumed, not included. “Everything is possible” represents the object to the sign, but does not include an explanation of the sign itself.
Quoting apokrisis
I get that - but surely ‘everythingness’ is not the same as ‘everything’? Sorry, I’m being pedantic, but I would have thought “everythingness is possible” to be more accurate...
Yes, it is logically the case that there is a "first cause" or something that has no reason for its existence, besides the fact that it exists. That doesn't mean everything else can't exist. The problem he doesn't realize is that a self-explained existence's reason for existing, is simply the fact that it exists.
2. Reality in total cannot have an explanation (PU).
3. Therefore, there is no reality in total.
4. If anything exists, then there is the total of all that exists (reality in total).
5. Therefore, nothing exists.
Somehow I must be missing the point... at least none of you gave the answer that is very obvious to me, so probably I am wrong.
The problem as I see it resides in the formulation 'reality in total'. The assumption is apparently that reality is the sum of all things (total).However, indeed, there is no reality in total. Of course we can add all existing things, fine by me, but all those things indeed have an explanation. And so 'the sum of all things' is consistent with premise 1. Premise 2 though targets not 'the sum of all things', but it targets 'reality', the concept we have of a whole in which all existing things ft together, even though we abstract from the actual existence of these things. Reality as such is the most general, but also the most empty concept. I see all kinds of things, but I never see a thing I call 'reality'.
Reality, like being, nothing, becoming, is an abstract concept, a category of thought. Now premise 4 perpetutates the mistake of equalizing 'the sum of all things' with 'reality', indeed if anything exists, the sum of all things exist, but that says nothing about reality because reality is not the sum of all things. It is our conceptualization of 'everything that is the case', but not a sum of things. Because of this confusion the author draws the conclusion 5 but he equates again a sum of things with a mental conceptualization, namely nothing(ness).
The argument can be stated without this mistake as follows:
1. Everything must have some explanation (PE)
2. Reality cannot have an explanation (PU) (Indeed, because an explanation is explains a phenomenon in terms of something else, but reality being the most general concept, we by definition do not have something residing outside of it)
Therefore:
3. Reality is not part of everything
And indeed it is not. Reality being itself an empty totality in which everything else resides, is larger than everything. The paradox arises when one equates realty with 'everything' and the author of the paradox merely proves the futility of doing so.
Of course, everything that is real, must have an explanation. That is true. Reality itself though is neither real nor explainable.
The whole post is quite hermetic I understand, but it can be stated much simpler. Just analyze the phrase 'reality in total'. Is a 'reality in part' thinkable? Does one piece of reality add up together with another piece to come closer to 'reality in total'? The combination of words is gibberish.
It is the height of human hubris and folly to think that what is, was, and will be are limited by what we can think or comprehend or give an account of.
Not really, because saying that 'there must be something that exceed the limits of our thought' as you seem to do, is then still conceptualized as a certain something an therefore thought. Something that cannot be thought, for lack of a better description, since what we are dealing with is the indescribable, cannot be anything for us. Even being is a way of conceptualizing. That which 'is not', is not, as Parmenides indeed held.
The genius of Parmenides is, at least I feel this way, is that he articulated the limits of our thought and by that notion invented philosophy, an inquiry leading to the insight that 'the world' is 'our world'.
The problem is not with thinking that which is not, although more on that below, but with the assumption that what is is limited by what is thought. Until quite recently what was thought did not include quantum physics or astrophysics. We still to understand them and there may be things beyond our capacities of understanding.
As to non-being and indeterminacy see this discussion of Plato's metaphysics:
Plato's Metaphysics
Well up until recently there was no wheel either. What is, is limited by what can be thought. that is the thesis of the identity of thinking and being. What it holds is that we must hold that we can comprehend the world for it to be a world at all. It is metaphysics, not physics.
The wheel is a human invention, the micro and macroscopic world is not.
Of course it is, or did they found some sort of sign saying "macroscopic world" when human kind first emerged? The division is human, the classification of one thing as different from another is a human made distinction predicated on the way humans perceive their world. That is the whole point of the identity thesis. Not accepting it in fact leads us to 'metaphysics' of the worst kind, the postulation of all kinds of things that are unthinkable.
Interesting is though that you consider the flaw of the argument to be the acceptance Parmenedian claim, while I think the flaw of the argument is not heeding it. :smile:
The divisions are a way of referring to things that existed prior to anyone thinking such things exist. Whether you think the very small and the very large are the same thing or not has not bearing on the fact that such things as neutrinos and neutron stars exist.
Thinking presupposes being like tides presuppose the ocean – nonidentity (e.g. Adorno, Levinas, Zapffe, Rosset, Meillasoux, Brassier). "What is" is the horizon – unthought – of thought. In other words, thinking does not include, or reach, the greatest (final) number.
Quoting Fooloso4
:smirk:
So the division between the macroscopic and the microscopic always existed without anyone making the distinction? In who's mind, God's?
If your interest is in being argumentative, I am not interested. If your interest is in trying to understand views that differ from your own then you should begin by not misrepresenting what I have said.
What is at issue is not the division but that there are these very small and very large things that were unknown and unthought.
Yes, but being equally presupposes thinking. When I say something is, it means it is at issue for me. A rock, a grain of sand, an ocean does not care one iota about its being. An ocean is not in fact something different from a rock, but for someone for whom the difference matters. Materialists and idealists are just birds of the same feather they absolutize a certain an call it absolute.
Quoting 180 Proof
I do agree with this. We know there is so much more than we can now fathom. "is this all", "there must be more to it" and there always is. However it is thought that makes this distinction. It creates its own horizon.
Do not be condescending or tell me what I should be doing. It is impolite.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes of course there are. No one took germs and viruses into account before... and now we do. However. tiny slivers of matter that make us ill are thinkable, they conform to our categories of thought, there is nothing new to it. the identity of thinking and being stipulates that the categories of thought necessarily mirror that which we find in our world. That is at least what I take to be Parmenides' point, read charitably.
I edited out the wheel argument though, because I thought it would lea us astray and it did. However, I like the discussion about where the paradox in fact comes from. I think it comes from equating reality with the sum total of things. What o you think.
You have got this backwards. They do not conform to a priori categories of thought. It is, rather, that thought was forced to change to accomodate what did not fit existing categories.
Quoting Tobias
Parmenides "categories of thought" exclude change.
Ocean is the independent variable, tides are a dependent variable that 'makes explicit' a dynamic aspect of the ocean. "Equally presuppose" makes no sense here. Feuerbach suggests (as I read him), it's merely an anthropocentric bias (blindspot) to reify – project, literalize – our thoughts (e.g. distinctions) and then thereby conclude 'maps = territory' (even as maps are made by / from aspects of the territory and used to make explicit other aspects – yet never 'the whole' – of the territory). :chin:
Quoting Fooloso4
Well they have to, unless you want to go back to pre-kantian days. We need the category of difference to account to perceive things as different to begin with. We do not stumble into the world as tabula rasa.
Quoting Fooloso4
Well Parmenides did not have the categories of thought, or the 2000 whatnot years of philosophical development that came after him. Indeed he was puzzled with the notion of change. He had to deny it as real based on what he could logically fathom. It took Herclitus to clear it up to some extent, in the same river we step and do not step. What he did not realize is that becoming is a category of thought as well. He was not right, I am a Heracleitian, but what he got right was the notion that what is real has to be able to be thinkable. He thought change was logically impossible, that was a mistake.
Correct. The argument shows that the somethingness that does exist is organised in this fashion. And thus what we can conclude is that it all starts with an everythingness - an Apeiron or vagueness - and not a nothingness. (Although an Apeiron or vagueness is in fact also a “less than nothing” as well.)
But the “existence” of that Apeiron or vagueness is not explained in any immediately obvious fashion. However you could then wonder what could rule out the “existence” of naked possibility itself.
If nothingness is so easily taken to need no cause to be the case, why wouldn’t the same apply more strongly to that which is less than nothing?
Quoting Possibility
The different terms denote the possible vs actual distinction. So everythingness is the state of possibility, everything would be its (impossible) realisation in actuality.
Perhaps you are reifying what can “exist” as only the unbound potentiality for “all things”? So this is a linguistic trap here rather than a problem for the logic of the argument.
Remember also that this bootstrapping argument works it’s way backwards from the physical world as we know it. So the prior potential can be framed in terms of infinite GR dimensionality and infinite QM fluctuation. Or a QG unbound view.
We can explain donuts no problem from the Big Bang on. And we can explain the gauge symmetries that impose a mathematical-strength shaping hand on any initial Planck-scale QG potential.
So the notion of this everythingness has physicalist parameters. It is tied to what are already our notions of fundamental simplicity and not some naive realist or modal notion of the everythingness of a world of “medium sized dry goods (and torus-shaped confectioneries)”.
We can distinguish what is necessary being from what is merely contingent, and so greatly reduce the explanatory load that the argument must bear.
Well, I wonder why I have to accept that the territory is real and somehow the map is not. The whole distinction is a map making exercise, done in order for us to navigate better, but reifying this distinction as something that is a really really real distinction is actually what you are warning us against doing.
It may be useful to do in some instances and to say, well this is real and unchanging and this is a changing aspect of it. At least I think that is where I think you are going with your distinction between tides and sea, but I might be wrong of course. It may also lead us astray if one holds on too firmly to these distinctions/ The problem with the paradox, at least from my perspective, is that it reifies a certain concept, namely 'reality', and then compares it to certain 'res' all things that are.
Do we see things differently according to a priori categories or did difference become a category as the result of seeing differences? Kant claims the former. This is not the prevailing view today.
Quoting Tobias
That supports my point. They are not invariant a priori categories. Or, more generally, it is not the case that thinking and being are the same if thinking leads to the denial of change.
Quoting Tobias
The relationship between Parmenides and Heraclitus is an open question. Some maintain that Heraclitus was responding to Parmenides and others that Parmenides was responding to Heraclitus.
Quoting Tobias
It not that he did not realize it, he just thought that becoming is a false opinion. His monastic thinking led him to reject change and difference. This is a good example of why we should not accept the premise that thinking and being are the same.
Where do the laws of nature or the constants of nature fit into your notion of reality as mereologically the sum of all things?
Aren’t you looking at this from the point of view of the current “world of medium sized dry goods”, whereas physics suggests that laws and constants - the absolutely general - are all that constitute our reality at its beginning?
Quoting Tobias
So therefore reality is the wholeness of every thing, because - as you say - it aint’t the mereological sum?
And thus reality speaks to the maximally general. Which in physics-speak is laws and constants.
Quoting Tobias
Well physics does divide reality - as the bounding wholeness of concrete actuality - into the two parts of laws and constants.
To fix that dichotomy, you then need a systems logic that can find the unity in such opposites.
So the structure of the challenge is familiar.
Well I would not know how you can perceive 'difference' without a mind wired to see 'difference'. It is also very binary, right, it is the same thing or a different thing. This binary view of things to me seems to belong to the human condition.
Quoting Fooloso4
Why would it lead to a denial of change? Only if you assume that thinking cannot handle change. I don't see why it would not be able to. I conjecture that it is because one considers thinking to be mere logic or 'quantity', but dialectical thinking is very dynamic. I realize that I am the same person I was yesterday and that I am different from the person I was yesterday.
Quoting Fooloso4
Ok, but I think we both agree there is more to thinking than monolithic 'sameness' or identity. In your view though it seems like we first have to experience non-identity in order to be released from our slumber that thinking prioritizes identity. I think that assumption, that identity and sameness is the default and change modifies our thinking is not warranted.
Quoting Fooloso4
No, it is a good example of the dawn of philosophy. He held on to assumptions, namely that 'real' thinking deals with the unchanging, which we questionable.
I do not hold reality as the sum of all things, it is exactly the opposite I would say. Rasmussen, the author of the paradox seems to hold that idea.
Quoting apokrisis
No, I hold reality to be a metaphysical concept, not a physical one. I would therefore also think that 'reality at its beginning' is a square circle. As if there was no 'reality' and will at some point not be a 'reality'. Reality is a concept by which we refer to all that is real for us, or all that is the case. It is an abstraction referring to the most general state of affairs.
Quoting apokrisis
I have no idea what physics would say, I am not a physicist. If when physicists speak of reality they actually speak of 'laws and constants' that is well possible. That does not mean anything though in a metaphysical discussion. though when physicists and metaphysicians speak to each other they will first have to clear away such mutual understandings of a concept.
Quoting apokrisis
Ok. than they run into a paradox. Poor physicists. I do not see though why you would give the keys of metaphysics (conceptual analysis) to physicians (analysis of the physical world).
Quoting apokrisis
I recommend dialectics ;)
The best way to understand them is imagining what it is to be a quantum particle or a cosmos. Quantum particles have properties were not familiar with from everday life, but it's still possible to sympathize with them.
The laws and constants are secondary. It are particles, their interactions, and their collective behaviors, that matter. Democritus told us that already.
There must be a 'The Physics Forum' where such issues are vehemently discussed.
Isn't physics part anymore of philosophy? Or only metaphysics? About physics, that is.
I do not think so. Neither is law, art or construction. However, there is philosophy of art, philosophy of physics (a sub branch of philosophy of science) and philosophy of law.
Though of course one can argue a question is actually not a philosophical question, but a question of physics. That is a philosophical discussion too, because it is about the limits of philosophy.
So you don’t hold to metaphysical naturalism? Are you arguing for dualism or something?
Quoting Tobias
Those could be two different things.
Certainly from my Peircean approach to metaphysical naturalism, I recognise the potential and the necessary to be real along with the actualised, So all that is the case in terms of the brew which could result in a “real material world” includes the tychism of quantum potential and synechism of mathematical symmetry.
Thus metaphysics and physics wind up singing from the same hymn sheet. Talk about the origins of reality are informed both by the dialectics of metaphysics and the pragmatics of science.
Quoting Tobias
Why wouldn’t physics and metaphysics be prioritising this merged approach?
Peirce has already done it. Ontic structural realism takes it seriously enough. I don’t see a problem for the metaphysical naturalist given physics used to call itself natural philosophy for just this reason.
But it used to. 19th century physicists (and before), combined them happily. Mach, Bolzmann, Einstein, Planck... Where are the likes of them nowadays? They are rarities instead of the rule. Luckily there are exceptions, for the better of physics, I might add. Rovelli, Smolin, etc.
I think this also fits with what is perhaps my own misreading of 'the real is rational and the rational is real.' Our shared lifeworld is structured by our social symbol slinging. The intelligible 'spine' of reality is our quilt of maps which functions for the most part as the territory itself, since most interpretations are so shared and automatic that they count as facts.
Does me referring the question to a certain type of analysis say anything about my metaphysical commitments? But no, I am not a metaphysical naturalist.
Quoting apokrisis
That is the difference (for me at least) between philosophy and science. Science departs from absolute presuppositions about the nature of what it is looking for. Philosophy examines which absolute presuppositions are being held when people discuss the 'origins of reality'. For me they do different things.
In order to discuss the natural world and everything within it from a third person detached perspective, I would take recourse to science. Why would a philosopher speculate about that? I will not in fact, because I am not a scientist. This: "So all that is the case in terms of the brew which could result in a “real material world” includes the tychism of quantum potential and synechism of mathematical symmetry." is enigma to me. Or maybe it is the current analytic vogue, that is possible, but then equally I will have to fold because I have no idea what this means. But indeed if the claim is that 'the material word' somehow is the world as it is, qua metaphysical position, then no, I do not hold that. I think it is reductionist and well... metaphysical in the pejorative sense of the word.
Quoting apokrisis
They can, they just have to be on the same page conceptually. If one is a metaphysical naturalist maybe. However, then is it nor more likely that the physicist will come to a better understanding? I stand in the continental tradition rather squarely.
Could you elaborate?
Agreed. It is the ‘you could then wonder what could rule out’ that I was referring to. This process of energy from imaginative possibility to actuality is filtered through a limited logical and qualitative structure of potential/value/significance/knowledge: you.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, I get that - I can follow the logic of your explanation - but you’re assuming a qualitative understanding of QG (or the aesthetic idea of relating QM and GR). I’m not reifying anything - I’m merely noting your uniquely affected qualitative relation of ‘sign’ to your conscious and discerning language use as the particular ‘signifying’ device in your explanation. When you say “we can...”, you’re referring to your own qualitative potential.
The Tao Te Ching refers to this in its opening chapter, acknowledging that “The Tao which can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” The original ideographic language of the TTC is a qualitative logical structure, to which we as readers align our own qualitative logical structure (in a potential state ‘empty’ of effort), in order to relate to the unbound possibility of energy as a whole in absentia, and recognise the possibility of its unique path through our particular qualitative logical structure. It’s a different way of explaining the same structural relation you’re referring to here. The difference is that it incorporates its language structure wholly within its explanation, and excludes the one aspect of reality we have any hope of accurately isolating from a written representation: energy.
But all this is tangential to the OP, anyway.
Quoting lish
I think you and I, @apokrisis would reach tentative agreement in arguing against 3. You’re rejecting the second principle, but my view is that 3 does not follow necessarily from the first, regardless of the second. That ‘everything must have some explanation’ does not negate the notion of everythingness (reality in total) existing without any logical explanation. We can’t escape from the qualitative aspect of language use in logical assertions of reality. Even if the maths works. :wink:
I've also pondered the map-territory distinction as part of the map (which deconstructs the distinction.) A softer version interprets the 'territory' as the looming disutility or obsolescence of any given map. The map or the sign or structure itself is perhaps impossible to finally define. “The sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: ‘what is...?’”
Thanks! I can relate to where you are coming from. 'No finite thing has genuine being' suggests a similar point to me. Our signs form an interdependent system. This system has no bottom or first element. Opposites come in interdependent pairs.
It would help understand where you are coming from on his question. If we don’t share the same axioms, we are hardly going to agree on the same conclusions.
So all my arguments here are contingent on taking a totalising natural philosophy view.
Quoting Tobias
It is a checkable theory, like all metaphysics ought to be … to avoid being word salad.
Quoting Tobias
Gotcha. (But I thought that had taken its own turn towards systems science with enthusiasms for things like Prigogine’s far from equilibrium thermodynamics.)
Probably, I am just way more old fashioned. It never was in my curriculum. If anything I subscribe to a perspectivist or constructivist world view. In metaphysics I use the dialectical method and m view of being in the world is phenomenological.
Quoting apokrisis
I think that is impossible, because it would require another meta-theory from the vantage point of which you would have to check it, meta-metaphysics. (see pataphysics). What I think you do is simply conflate metaphysics and physics. Physics indeed needs to work with testable theories. I think though that it is a reductionist view. Metaphysics examines the assumptions with which we relate to the world. It is therefore introspective.
I’m referring not to my qualitative judgements but that of a Peircean community of rational thinkers. I rely on the world-structuring of a logical semiotics as practiced within a pragmatic human tradition.
So as embodied in philosophical naturalism, quality gets properly defined - as dichotomous to quantification.
And the qualities employed are those that are the product of rational dialectical argument. Metaphysics was founded on the identification of such dichotomous qualities. Chance-necessity, matter-form, atom-void, being-becoming, stasis-flux, etc, etc.
Qualities are not free choices. They are the unities of opposites that reasoning about pure possibility must force upon us.
And then the value of these metaphysical distinctions are checked against the material facts by the scientific method - the methodological naturalism to complement the metaphysical naturalism.
Quoting Possibility
Sure, but how did Peirce resolve this Kantian dilemma? Do we fetishise the thing-in-itself or get on with the pragmatics of being selves in a modelling relation with our reality - the Umwelt argument.
So the Apeiron or Vagueness, or the quantum foam for that matter, are the eternal which cannot be spoken about. And yet still - pragmatically - we can be completist by including them in our conversation to the maximum degree that it is usefully possible.
Quoting Possibility
In fact energy isn’t the ground level of physicalist ontology anymore. The modelling has moved on to information-entropy as the dichotomy that best captures the wholeness of reality’s foundations. So a structuralist account is replacing a materialist account.
As might be expected where rational structure is the stabilising cause of being, making materiality its “other” of the radical and undirected fluctuation, or fundamental instability.
Sure. No problem. Naturalism competes in the philosophy space with other metaphysical views - like those that are dualistic, intuitionistic, or anti-totalising. And in science, the holism of systems science competes against the reductionism of atomistic science.
Even within systems science there are dozens of camps.
Agreement can only arise in the long run - at the end of time.
My dog can see difference and smell difference and taste difference. Is her mind wired with Kant's categories or some other a priori categories?
Quoting Tobias
Parmenides denied change. It did not fit his thinking.
Quoting Tobias
It is not a question of identity in general, but the identity of thinking and being.
Quoting Tobias
So, his thinking was questionable. Do you think that thinking has now progressed to the point where thinking and being are the same but in thinking they were the same he was wrong based on his thinking?
Yeah, so we actually have:
1. anything must have some other explanation
2. reality in total cannot have another explanation
I'm not sure what could be self-explanatory here.
General necessities are hard to come by; self-consistency might be a candidate, then again that just seems like us imposing so we can make sense of things, don't think there's any guarantee of that.
1. Everything that exists must have an explanation based on something else.
2. The totality of reality has no explanation (there is no something else).
Ergo,
3. Nothing exists
Another version of it would go
1. If it exists, it has an explanation
2. Reality has no explanation
Ergo,
3. Nothing exists
Yep, can't argue with that!
Unless you buy into the argument based on
1. Explanations being based on things simpler than that which they explain.
2. The simplest, therefore, needs no explanation
The totality of reality began as the simplest conceivable object (the Big Bang singularity). Looks like physicists are on a wild goose chase, there is no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.
Options:
1. Reality needs no explanation (I opted for this)
2. Reality explains itself (Someone might want to work on this)
You don't. I don't. As I say above 'maps are aspects of the territory used to delineate, or make explicit, other aspects of the territory', so they are real too, though formally (i.e. abstactions) and not as the concrete (empirical) facts to which they refer.
Again, to my way of thinking, being is the independent variable and thinking is a dependent variable (ergo, 'the being of thinking' (whereas 'thinking [s]of[/s] being' makes no more sense than 'map = territory' or 'solipsism')) – and these "distinctions", or ideas, are thinking-dependent-dependent variables.
The problem, the way I see it at least, is that both are dependent on each other. Thinking ' is' , certainly, We encounter it among all kinds of phenomena and give it a separate name, we refer to it as thinking. Therefore it seems that in this vast ocean of being, there is a tiny ship setting course, and perhaps making a map of this sea, we call this ship 'thinking'. Quite naturally it sets itself apart from the sea it is navigating, the stars it is mapping and the winds it gauges. It does not give it a pause ordinarily on its voyage.
However while far away from home, at a time the Captain cannot sleep and he stares over the ocean at night, something occurs to him. Why does he maps the things he maps? Why does he rwrite 'ocean' on one side of the paper and 'land' on another. "Because they are different" he tells himself. However, something keeps nagging. He notices and sees so much more differences, the water is dark blue on the ocean, light blue in some bays. He does not make note of it. He thinks, perhaps all these drops of water, each and everyone of them, they might all be different from each other. There might be differences we aren't even aware of. Or, perhaps, there might be similarities we are not even aware of. How would God discern between land and ocean? Would he? Or is the distinction as trivial to an omniscient mind as the minute differences between two drops of water are for us?
The captain of the ship of thought realizes that all the differences we make are based upon itself. Het is after all making the map. He realizes that the ship is from the same matter as the land is and as the ocean is, but that all the differences made within this matter are made by thought. He realizes that even him referring to matter, invokes the history of philosophy, wasn't it Aristotle that called it such, he wondered. So yes, he realizes, all this mapping, all this thinking, it is based on the history of it, what we have considered important, what we have considered all this stuff to be. He goes to sleep, feeling puzzled and slightly confused,, but not out of place. He realizes, he is not different at all.
The external relation for Peirce was unconditional love. In this sense, quality is indefinite, and not entirely dichotomous to quantification. Reasoning about pure possibility is, after all, a free choice.
Quoting apokrisis
Agreed - and being honest about the incompleteness of this.
Quoting apokrisis
I’m with you here. Energy, as I understand it, is not so much a material entity as a placeholder for the ultimately illogical quality of information-entropy.
I do recognise that my position goes a step beyond reason - I’m actually in complete agreement with much of what you’re writing here. It isn’t really useful for me to take this step, except when it comes to being honest about completeness and our relation to possibility.
I guess a dog's brain is hard wired too yes. Actually in dogs we tend to find it much easier to believe and call it ' instinct'. What a dog does not have and mankind does, is self reflection. At least there is no evidence that the question of being is an issue for dogs, but it is for humans.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, he denied it, because he considered only static relations to be really thinkable. I think that is not true. Being is indeed a fixating concept, but it itself can only be thought in relation to nothing, leading to the concept of becoming, pace Hegel.
Quoting Fooloso4
They always were the same. They are analytically the same. To be is to take part in a state of affairs (free after Wittgenstein). Their identity is not based on empirical findings but on conceptual analysis. That is why the identity of thinking and being is a metaphysical proposal and not a physical one or a psychological one. That is the whole difference between philosophy and physics for me. Philosophy is self referential, a conceptual analysis of only itself. It leads to self knowledge but not knowledge of the world.
I guess it depends on how one interprets agapastic evolution.
Can it really be driven by such a transcendental quality as "cosmic love"? Or is it better covered by the prosaic systems view that, of course, all biosemiotic systems must balance the secondness of evolutionary competition with the thirdness of ecological cooperation?
So it is the dichotomy of competition~cooperation that is the driving immanent, or self-organising, dynamic that emerges from pure semiotic possibility in nature.
Quoting Possibility
:up:
But to note that a dog can taste the difference between cheese and carrot does not mean it's mind:
Quoting Tobias
You got here by arguing that things:
Quoting Tobias
You now expand our categories to include dogs. But a dog does not need the conceptual category of 'difference' to taste the difference between carrot and cheese.
Quoting Tobias
Do you mean according to Hegel and contrary to or pace Parmenides? If so, it is odd that on the one hand you argue in favor of Kantian categories and on the other Hegel, who rejected them.
If you are arguing in favor of Hegel then it is only at the completion of history, with Geist's self-knowledge, with the realization/actualization in time of the real being the ideal, that it is true, for him, that subject and object are unified. But none of this means he was right. Many consider it metaphysical overreach, wishful thinking, or idealist fiction.
Yep. That was the position I argued against.
Quoting jorndoe
In our "best" descriptions of nature, self-consistency in the form of some global finality, some general optimisation principle, is always needed, even if it can't be really explained by the view from the individual parts.
Take the Principle of Least Action and the way it must be smuggled in as the mysterious foundation to all mechanics.
I do not understand. It certainly notices difference or it would eat everything, but it does not. It does not articulate the difference. Indeed, dogs do not engage in metaphysics.
Quoting Fooloso4
Dogs are not categories of thought. The categories of thought (as Kant articultaed them) represent necessary distinctions the mind makes when it perceives the world. Dogs do not need to articulate the category of difference, neither do we, to taste the difference. That does not mean that the category of difference is not a necessary category, without which our world would be vastly different from what it is now. It is odd, because I think you and I disagree because of a misunderstanding. Our thinking conforms to the world and vice versa, yes, but that does not mean that the moment we become self conscious of a certain mental operation, our world changes. You seem to impute that on Parmenides as well, who articulated something like the thesis of the identity of thinking and being. However, it is not because we found the possibility to incorporate change in our conceptual apparatus, magically change happened in the world. Or that when we could not articulate it, thinking was somehow not identical to being. We simply did not comprehend how it could be an later we learned. I wonder if we are actually far off or not.
Quoting Fooloso4
Hegel rejected them because he thought Kant's table of categories is too static and too 'formal', based on some kind of luminary self understanding which we do not have. For Hegel we come to realize the categories of thought through a dialectical process in the course of practical history and not through a process of clear introspection. this insight opens up the historical nature of our way of thinking. I applaud that.
Quoting Fooloso4
Sorry, pro Hegel, contra Parmenides. Yours though is is a very thick, metaphysical reading of Hegel and I think a much lighter reading is possible, based on Robert Pippin and Walther Jaeschke. 'Absolute knowledge' amounts to no more than the realization that thinking progresses dialectically. Only after this realization is it possible to engage in the 'Science of Logic', the dialectical articulation of the different concepts, or, in terms used throughout this post, the categories. With Kant 'Geist' opened up the possibility of self knowledge and Hegel completed Kant's project (or so he hoped).
Overrreach in a sense yes, there is a lot to say about Hegel's claim that with him a fundamental insight broke through in philosophy and also a lot to say about what results the dialectical method brings us, but that would take us far out of bounds. For now, I do not see at all why it would be necessary to read Hegel in the light of some cosmic world spirit, that would reach some sort of historical endgame as Fukuyama or Kojeve seem to hold. That is more Schelling than Hegel and perhaps late Hegel when his pride and fame got the better of him.
Not dogs as a category but dogs having "our categories of thought".
Quoting Tobias
Neither the dogs or us need the categories to taste the difference.
Quoting Tobias
Change happens whether we are able to think change or not. That is the point. It points to the separation of thinking and being.
Quoting Tobias
So, thinking changed but thought did not.
Quoting Tobias
Right. So they are not hardwired. And dogs do not share in the history of spirit that realized in western culture.
Quoting Tobias
I agree, but I see that insight in terms of becoming, history, and culture. Not the realization/actualization of spirit in history, the concretization of thought, and the overcoming or aufhaben of the difference between subject and object.
indeed, that is what I responded above.
Quoting Fooloso4
No, if we would have no ability to discern change from sameness it would not happen. Just like there is no color 'Grue' because we do not have the ability to discern it. You need the conceptualization of it in order to articulate it as happening. Perhaps a dog's life is just for us different every day. I do not know what it is like to be a bat.
Quoting Fooloso4
No, we articulate it as 'happening whether we can think it or not' , but without a mind for which change is an issue change does not 'happen', just like nothing really 'happens'. Also a happening is somehting that is an issue for someone, an object for a subject.
Quoting Fooloso4
Thinking as such did not change, we just managed to articulate the process more richly.
Quoting Fooloso4
They are, they are already present 'in itself', just not 'for itself' in Hegelian terms. In dogs they are perhaps also present in themselves however, the chance they are also actualized for themselves is very questionable. In Western culture they have become 'for themselves', at least according to Hegel.
Quoting Fooloso4
I also do not, like I told you. My Hegel interpretation does not follow that rather traditional path.
I’ve come to recognise at least one transcendental quality in any plausible understanding of the system - a firstness, or that which is as it is independently of anything else. An unresolvable paradox sits at the heart of it all. But it’s interchangeable, and that’s what makes it at least possible to UNDERSTAND the entire system from the inside. Just not explain it - not without excluding ourselves from the explanation as an assumed relative position.
In the Tao Te Ching, the transcendental quality is what we embody in our limited sense as ‘desire’ or affect: this information-entropy dichotomy as an unresolvable, interchangeable paradox. Information is not necessarily 1 with entropy 0. We don’t always have to be perceived to intend, or to possess our capacity - a leader is not necessarily one who acts or enforces.
The interchangeability of the dichotomy maximises variability, and enables us to critique, improve and explain our understanding of the system by varying our possible relation to it. This is also essential to Peirce’s synechism: the third member in any continuum C is our possible relation to C. Recognising that there is always another possible relation to C with unique information - and extrapolating this beyond a linear qualitative structure - is the basis of Peirce’s notion of unconditional love - if we are to aim for a living community of rational thinkers, then we need to accept that we cannot always BE or THINK rational, owing to our limited actuality. And if we accept this, then surely we cannot ignore, isolate or exclude the relative position of those who seem (from our limited position) to THINK less rationally?
It's been awhile, but wouldn't this be too anticlimactic? To make it interesting, I believe we need to do something like destroy the exterior (and with it of course the interior.) I watched some Pippin videos that he was great. Cool that you mentioned Kojeve. He's a fun one. Anyway:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_B._Pippin
This reminds me almost too much of 'Dreydegger' and some interpretations of Wittgenstein. I guess I'd understand the softer version of absolute knowledge as a kind of introjection or ingestion of that which was previously projected as an external trans-human or non-human authority or indigestible kernel 'behind' appearances.
Beautiful. Do you mean that 'he' realizes that this 'he' or 'subject' is another piece of the 'map,' and that even the 'map' metaphor depends on everything else for its significance? 'He' makes the 'map' according presumably to his desires, themselves historically generated, but only according to the map that makes him along with itself. A whirlpool of traces.
I prefer Peirce’s framing of Firstness as Vagueness, or even Tychism. That gets beyond the idea of something that exists by itself or is independent of what then arises.
Sure. The notion of independence can suggest the existence of a particular something - implying a certain substance or concreteness that just isn’t there. Vagueness is a non-logical quality of existence, while tychism undermines its own attempt to explain or logically structure reality.
How so when it is logically defined? (as that to which the PNC fails to apply)
Quoting Possibility
How so? A systems way of looking at things says that everything boils down to global constraints on local instability. Which is the tychic-synechic story.
So surely the point would be that tychism indeed doesn’t logically structure reality. Instead it is formally the “other” which is the disorderly potential that actually gives synechic continuity, or the thirdness of regulating habit, a job to do.
Ha! I guess it depends on your perspective - that’s not how I would have described vagueness myself (I’m an Arts major, after all), but I can see it now!
Quoting apokrisis
Hmm... I will admit that I went off the standard dictionary definition of tychism: “the doctrine that account must be taken of the element of chance in reasoning or explanation of the universe“, and naturally interpreted it from my position, which as you can probably guess is more qualitative than logical.
I’ve often looked at systems as introducing local constraints on a universal instability - a more creative impetus of structuring information against entropy. Looking at it now, I wouldn’t think either is more accurate than the other. All of this speaks to the interchangeability of the dichotomy.
This discussion has been very enlightening for me. Thanks!
Do you think nothing happened before there were humans or something else that was able to discern change?
Quoting Tobias
There is no color grue because 'grue' is a word that was made up that does not name a color.
Quoting Tobias
What happens and an articulation of what happens are not the same. Something must happen in order to articulate it as something that happens.
Quoting Tobias
It is not a question of "thinking as such" but of what is thought, and that changes.
Quoting Tobias
But for Hegel the identity of thinking and being is realized, made actual in time. Prior to this they are not the same, and it is only through the dialectic of difference that thinking and being become the same. How does your interpretation differ?
To my shame I must say that I know too little of Dreydegger to really comment but from what I do remember it does sound similar. The wiki quote is also how I would see it, but better articulated than I could. I do not know if the appearance of this insight is anti-climatic, I do not think it is. With the ' Phenomenology' (appearance) of spirit (a necessarily assumed horizon of meaning) we realize that we ourselves are not some free transcendental subject as Kant would have it, but that our self actualization takes place within a larger whole, later to be called horizon or maybe even 'episteme'. I must be careful here though, Hegel assumed continuity, the later emphasis on discontinuity is a reaction (in dialectican fashion) to Hegel. I think 'absolute knowledge', is an even stronger realization than that though. With its procedural way of thinking the 'Pheno' is an introduction to and vindication of the method employed in the Logik, his truly metaphysical work of conceptual analysis. The dialectical process also proves itself as the ground structure of thinking (logos/ logic) and from this ' absolute' standpoint the conceptual analysis proper may be undertaken.
Quoting Fooloso4
Indeed if it wasn't for the appearance of a mind able to discern 'change' nothing happened. It is only by abstraction that we say something must have happened before the emergence of us. We discern change so we cast the universe before our onset in the same terms. However we can only do so from our own standpoint and in our own categories of explanation. Had we or anything else discerning change not been here, nothing would have changed.
Quoting Fooloso4
The grue word denotes a color we cannot discern and because it cannot be discerned we cannot say whether it is or is not there.
Quoting Fooloso4
Something takes place, certainly, at least something appears to us. That is what we know. What exactly, we cannot know. We cast it in terms of change and happening. They are exactly the same until we find out our articulation of it was somehow inadequate.
Quoting Fooloso4
No, it is exactly of 'thinking as such'. What is thought always changes of course, but we are dealing with the categories in which we think. They remain the same. Of course, the contents of my thoughts at a present moment can never encompass being as such. Metaphysics is about being qua being, not a kind of being or a certain being.
Quoting Fooloso4
Hegel's thinking is circular. the identity of thinking and being is always there. Substance is always subject in the language of the pheno. However it is not realized it is such. We always spent our time within this horizon of meaning, yet, Kant for instance did not realize it yet and posited a free subject. Spinoza also did not realize it yet and proposed a substance without rationality, a godlike unbound substance. Only with Hegel did substance realize itself as subject, in other words, it came to self knowledge, reflexivity.
Quoting lll
What I do see, in this discussion with you and Fooloso4 is that I am using those two notions of subjectivity, the Kantian one and the Hegelian one and that does not bode well for consistency. In my boat and captain story I relied on the Kantian version, but that indeed spells trouble from a Hegelian perspective, so I am thankful for the life buoy you threw me III ;)
I like your articulation, of what I in fact stated very incompletely... yes the Captain realizes this. Also in answer to @180 Proof I would not call one variable independent, the other dependent, both map and map maker exist within this horizon of conceptualization in which the map and territory metaphor also has its place and from which it derived its meaning. I would not give any metaphysical priority to one or the other, I think it is not needed to commit oneself to either a materialist or idealist metaphysics. Yet, maybe it is me though. I like and feel at home in a world where nothing but the relation is real.
How could this emergence happen if nothing happened before we emerged? Obviously we could not say something must have happened if we had not happened but this does not mean that what happens is dependent on us.
Quoting Tobias
It does not denote a color. It is a hypothetical property of of something at time t. The term along with 'breen' were invented by Nelson Goodman in order to illustrate the problem of induction.
Quoting Tobias
Good. Now let's return to something I said earlier:
Quoting Fooloso4
The problem I am raising is not with "thinking as such", by which I take it you mean the dialectical movement of thought in time, but with the content of thought, what we can think or comprehend or give an account of.
I raised this in response to Rasmussen's paradox. More specifically the first premise:
1. Everything must have some explanation (PE).
It follows from this "must" that if something cannot be explained it must not exist. It might be argued that even though there are things that cannot be explained now they must still have an explanation that in time can be provided. But this assumes that there are no limits to human knowledge. Such metaphysical privileging should not be accepted on faith.
Hegel's theory is not only about the movement in time, but in place. It is Eurocentric. In addition, our thinking is not simply in terms of forms of thought, but in terms of specific concepts that change. Hegel knew nothing of relativity or quantum mechanics, both of which shape our thinking in ways that they could not have shaped his understanding of reality.
I've come to a similar conclusion, but you've stayed in two paragraphs what had always taken me two pages, so I very much appreciate it.
This is an excellent point. My struggle with this line is that realism vis-á-vis the independent existence of external objects, and the idea of there being such a thing as accessible being-as-itself (i.e., being not altered by the faculties of human thought, Kant's noumenal) is the default of human intuition, and may itself be the result of a cognitive blind spot.
If you look at early human societies, or cultures that existed into the 19th-20th centuries with very low levels of technological development and little to no exposure to modern science, generally what you find is realism. It is a realism with a lot of supernatural elements, but still a fairly familiar world when compared to idealism.
Certainly, this realism has been challenged by advances in philosophy and the sciences alike (e.g., Kant's transcendental or Quine's points on epistemology in philosophy, most notably quantum weirdness, particularly delayed Wigner's Friend experiments in the sciences). Arguably these challenges have already been met after some readjustments. My fear, is that my strong predilection towards realism is actually the result of a cognitive blind spot, not evidence that such realism is actually warranted.
I am a big fan of information theories, but this might be overselling its adoption in physics. I will admit that I'm not super up to date on recent papers, but it seems like through the late 2010s there were still a lot of people writing off information-based ontologies using either Bell's "information about what?" argument or calling it essentially crypto-logical-positivism (i.e. a way to slip in "only observations exist). I think both these critiques misunderstand the theories at a fundemental level, but they still seem fairly prevalent.
This part of the quote reminds me of Quine's web of belief. For example, that you can get around relativity and keep absolute time and space if you're willing to accept shrinking and growing measurement tools and objects as real facets of the world.
I'm not sure this is really a fair assessment. Hegel was writing before Darwin's theory of evolution, but his theories are certainly applicable to biology as a whole (see: below). Hegel likely wouldn't have had too much of a problem with QM or relativity. His vision of progress towards to Absolute as historical in human history doesn't have to shift that much to incorporate contemporary theories of life, particularly ones centered around biosemiotics (Hegel is a precursor of semiotics to some degree), information, and life as a self organizing far from equilibrium system.
https://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings59th/article/view/2658#:~:text=In%20Hegel's%20view%2C%20nature%20develops,%2Dequilibrium%20self%2Dreferential%20structure.
I've seen Hegel get a fair amount of play in cognitive/neuroscience and biology journals recently, and in philosophy of science across fields. My results might be biased because I sought these types of takes out, but I remember reading Incomplete Nature, The Vital Question, and Synch, and sections of What is Real? and Chaos, and thinking, "this sounds very Hegelian." And sure enough, when I looked, people had already published the papers I was thinking of writing, with the benefit of all the context, knowledge, and prestige of actually having done a PhD in the relevant area.
The dialectical is potentially a more holistic model through which to view Kuhn's work on paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions. Shifts tend to arise when contradictions are identified and either the paradigm sublates these or is overturned, but elements of it always survive.
It also might be a better model for analyzing developments in human institutions than natural selection, since extinction isn't a concern in the same way, and neither is competition and cooperation really the same dynamically. Fukuyama's End of History is a good example.
That may be, but the concepts of QM and relativity are not found in Hegel. Thinking is not Hegel's concepts of thought. Our thinking in terms of these concepts (QM and relativity) were not available to him.
I would argue that there are things that cannot be explained now that will be explained later, but not that everything that cannot be explained now must still have an explanation that in time can be provided. That is simply something we do not know.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Progress toward the Absolute, according to Hegel was completed by Hegel. Whatever new discoveries are found, whatever new understanding that occurs happens within the circle of knowledge becoming self-knowledge. But thinking has content. It is not just the movement of thought thinking itself. What there is, being, is not limited by what has been thought. If there are limits to human thought, that is, if we are not omniscient, then the limits of thought are not the limits of being.
I agree with the notion of self-organization. This is fundamental to my argument in favor of physicalism.
Quoting lish
This sounds like the classical philosophical questions: "Does everything has a cause?", "Is there a primary cause to everything?", etc. The word "explanation" however, introduces an ambiguity in the subject of "cause and effect", because it means that the existence of everything may be difficult or even impossible to explain, i.e. conceive or just describe in words. But then, this would not exclude its existence, would it? So, since the case here is not a problem of description, but rather of actual existence, I believe that the word "cause" should be used instead, which makes sense and is very clear: "(the existence of) everything must have a cause". However, this would may be some other "principle", not the present one.*
Quoting lish
What kind of "reality" are you have in mind? There's no such a thing as an absolute, objective reality. In that case, there's nothing to discuss about or anything that will be discussed based on that inexistent "reality" will be idle talk. Except if by "reality" you mean the "physical world" as a lot of people do. In that case, the proposition will become, "The Universe cannot have an explanation".
(BTW, the phrase "in terms of anything beyond itself" has no sense in this context, since "itself" does not consist an "explanation".)
Now, here too, the word "explanation" introduces the same ambiguity as in the first principle.
***
At this point, it there is no much meaning for me to continue, discussing the arguments offered for Rasmussen’s principles. This would unnecessarily burden this post. But I can do it in another post, if I'm aske to ...
It can be true both that the very ground of being is a radical instability and that nothing systematic exists until that ground has been sufficiently stabilised for the system to become composed by it.
So atomism is a thing. But it is also an emergent thing - the emergent ground that is a secondness solidified within the structuring habits of a state of thirdness.
The intertwined nature of a triadic causality makes it hard to dissect in the usual fashion - where something is the monistic ground and all else becomes emergent.
Metaphysics usually gets hung up on the very first step of the debate - is the ground of being matter or form, physicalism or idealism, etc. The triadic view would see no actual ground of being but instead vague possibility being divided towards its opposing limits.
Any world, conceived of in a general way, must have a local~global, or hierarchical order, where there are parts and wholes, the contents and the container, the material events and the immaterial laws or structuring constraints. And thus any world conceived of in a general way must have a developmental trajectory that gets it from the starting point of an Apeiron or radical undivided vagueness, and see it become as divided against itself as possible as it tends towards its opposing limits on what is possible. At the end of time, a world will achieve its most divided state of existence.
We can see this argument in Anaximander's Apeiron as much as Peirce's pansemiotic cosmology. And we can see it in the actual cosmology of the Big Bang universe - the cosmos that starts in a state of Planckscale quantum foam, an everythingness of barely contained hot fluctuation, and which spreads~cools to become effectively its own thermodynamic heat sink. By the end of time, when the Big Bang arrives at its Heat Death, the initial state of everythingness will have been turned into the most definite and uniform state of a divided nothingness. A container as large as possible with as little content as possible.
So what makes sense of a dichotomy is that it embeds this developmental or process philosophy perspective. The dichotomy starts in the raw possibility that is a tychic vagueness and then unfurls towards is two immanent and logically-reciprocal limits of being.
The end or goal is marked by becoming as stably divided as possible. Further development becomes impossible because the system has reached its equilibrium state where - like an ideal gas - local differences cease to make a global difference.
:up:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Is the glass half full or half empty? It seems both obvious that fundamental physics knows it needs to add thermodynamics to a view of nature that has been based on relativity and quantum mechanics, and that this is very much work in progress.
Statistical mechanics was welded on to QM to give us decoherence. In relativity, it has been all about black holes and holographic horizons for a few decades now. Particle physics has been influenced by condensed matter physics and its topological order for much longer.
So sure, there is a lot of nonsense out there where information is spoken of as if it were the new material atoms of nature - some kind of actual matter or primal substance. That is the crackpot end of things.
But when information is understood as degrees of freedom, or the "atoms of form" rather than the new atoms of matter, then this marks a move to a more suitable metaphysics.
Thermodynamics fixes some basic problems for physics by introducing finality in a natural kind of way. And it brings with it new maths that is widely used.
Quoting apokrisis. Sounds like a game the whole family can play But who invented the rules? Can we invent new rules?
If we can still find the freedom to imagine things being different, then we haven't arrived at the ultimate goal of the game - Platonic level, mathematical necessity.
So the game is to develop the "rules" to the point they self-evidently exclude all other possibilities. The game is precisely that kind you would call a totalising and univocal game - one that absorbs all plurality and contingency into the eternalised hardness of its irrefutable logical structure.
And it is indeed game over for plurality and contingency when the triadic structuralism of Peirce and systems science comes to include them as part of a larger dialectical logic.
Doesn’t this swallow up and bury the mystery of sense? As in the ‘sense of a meaning’? Isnt the sense of any concept , fact , perception subject to constant contextual shift in its sense? Do we simply reduce sense and its transformations to biological causal processes, or does trying to ground sense in causal mechanisms just keep us trapped within the circle? Is it totalizing finality we need or endlessly rejuvenating creative wonder?
What are the moral implications of this totalizing univocal game? As ethical agents what should we strive for? I assume not just historically contingent, relativistic change?
Are there certain universals we should be guided by in our relations with others?
Exactly. Ontological holism emphasizes the systematicity or radical interdependence of concepts (hence 'the Concept' singular in Kojeve's Lectures on Hegel). (These lectures are dear to me as my entry into the aromatic Hegelian wetlands.)
[quote=Kojeve]
The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought. In particular, if the thought and the discourse of the Hegelian Scientist or the Wise Man are dialectical, it is only because they faithfully reflect the “dialectical movement” of the Real of which they are a part and which they experience adequately by giving themselves to it without any preconceived method.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/kojeve.htm
This 'episteme' reminds me of Braver's book on anti-realism, in which we have Kant => Hegel => Heidegger => Foucault. This is not to be understood as an ascension but to chart a movement of the big idea that the 'subject' is a kind of unstable liquid lens. Kant gives us the lens metaphor but wants it to be crystalline and eternal, so that we can have that kind of knowledge. Hegel liquifies it (makes it a function of an evolving community) but gives a journey toward eventual comprehensiveness. Then Heidegger and Foucault allow finally for unanchored drifting. The lens metaphor breaks down along the way, so we get some kind of form-of-life goo where entities are no more mound than mutter. Do please forgive any absurdities in this hasty sketch.
I don't think this is a correct interpretation. The Phenomenology and Greater and Lesser Logics serve in defining Absolute Knowing, and indeed it's arguable that the main goal of the Phenomenology is to bring the reader to the standpoint of Absolute Knowing, the place where philosophy transitions from "love of wisdom," to actual "wisdom," the elevation of speculation to science. This concept of Absolute Knowing is not identical with the Absolute. Hegel has a number of "Absolutes" that exist within his "circle of circles," systems (e.g. the Concept, Absolute Concept).
I don't think, although some commentators argue this, that it represents an omniscient knowledge. Nor does it represent some sort of special enlightenment Hegel had (normally a position of critics).
For one, the Preface to PhS is explicitly a call for a shift in the current prevailing perspectives of the day, but the Absolute represents a process occuring across being and would be inclusive of all concious beings. Towards the end of the Preface, Hegel reflects explicitly on the intuition that his work won't be immediately grasped by many, and so the process of realization of the Absolute won't be completed.
The problem with the omniscience version of Absolute Knowing is that it appears to be contradicted throughout Hegel.
The problem with the narrow view of knowledge in a broad sense essentially being completed with Hegel is that it totally ignores his "truth is the whole" epistemology, which obviously is incomplete at the time of his writing. It also clashes with his commentary on the sciences of his day
A good working definition I've found is:
I like Hackett's treatment more but it's not so neatly summarized.
Anyhow, that's all tangential. I think the main point would be, what reality would a thing have that can't be thought?
Physicalism is necissarily an ontology where an abstraction (physical reality) is accepted as more basic than perception. However, for any knower, subjective experience is obviously going to be more appear ontologically primitive than the abstraction of the physical world.
Now we know appearances can be deceiving, and we have plenty of good reasons to believe in physicalism, but this does pose a problem for physicalism in that it has to reduce what by all appearances is something more ontologically primitive (subjective experience) and fit it satisfactorily into an abstraction that is itself necissarily a facet of subjective experience. Hence, we have the "Hard Problem," where it appears to be impossible to derive the experiences of the subject from the abstraction the subject experiences (the model of the physical world).
If those sentences seem circular, it's because the attempted reduction is circular.
Upon reflection, the Hard Problem shouldn't be at all suprising, because it's essentially demanding that an abstraction somehow account for sensation despite the fact that thinking through an abstraction is itself a sensation (and just one type of sensation).
Now if something can't be thought (and thus also can't be perceived) it's hard to see what sort of being it can have. It can't exist as part of subjective experience obviously, but it also can't exist as a physical entity that has any sort of support for its existence, as empircle evidence for its existance would be impossible since it cannot be thought of.
To be sure, there might be things that humans can't think of that aliens or later forms of life can. There might also be things we can't observe currently that new technologies will let us observe in the future. I don't know though if there can be things that exist which can never be observed or thought of by anyone however. The existence of such things would, for all observers, forever be identical with their non-existence. But if two things are definitionally identical, as they must be for all observers in this case, than every trait held by state X (the thing's being) must also be held by state Y (the thing's not being) for all targets of the proposition. This seems to violate Liebnitz' law of identity. The thing could only be as an object within a third person abstraction of "absolute/noumenal being," but such abstractions by definition only contain things that can be thought.
Why do you keep insisting on reducing dichotomies to monisms? Haven't I spent enough time on explaining that they are the step towards the holism of a triadic metaphysics?
If you check back to my response to this OP, you will find that I argued the Cosmos must begin in the free possibility of a state of everythingness. So you have infinite creativity and fecundity right there.
And then the second part of the story is that this infinite potentiality must be constrained by a totalising structure for it to then have definite local possibilities, or fundamental and atomistic degrees of freedom. The formless must gain a general formative capacity for producing its informed materials.
So to get to your concrete plurality - the many contained within the one - we have to constrain a shapeless and pure creative potential in a way that it gains useful and cohesive form ... as localised variety playing the common game even as its pursues its individual trajectories.
I get that your idea of phenomenology demands you defend a Cartesian dualism where matter and mind are your fundamental categories of nature.
But as I say, such a metaphysics can never make sense as it only speaks to the division and not its resolution.
And to make your flawed metaphysics sound more appealing in every conversation, you must thus dogmatically oppose it to a monistic strawman and avoid engaging with the triadic position I always argue.
Quoting Joshs
Again, I have said the same thing so many times to you that it becomes tedious to have to repeat myself.
The systems view, the biosemiotic view, has a huge amount to say about such things. For instance, as I said, it shows why competition~cooperation is the natural dynamic driving any society. And it is hardly rocket science to draw the usual pragmatic moral imperatives from that.
So a successful ethical agent would be defined as an individual able to balance this dynamic in its most synergistic way. A win-win where the creative possibility is being invested in making a better social structure for all - and that better social structure being in turn one that would be capable of fostering exactly that kind of individual disposition.
Something like a modern social democracy, as enjoyed by the world's happiest nations. :razz:
So what have you got against golden rules like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"?
Is this not a simple statement of reasonableness in your eyes? And is it not - on closer examination - exactly a systems science perspective?
I’m writing a paper on the modern history of moral blame, which gives me a slightly new framework within which to view our previous conversations.
It strikes me that cooperation and competition both require shared values. Without agreement on a larger system of practices , neither cooperation nor competition are coherent. Relativistic approaches to ethics argue that there can be no ultimate agreement among disparate cultures on what constitutes a better social structure (Russia vs the West, or social conservatives vs liberals in the U.S.). In the U.S. there is wide disagreement over what makes us happy ( only some believe we need to “make American great again”). So the golden rule turns out to be as relativistic as the values that determine what we want to have done to us or in our name.
Opposing the moral relativists are those who believe utilitarian consensus is possible. Their justifying metaphysics tends to involve some
form of objective naturalism, providing the ground of correctness and consensus.
Mmm. So still trying to talk past the triadic logic then.
The global coherence of the cooperation is only possible due to the local incoherence of the competition. Or more accurately, the system must both integrate and differentiate to exist in a definite dichotomous fashion.
So yes, there must be global integration. That is what underwrites the long-term persistence of the social fabric. And there must also be the moment-to-moment local differentiation. That is what provides the definite local degrees of freedom that give the system its creative capacity to keep adapting.
If all the parts of the system marched in lockstep, it would be a machine. But a society is an organism. It has to make mistakes if it is to learn. Individuals have to be free to fuck up royally in the most definite and binary fashion. They have to be able to be wrong - so they can counterfactually also prove to be decisively right ... in terms of what consequences result in from the acts so far as the overall cohesive stability of the social organism is concerned.
So contingency is hard-wired into the deal. It is a virtue to be black and white right or wrong as that is the "requisite variety" that any Darwinian process uses as its informational fuel.
Even if individuals act blindly, as long as the action is binary in its counterfactual definiteness, then it will serve to drive the evolutionary progress of the whole.
Being able to act at the level of a self-aware social agent is just an added advantage. One can start to work within a community of interest groups - the more complex thing of a nested hierarchical structure.
So in modern society, we are meant to be able to participate in many interest groups with somewhat different organismic identities - our workplace, our home, our pub, our football club, our library, our courtroom. And this becomes possible as we accept our identities as individuals wearing many different masks to suit the institutional occasion, along with our overall identity as "thinking and feeling human beings" operating within some overall notion of sovereign state and rule of law.
Quoting Joshs
Well if we weren't all constrained to live on the one planet with its hard entropic and ecological constraints, then we could simply let all the systems run and see which manages to persist the longest. Does social democracy win out in the long run, or ruthless neoliberalism, or autocratic empire, or whatever.
And even here, the answer from ecology is dichotomous, and hence about a dynamical balance.
Evolution is famously punctuated as ecosystems fluctuate between immature and senescent states. The two opposed ways of persisting as a dynamical system are either to have a high metabolic turnover and repair capacity - a bias towards youthful creative recklessness - or instead the opposite bias of being organised by wise, efficient, already well-adapted, habit.
Immaturity makes many mistakes but has the energy throughput to bounce back. Senescence makes few mistakes and is super efficient, but lacks the flexibility to recover from major perturbations. So one is flexible but wasteful, the other is economical but brittle.
So the systems view has no problem framing this debate. But it is triadically complex. It requires a grounding in the maths of hierarchy theory and dissipative structure.
Quoting Joshs
Well all you have only shown is that it is possible for societies to think in the shallowest and most short-term fashion. Their application of the golden rule has one spatiotemporal horizon and not some other.
So it can be "completely correct" if one doesn't actually need to worry about peak oil, climate change, the breakdown of social cohesion, etc, etc.
And unfortunately for the rest of the world, the US is shifting away from its "American way" neoliberal globalism because it probably will do better in the medium term by turning in on its North American fiefdom.
It has all the advantages of geography and demographics to continue to flourish in energy and resource profligate fashion for another 50 years of so, especially now it has pinned down Canada and Mexico as captive trade partners, and secured its Asian alliances on the other side of the Pacific.
America has been great ever since the old empires burnt down their own homes in WW2. First it was great because of Bretton Woods and the establishment of King Dollar. The corporate America era.
Then it was great because globalisation meant the world could become its sweatshops and ecological dumping ground.
Next if will be great because it can retreat back into a North American sphere of influence where the Canadians provide the resources, the Mexicans the factories, and the US can keep doing its entropic thing until the poles melt and the skies catch fire.
Quoting Joshs
Of course. If you have your pro and your con position, you have the two sides of your argument. The only thing that remains is to pick the winner and jeer at the loser.
Get back to me when you can see how the subjectivist and the objectivist are the two sides of the one coin. Then you will be starting to see where I am coming from.
[EDIT]: I didn't complete the point on your US example. What is consistent in the three versions of America the Great is the valuing of the immature stage of the canonical ecosystem life-cycle. American remains in pursuit of an eternalised youth where there is always energy to burn and every reckless mistake heals itself fast.
And that has been its self-identity since it founded itself on a heady mix of Enlightenment~Romantic ideals. The boundless human frontier, the world as constructed by independent genius.
So each stage involves a radical socio-economic shift, but only so as to continue in the same vein.
Trump and Bannon are speaking for something quite rational in its narrow self-interest when they seek to put an end to Davos-world and get on with Fortress North America - the empire right-sized for the next age of generalised environmental disaster and 10 billion people in resource conflict.
Right. The universal is unity of the immediacy, direct and unmediated, of knowing and being, of knowing and for knowing. (Preface to the Phenomenology, #17)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
For there to be perception there must be something to be perceived, the object of perception.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This begs the question. To ask what sort of being it can have is to say what it is. To treat it as an object of thought. Whenever we discover something new, something previously unknown, we have an example of something that is but was until then not thought and not perceived. It does not come into existence when it is perceived, it already was, we simply become aware of it. In fact, at the astronomic level it may no longer exist. What we perceive is what was but no longer is.
Nice setting up of the 'heard problem of conch is this' ! Lots of complexity in 'what by all appearances is something more ontologically primitive.' One machete for this overgrowth might be thinking in terms of the individual navigating its relationship with tribe, as opposed to mentality as mediation of an otherwise unknowable physical substrate. Then 'reality' is (approximately) the best way for the tribe to talk, and 'seems like' is a kind of modesty or tentativeness in reports brought to that tribe (and its virtual surrogate in the self-doubting philosopher.)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Something similar occurs to me. If you define some X as radically private, then 'obviously' it's excluded from rational explanation. It's even outside of language, an irrelevant beetle in an unopenable box.
The 'sensation' of thought you mention is what I take many to mean by 'pure meaning,' with which the metaphysical subject is supposed to be 'infinitely' intimate. Yet this 'subject' is itself a mere 'dream' or 'sensation' or 'thought' of this (no-longer-a-)subject. ('Watch me pull a hat out that same hat.')
This is sort of all aside the point, because my comment was specifically about the reference to things that can never be thought of, not things that we didn't think of until X point in time.
I get what you are getting at here but this:
does not follow as a necessity. It's simply a good assumption that needs to be confirmed. We think things we perceived for the first time already existed because empircle analysis tends to allow us to find evidence of its prior existance.
So, while we didn't have observations of bacteria for much of our recorded history, but we had a huge historical record to look back on as evidence that bacteria existed before we knew about them. The same holds for electrons, gravity, etc. In cases where this evidence is not as clear cut, we have the general pattern of having found such evidence in the past to support our inference that the newly discovered entity didn't just appear when we perceived it.
On the other hand, we generally don't have good data to suggest that things tend to appear ex nihilo, at least not at the scale of every day objects (quantum foam arguably being a notable counter example, and quantum mechanics being an example where repeated experimental evidence suggests that observation does cause a state to exist that did not exist prior to observation).
That said, all these inferences are the results of prior experience and the shared experiences of others. They aren't the products of deduction. It is a guideline based on past experience itself, the results of observation.
If a second, pink moon appeared tomorrow and began orbiting the Earth, it would not make sense to assume it had always been there despite it being observed for the first time just recently.
I agree. However, I think "the relation" is factual (Witty) and not just virtual (Bergson).
If logic concerns rules of correct inference from assumed premises, then when attempting to use logic to discuss ultimate causes, you have these choices:
1. Make use of circular reasoning (which is typically considered to be incorrect).
2. Make use of unjustifiable premises (which really doesn't come to ultimate answers, unless you call the unjustifiable premise "God", and this is a form of the first mover argument).
3. Have an infinite regression of causes.
The conclusion I come to is that having a total logical knowledge of everything is beyond human comprehension. Since "ultimate" explanations seem by definition to be beyond the scope of human understanding, we can stop there. We do not need to speculate about whether an uncaused God created everything, whether we are in an infinite loop (circular reasoning as applied to physics), or whether there is a metaphysics that explains the origin of regular physics (and a meta meta physics, and so on forever). It is unknown and unknowable.
Things that were not thought of until X point existed before X point. Can we know that there will be an X point for everything that exists?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't see what this is supposed to show. One might argue that if thinking and being are the same then we should be able, a priori, to deduce all that is.
I should add @Tobias that the identity of thinking and being for Hegel is based on the aufheben of the difference between thinking and being. It there is no difference there cannot be an identity.
Maybe I wasn't being clear. I was thinking of entities that are necessarily unthinkable, not contingently so. For example, a theoretical particle that exerts no observable influence on any part of the universe, versus a rock floating through space that no one ever looks at, but could see if they did look at it.
In this first case, the point is simply that empiricism does set the limits of what can be said to be as what can be observed. This is not to imply that this observation cannot be indirect, or reliant on multiple levels of abstraction and inference, as is the case for quarks and leptons. This is true for the ultimate sense of being "unobservable," that is, being necissarily unobservable versus contingently so, not in the sense of "not having been observed to date," or "possibly not being observed in the future."
The unthinkable (as in unthinkable for all minds, past, present, and future, necissarily as opposed to contingently unthinkable) obviously can't be observed, and has the added lack of reality of being unable to be imagined or deduced since it can't, by definition, occur as an object of thought. It seems empiricism and idealism must declare such things to be meaningless or lacking in any ontic status.
It's hard for me to imagine the contents of mind existing outside of experience. If everything is thinking, I'm not sure what reality would look like, unless perceiving is covered under "thinking?"
I'm not sure if the claim that all things should be deducable holds for most idealist ontologies, which do posit that all reality is mental, but perhaps not that all things are thinking. Modern idealist ontologies generally suppose that mental objects behave in the manor we observe in the "physical" sciences. These behaviors/properties cannot be deduced, but require inductive inference to derive.
The arguments I normally see for these ontologies is ironically that physicalists introduce too much epistemological baggage and speculation by positing that a set of mental abstractions (i.e., the explanatory model of the physical world we experience in thought), which are necissarily a sort of second order type of mental object, is actually what should hold the primary ontic status, over and above the more concrete and accessible world of subjectivity, of which mental abstractions are just a part.
I say ironic because in the modern context idealists are generally stereotyped as the more speculative, less analytical types, but the newer forms are generally arguing from Occam's Razor, the formal logical consistency of the ontology, and parsimony.
I'm not ready to switch camps or anything, but it is something that idealism has just one ontological primitive, experience, and computational/informational ontology also has just one ontological primitive, whilst physicalism now has an absolute zoo of them, hordes of particles of virtual and non-virtual varieties, various forces and fields, all of which are only accessible using multiple layers of abstraction. The two aforementioned ontologies also have the benefit of looking at the Hard Problem and the role of the observer in physics and saying "well yeah, that's what you'd expect."
A theoretical particle is by definition thinkable. To theorize is to think.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You shift from 'thinkable' to 'observable'. Thinkable, in the context of Rasmussen's paradox means explainable.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
All that is thinkable is contingent on our ability to think. Will we ever be able to explain all that is observable that goes on at the subatomic level? Maybe, but maybe not. When you shift from our minds to hypothetical minds then you can posit whatever you want, including omniscient minds. But to think about the existence of minds that do not have human limits does not mean that there are such minds, even though we can think them in the sense of hypothesize or imagine them.
Quoting Tobias
... and in order to show the fly the way out of the Kant-Fichte-Hegel fly-bottle, this break follows:
[quote=L. Feuerbach, Vorläufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie]Thought comes from being, but being does not come from thought [ … ] The essence of being as being (i.e. in contrast to the mere thought of being) is the essence of nature.[/quote]
:fire:
(emphases added)
That last part is true, of course. thinking and being are not the same thing, yet they are identical, one finds upon reflection. Yet, it takes time for this insight to break trough.
The first part is interesting. I think you have a too phenomenological reading of the "phenomenology". Being is not the same as 'beings', thinking for Hegel is not the thinking qua intentionality that the phenonologists seem to me to support. If something is to be an object for us, ('Gegenstand', standing opposed to us, against us), it must be thinkable for us in so far as it fits within our web of conceptual relations. Of course we might discover new things, we will discover new things until the end of time. However for it to be discoverable as a 'new thing' it has to fit within the conceptual makeup of 'spirit' that whole of rational relations in which 'we' dwell.
That insight, the insight that there is such a realm in which we articulate ourselves (maybe close to Heideggers Seinsverständnis, though that has much more realistic connotations) broke through with Hegel. Not only the emergence of this realm though 'appeared', our relation to it appeared as well, which is a dialectical relation. I always see myself as different from reality, as a perspective on reality, but at the same time I know I am part of this greater whole. We are 'being the same in difference'.
Actually, the idea that everything is deducible is very un-hegelian I would say, because it would fall into some sore of transcendental subject an all knowing mind. The whole dialectic would be unnecessary. However, we 'find ourselves thrown into a world which seems to be not-mind, which seems totally different. It remains different, just also the same as thought in the sense that it must be understandable for us, we assume it can be understood, the world is not totally alien in the end.
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
I am still struggling with the following: to what extent did Hegel also want that relation to be real and to what extent did he succeed? He prioritizes 'life' sometimes he feels rather naturalistic. I do think he was looking for this actual relation. When 'my' prof explained the absolute to me, he hit his hand on the table, and said 'this, this is absolute'. I feel he is right, yet, what Hegel does in his work is all conceptual, on and on, spiral after spiral, circle after circle. He does try to be bodily but it is a very abstract, conceptual 'bodyliness' if that makes sense. Does he succeed in making the break on through to the other side? I am not sure.
I feel that is why one of the reactions against him is the phenonological, more realist approach leading to a reappraisal of the body, seen in the French thinkers, Merleau Ponty, Foucault to a lesser extent, perhaps even Nietzsche. If he can not, if his system cannot account for nature or life, because it is in the end one sided, then there resides the 'more', the abundance of life over and above the concept. The price for that is high though. We rescue some sort of abundant 'physis' but what is our place in it? We are essentially drifting never knowing whether we are at home in nature. It is by all means the prevailing view though. Hegel's enlightenment homeliness has lost its place to ecosophical estrangement.
Great discussion by the way. Even if do not react I am keenly reading what you write. If it starts to involve QM, I am out because I simply do not know enough of it. Back in the day Hegel was almost not studied at all and no one on the PF was really into a discussion. Now we have a number of perspectives... :fire:
Are you claiming that Hegel made the Heideggerian distinction? He distinguishes between pure being and determinate beings. Pure being is not.
Quoting Tobias
Of course! How could something be an object for us and not be thinkable for us?
Quoting Tobias
For Hegel 'Concept' 'Begriff' has both an overarching sense of the movement or working out of spirit and concepts as in the concepts of mathematics or physics. It is this latter sense that both enables and impedes knowledge. For example, QM does not fit within the division of the concepts of 'wave' and 'particle'. Here thinking had to change to get more in line with being, that is, with what is.
Quoting Tobias
I was responding to this:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yeah, that was the point I was trying to make. Such a particle is thinkable, but unverifiable. It still has being in some sense in that it can be posited. It falls beyond the limits of empiricism to define being. The unthinkable, arguably, falls beyond the limits of being itself.
The unthinkable cannot have being for us. The necissarily unthinkable (for all minds,) cannot have being period, unless you posit some sort of absolute God's eye view of existence as a ground, or some sort of unanalyzable bare substratum of being. The problem with positing the being of things that are (necissarily) unthinkable is that their being and not being will always be coidentical for all parties, and so it is unclear if the bare substratum of being posit is actually meaningful. To put it another way, if you can posit it, it is thinkable, so such things cannot even be posited directly.
I guess I was not explicit enough: the points about unobservable things are in reference to the limits of what empircism can accept as having being. The points about things that are unthinkable are about what can even have the potential for being. The distinction between necissarily unobservable/unthinkable things and ones that are only contingently so, is the distinction between the hard limits of being, and simply the horizons of human knowledge.
Did Feuerbach ever give an example of such being without thought? Obviously he didn't, because anything he set down would obviously have been an object of thought.
This is just asserting a bare substratum of being as brute fact, despite the fact that evidence of being without thought is impossible.
Now, the logical positivists had a lot of bad ideas, such as asserting that talk of things existing while not observed is meaningless, but they potentially had a point about this "being as being" talk being meaningless. I am not willing to go that far. Rather, it is simply talk about something that is utterly unprovable and whose reality makes no difference to us. Arguably that fits the definition of meaningless; I don't think it does because such a thing can possibly be imagined, although arguably it cannot be imagined if we must necissarily imagine an observation of this being as being, not the thing itself.
Why? Because the existence of being without thought is always and forever, necissarily the same for all observers if it exists or doesn't exist. This being as being, bare substratum of existence, etc.'s being is indiscernible from its not being.
Now I anticipate the follow up of "does the moon exist when no one is looking at it." This is not a real problem for the point above. Copious amounts of observable evidence exists for the moon having been where it is for a very long while. If we didn't have a moon, and one showed up in the sky tomorrow night, we wouldn't assume it had always been there. A model of unobserved items behaving as they do when observed has plenty of support. It's also a thing that can only exist as an object of thought, a map, not a territory.
The quote above is making a claim about the map being the territory. It's unprovable and unfalsifiable. Thought is contingent on being. Being's contingency on thought is simply an unanswerable questions whose answers are indiscernible from each other.
This issue is incorrectly compared to solipsism. Solipsism is similar, in that it poses questions that cannot be answered, but the answers are discernable across observers. If solipsism is true, then acts of cruelty and kindness only effect one observer, but if solpsism is not true, there is a big difference for people on the receiving end of such acts. This is in contrast to being as being, where the answer necissarily causes no variance for any observers, ever.
This assumes the very thing in question.Esse est percipi is a supposition. I see no reason to assume that existence is dependent on the existence of sentient beings. I also see no reason to assume that being requires a substratum. I don't think it is even a coherent concept.
Of course he did: nature before humans existed; but also your body before you developed self-awareness or bodily-awareness, and The Bard's "the undiscovered country" – c'mon, Count, how could one not recognize that thought presupposes non-thought (other-than-thought)? As Feuerbach points out, the "thought of being" is not being (just as the map of Texas is not Texas). You grok the concepts of presupposing and implicating, don't you? :roll:
That's fine. It just means you're supposing the truth of something whose truth or falsity is necissarily always and forever in question, and whose truth or falistiy makes no difference to all observers, always and forever. The proposition is not a logical truth, and by definition can have no observable truthmaker.
But on the upside, it won't have any practical input on your model vis-á-vis empircle vetting.
It's not that being has a substratum, the theories posit that objects have a substratum, a thisness that universals or tropes attach to. Otherwise, how is an object not fully defined by its traits? (That objects are their traits is of course, popular too).
Those examples are the product of thought. Did he write them without experiencing them, throwing them subjectively ex nihilo on to the page?
Please tell me when you've ever had access to pure noumena? It is ostentatiously true that we experience this third person view of the physical world as a mental abstraction within first person experience. You are assuming that your map represents something more ontologically primitive than the substrate in which it exists (mental experience). This may very well be true, but it isn't proveable. Empiricism can by definition have nothing to say about the necissarily unobservable, which being without thought is by definition.
Now there are still good reasons to go along with physicalism, notably the problems competitors also have, but this doesn't negate the fact that physicalism necissarily implies positing a model that exists in thought as being ontologically more primitive than the substrate it must exist in. Note, this point has absolutely nothing to do with realism. Plenty of idealist ontologies are realist vis-á-vis external objects.
Edit: BTW, this issue is a pretty good explanation of the Hard Problem. We are asking that we derive our experiences from our abstractions, which are themselves just one facet of subjective experience. This is used as an argument against physicalism, but I think it's actually a good excuse for it. It shows that the Hard Problem is due to an epistemic limit, not a flaw in physicalism. Physicalism thus gets a boost from taking criticisms seriously and not hand waving them away.
I see no reason why objects need a substratum.
Not including it opens your metaphysics up to a broad side of attacks that show your theory can't account for numerically different entities with identical properties. You have to say two red balls that are exactly the same are the same ball in two places (at least that is the argument, but it's better than it sounds).
I will summarize when I have time because I find it pretty neat.
?
My metaphysics? What theory?
What do you mean by 'pure being is not'? Hegel does not thematize the Heideggerian distinction. In fact 'being' is prety quickly 'aufgehoben' into becoming in Hegel's Logik.
Quoting Fooloso4
I o not see why 'thinking' has to change. We think differently about things, thinking itself did not change at all. It casts the concepts of QM in the same mold it always casts theories in. It uses identity, difference affirmation, denial etc. Our understanding of the world around us changed, yes. Not because something is in a different way, but because we conceptualize what is in a different way, based upon theoretical reflection or on empirical observation or both. QM probably better accounted for the things we saw than did earlier theories of physics. Or what is also possible QM is based on theoretical reflection only, I do not know. However, the jump from we think about things differently now and that is because they correspond now to what we think about them and not then, is a leap of faith. The leap is I think unnecessary.
Quoting 180 Proof
What is this 'nature' you speak of? When I think of nature a host of images, assumptions and juxtapositions come to mind. Nature as a pristine state, nature as green leaves on trees and unspoiled brooks, nature as opposed to culture etc. What characteristics did nature before humans have and which did it acquire only after humans came on the scene?
Sorry, I just meant "your metaphysics,".in the broad, second person sense, as in "if you don't change your oil, your car will break," isn't about an individual car.
So, the problem for claiming that objects are defined only by their characteristics (being red, being round, weighing 1 ounce, etc.) is that, on the face of it this seems to imply that objects that share all their traits have the same identity.
Imagine two red balls that are exactly the same. If things don't have an essential thisness, but are defined only by their traits, then these two balls are the same ball. But this flies in the face of our prephilosophical intuition, because we see two balls.
A common counter argument here is that the balls do not share all their traits because, there being two of them, they have the trait of being in different locations. One ball is above another, or to the north of another.
The problem here is that such traits are derived from a thing's relation to other things. I can be above my table when on a ladder, and below my table when I crawl under it. If such derived traits are to be considered a part of a thing's identity, then it follows that I have a different identity when I am above my table as opposed to when I am beneath the table. This also violates our intuition, and makes identity a fairly useless concept for any formal descriptions of events.
Those are the main two contradictions. A lot has been written on them but the essential problem remains.
One way out of this bind is if you maintain that two identical objects are distinct if they never occupy the same space at the same time, and that this property of them never occupying the same space and the same time with other co-identical objects is itself a trait of the object. It is debatable if this sort of thing qualified as a universal or trope (realist vs nominalist definitions of traits), but showing why is a whole different line of problems.
Another way out is to not buy into tropes or universals. Theories that do this claim that all propositions are actually just about either words or imaginations. These nominalist theories don't have a problem here, but they do have a problem with any sort of epistemological realism, because propositions are now not about objects
People who claim that names are just sounds for things also have no problem here. This is a sort of super nominalism. These theories are also not very popular because they entail that statements about a thing being triangular, square, red, etc. have no truth value. Triangular is just a sound, it corresponds to no actual real concept. Such theories also generally have problems with modality and truth statements about things being probable.
You found your answer. Quoting Tobias
But you make the distinction:Quoting Tobias
Quoting Tobias
Here is why:
Quoting Tobias
Thinking without what is thought is an empty concept.
Quoting Tobias
? We did not think about QM at all until the 20th century. We did not know that the quantum world existed. Our thinking is changing in order to understand what is still inadequately understood about what is going on at the quantum level. Old concepts, old ways of thinking don't work at this level.
Yes, but that does not mean that being is not for Hegel. It is the same and not the same as nothing. Logical, because they are both empty concepts, denoting the same 'no-thing'. Yet, they are by their very definition antthetical to eachother. Quoting Fooloso4
Yes an neither are they the same for Hegel. 'sein' is not the same concept as 'etwas'.
Heg does not thematize the concept of sein as Heidegger does and therefore also not the distinction. Something appears quite early on the Logik but after being has been aufgehoben.
Quoting Fooloso4
Trivial. Every day we think differently about things. Does walking also change according to you when we walk to different places?
Quoting Fooloso4
Well, Hegel tries to articulate thinking, thinking itself. Such a conception can also be found according to some by Aristotle. Hegel's analysis is conceptual and perhaps indeed empty. I persist that you look with a pehnomenological lens at Hegel.
Quoting Fooloso4
No we did not. Neither did we think about nuclear weapons. So? Suddenly the way we thin changed because of nuclear weapons? And the remote control, did that have such an impact as well? black sewing thread too, or is it just QM?
Just yesterday my wife told me that our neighbor has the same table we bought. I said that is impossible, it's right here and has not been out of the house. She expects that kind of thing from me.
Really? Can there be thinking without something that is thought? Even if thinking about something there is still an object of thought, that which is thought.
Quoting Tobias
Do you mean thinking thinking itself or thinking itself? If the former then there is something thought, some object of thought, that is, thinking itself. If the latter then it refers to the activity of thinking rather than the activity. We do not walk by examining walking.
Quoting Tobias
Splitting the nucleus of an atom was the result of several scientific discoveries. It was the result of the development of scientific thought, of changes in thought. In addition, the threat of total or near total annihilation of all human life has changed the way we think. This is not something people think about every day but these days, with Putin's invasion of Ukraine it is something must be thought about.
Well in the whole thread we discuss the question what is real. Reality is a category, yet there is no such 'thing' as reality. Thought can be discussed in the same way, without a reference to thinking something concrete. Just like walking can be discussed without taking into account that walking is always to somewhere.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, the former, but what is than being thought is equally empty, the same emptiness you object to. That thinking that is being thought has itself as its object, so without something concrete being thought. Thinking that is thinking about itself, is not thinking about thinking that has an intentionality, but thinking that thinks itself thinking, pure self referentiality. We do not walk while we examine walking, but we think while we examine thinking.
Quoting Fooloso4
No it was the result of us thinking about different things. The activity of thinking is still qualitatively the same. It uses the same concepts, just applies them differently. Or do you think there is some qualitative jump, now not with QM but the emergence of the scientific method? And if so, was not the scientific method itself the result the result of some prior event or development? Or is, in your view, thinking different from every moment to the next? Does thinking ever recognize itself as such according to you?
So when we think of nuclear war, do we do the same thing as we are doing when we think about QM or are we doing something completely different?
Natural selection which humans discovered had given rise to humans et al before and acid rain as a by-product of human industrial activities after. Sure, the distinctions "before" and "after" are thoughts but, in this case, they are also corroborated by other-than-"thought" – they are not just mere ghostly "ideas" or dreams or hallucinations. The distinction between 'a map of Europe' and 'a map of Middle Earth' is a distinction with a referential difference; the latter lacks a factual referent and the former has a factual referent.
All the semantic juggling in the world, my friend, doesn't change the pragmatics of "thoughts of being" =/= being (Feuerbach) just as waves-tides-currents =/= the ocean or light-wind-clouds =/= the sky (i.e. modes =/= substance ~ Spinoza; atoms =/= void ~ Epicurus). :fire: In other words, to my mind, a negative ontology of immanent non-identities (actuality ~ facts, reals (re: "infinity"^^)) sans transcendent(al) identities (mere possibility ~ fictions, ideals (re: "totality"^^)) wherein 'being encompasses...
... beings and the "thought of being and / or beings"' (e.g. just as 'void encompasses combinatorial swirling-swerving atoms'). :fire:
E. Levinas^^
The argument isn't generally "thoughts of being = being." It is:
1. Thought presupposes being.
2. Being does not presuppose thought; however,
3. Being existing without thought is not a deducable necessity, a priori. It can be a contingency that nonetheless holds.
4. Empiricism is, by definition silent on being without though (can't have evidence from experience about the unexperienced).
5. So being without thought is unprovable and unverifiable.
6. If being sprang into existence with thought, or if it pre-existed it, makes no difference for all experiencing beings. For a recent example: in "conciousness causes collapse," if the universe was held in super position for billions of years, existing as possibility, not actuality, and became actuality much later, we would expect to see the same things either way. The two situations would always and forever be co-identical. This is how someone with the logical chops of von Neumann could hold such a position.
7. If the states of being without thought existing and not existing are always and forever coidentical for all observers, then there is no distinction and the two are actually the same because every property of X is necissarily a property of Y (Liebnitz Law).
Ironically, the ocean/waves comparison is one often made in criticisms of physicalism. Physicalism, as it is for us necissarily, is a set of mental abstractions living within conciousness (waves within the ocean). The claims of Berkeley are more akin to claiming that the ocean can't exist without water, because without water, you can't ever observe an ocean.
The refutations you have offered so far are argumentum ad lapidem, appeals to experienced datum.
Likewise, appeals to what people have seen looking at stars are also appeals to phenomenal experience.
If Berkey is to be refuted, it has to be a deductive argument. Since naive physicalism is humanity's default (e.g., God(s) creating material trees, rocks, people, etc.), arguably the flat disregard of Berkeley's argument because it is unintuitive represents one of the cognitive blind spots physicalists are otherwise so happy to point out when it comes to woo. So then, for the positivists, it became that talking of the necissarily unobservable, being as itself as an example, is simply metaphysical woo. It is certainly a metaphysical, ontological claim, as opposed to any sort of empircle one, that there exists such a thing.
I've pointed this out previously as the crux of my objection to the formulation "thinking = being". I'd appreciate a reply to what I've actually written and argued if you're going to reply to me, Count.
Yeah, "the world before [I was] born," is not a world before thinking. Your examples all derive from experience. Hence, "tell me a time when you had direct access to noumena?"
I did not formulate thinking = being, the formulation is "the reality or unreality of being without thinking is co-identical for all observers." That is, it is empirically unsupportable. Your evidence to counter this is all from observation.
For a self proclaimed "methodological physicalist," who makes no ontological claims (a prior claim) you sure do seem pretty concerned with the ontological truth of physicalism.
Notably, this same problem crops up at the heart of physics. Everett's original MWI does not imply any observable differences from Copenhagen. Neither did Bohm's, which was a plus in the climate he released it in. And, next to all of these, Conciousness Causes Collapse predicts the exact same observations.
Later versions are trying to figure out if there is any sort of testable difference between them. So, the issue is not just trivial, there is a self similarity at the heart of the physical sciences where the limits of observation make ontological interpretations about the physical world's essential nature merely dogma, including vis-á-vis Conciousness Causes Collapse, which would imply no actuality without thought.
Conciousness Causes Collapse is highly unpopular, but it's unpopular because it offends intuitions, not because it can be empircally undermined.
Eating can be discussed without reference to anything that is eaten, but there is no eating without something eaten.
Quoting Tobias
The object is thought itself. Thinking is what is being thought. As you say:
Quoting Tobias
Thinking is both subject and object.
Quoting Tobias
The activity of thinking changes with what is thought. Thinking is not a content free activity.
Quoting Tobias
The concepts of nuclear physics are not limited to:
Quoting Tobias
The fact of the matter is we could not do nuclear physics based solely on these concepts.
Quoting Tobias
Let's see what Hegel has to say:
Once again, you beg the question. Proof and verifiability are not necessary conditions for being. Being, however, is a necessary condition for proof and verifiability.
That isn't what I am asserting. I'm talking about the contingencies of being.
Proof and verifiability are necissary for saying that specific things have being. The claim being taken on is not "being exists," the claim is "being exists independent of X."
But clearly being is contingent on some things existing, because if absolutely nothing exists, there is no being, unless you want to argue for a pure being as being, being-in-and-of-itself.
However, it is not a requirement of logic that things that have always existed in nature do so only by logical necessity. So being may always exist in concert with thought, even if it isn't logically necessary that it does so (maybe, I'll get back to that). Indeed, how much of the fundemental elements of nature can be logically derived apriori? Not much.
So the reverse claim, that being has existed even when X did not, doesn't follow from any necessity. Gravity for example, perhaps has always existed. Its being may be coterminous with all being, but it isn't so from necessity. But if a claim doesn't flow from logic then it needs empircle support, but empircle support in the absence of experience is definitionally impossible, and thus the problem of being without thought. It is indeterminate.
If you merely claim being CAN exist without thought, as opposed to the claim that it did, in fact, exist without thought, you don't have the burden of observational data. However, since whether it did or did not makes no difference for all observers, it's arguable this distinction makes no real sense.
Now, arguably, being without thought is actually inconceivable, and so depending on how much stock you put in the conceivability = existant argument, being without thought may fail that test. I don't find that line particularly fruitful. It's worth noting here that the argument isn't that you can't conceive of yourself not being, and the world going on, it's that such a conception is necissarily still a thought.
By definition, being without conception can't be conceived. It's asking you to think non-thought, imagine without using imagination. That would be the crux of that claim.
So, being is contingent on being?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Again, question begging. There are no claims in the absence of thought. And no logical or empirical support in the absence of thought.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right, conceivability necessitates thought.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
A tautology is necessarily true. How is this the crux of the matter? Conceivability marks a limit of human thought. It does not mark a limit of what is.
Right, that seems obvious. The less obvious thing is that being is contingent on at least some level of difference. Because if being is just being, pure, undifferentiated oneness, undefinable relative to anything except for its not being non-being (which has no trait), then it's not clear it is anything different from nothing. It'd be a traitless being defined by its not being a traitless nothing. So, you need things, plural, for being.
I buy this argument, although its tangential to the argument I had been making. Some people do propose a completely undifferentiated being wholly defined by not being nothing. I think this is meaningless.
Right, there are no claims in the absence of thought. However, I was responding to a post that included the proposition/claim that there is being in absence of thought. That is a claim.
That isn't question begging unless you are claiming that the proffered proposition "I claim there is being in the absence of thought," is identical with the reality of being without thought. That seems silly on the face of it though, no? Propositions about things are not the things they are propositions about. "Theseus is standing," is not a standing Theseus.
The claim to make that line work would be "all true propositions' targets exist," paired with "the proposition that being without thought exists and is true because if it were true evidence for or against it would not exist." That to me seems indeterminant.
Yup, and thought necessitates conceivability.
Maybe some terminology would help here.
Definition 1 has problems because I've seen people claim they can absolutely conceive of four-sided triangles that are colorless and red. Definition 2 has problems that are debatable, so let's settle for Definition 3.
The refutation of the proposition that "conceiving of being without thought is impossible," seems difficult due to aforementioned reasons. It requires conceiving/thinking about things existing with no conceiving/thinking. Maybe this can be done by making your mind go entirely blank? Meditation? Shooting up anesthesia? But arguably this would just be the absence of consciousness, during which you wouldn't be conceiving anything.
The conceivability = metaphysical possibility axiom goes back to Hume, and unfortunately, I can't find a good summary. This gets at part of it.
The corollary, "all metaphysical possibilities are conceivable," isn't necessarily the case. The issue though is that, if something is inconceivable under ideal conceivability ( round squares, etc.) then whether or not it is metaphysically possible or not, or indeed actual, its being so or not being so is equivalent for all observers, and so co-identical. In order for such things to meaningfully be, one must adopt a viewpoint akin to some sort of "God's eye view," that somehow can observer "all that is," by definition.
This is why I say uncritical metaphysics has become a problem for physicalism, because in very many versions the God's eye view is posited, even as God may be denied.
Yep. So does this lead one logically to identifying fundamental being with vagueness? To get to less than nothing, we would find ourselves in a realm that would seem to lack both sameness and difference in equal measure.
So we know that sameness and difference exist in the world has it has become. They are a concrete metaphysical strength contrast or dichotomy that describe reality in terms of opposing limitations on being.
Thus logically - working backwards from the principle of noncontradiction, which clearly applies in the world as it has become - we would have to assert that the ground state of this being is one that lacks any distinction between sameness and difference. Which makes it a vagueness.
The ground of being would be discoverable by applying this reasoning to every metaphysical-strength dichotomy that seems to apply to the world's state of being. So it would dissolve away the distinctions between chance and necessity, the discrete and the continuous, form and matter, atom and void, change and stability, differentiation and integration, incoherence and cohesion, the local and the global, signal and noise, etc, etc.
Hard to imagine. But the logic of this seems clear enough.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is certainly true up to a point. But a quantum gravity theory of everything would have to be background independent, and so a model of an immanent point of view rather than a transcendent one.
This would put it in the class of pantheistic metaphysics where the view is unplaced in being the view from everywhere. Although I would prefer to call it a pansemiotic metaphysics as that gets rid of the last vestige of dualistic thinking and embraces the bootstrapping triadic logic of the systems point of view.
That's my take. That's why I think, Boehme, while extremely mystical and esoteric, hits on an essential feature of reality. Definition requires difference.
I'm not sure what the fundemental dichotomies would be. Pure supposition leads to a constellation of different essential opposites in the history of religious, philosohical, and esoteric thought. Order - chaos seems like it may be essential one. Both ends of the universe end up looking the same at maximum/minimum entropy. Perhaps mass is another. You have the massless proton not experiencing time, and the infinitely high mass black hole not experiencing time either.
[Quote]Hard to imagine. But the logic of this seems clear enough.[/quote]
Yeah. Quite the project.
Haven't heard this. Why is this so? How does it deal with the apparent experimental confirmation of contextuality (i.e. the same thing observed can occur at different times for different observers). Perhaps the "science discovers there is no objective reality," headlines were a bit premature, but I think it's been repeated since 2020.
But I suppose depending on the meaning of "background independent," it could work.
The Copenhagen Interpertation is not "unpopular because it offends intuitions"; it's just patently incoherent because the observer cannot be "conscious" of the planck-scale events, only of the measurements indicated ex post facto by his experimental apparatus, and therefore, "consciousness" does not "cause the wavefunction collapse". Idealism (antirealism) is not implied as New Agers et al like to daydream. The physical interactions of physical systems (e.g. apparatus & photon) decoheres quantum states.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
They all seem fundamental. What about Aristotle's hylomorphism of form and matter?
But I personally settled on an ur-dichotomy of dichotomies. :grin:
That is everything can be encompassed by the vague~crisp developmental contrast offered by Peirce, and the local~global dichotomy of hierarchy theory, that also speaks to triadic structure, but as that which is the fully developed.
So one dichotomy represents the process that is dynamical becoming - the vague start in a Firstness that culminates in a completely definite finality of Thirdness.
The other dichotomy represents the completed structure that is a Thirdness - the being that emerges as the dynamically stable limit of all that developmental becoming.
So you have two axes that are arranged orthogonally, and thus themselves compose a holistic dichotomy of being and becoming. The possibility of becoming divided into the local and global of a Thirdness - a stabilising hierarchical structure - is matched with the fact of arriving at that state of fundamental division.
If this Peircean logical story works, then it should be easy enough to map all other metaphysical-strength dichotomies to its ontic structure.
So chaos~order would fit to the local~global axis of being as the systems story of global constraints shaping local degrees of freedom in hierarchy theory.
And it would fit the vague~crisp axis of becoming as being also the view that it takes time for the global constraints (or the sameness of a global coherence) to evolve, and thus time for the local freedoms (or local differences) to be given some final restrictive shape.
A problem though is that "chaos" tends to be an ill-defined word itself. In probability theory, it speaks not just to a certain randomness - or lack of order - but to a more specific class of disorderliness.
Unsurprisingly, there is a further dichotomy at work - which is why chaos~disorder would be considered a non-fundamental dichotomy. A chaotic regime is randomness that is fractal, scalefree, open, and without a mean. It is ruled by powerlaw statistics. The other kind of disorder is the more familiar realm of Gaussian or Bell Curve randomness, that has a single scale, which is thus closed by a boundary, and does have a definite mean or equilibrium average state.
This is a technical point. And one could say that the new maths of deterministic chaos still isn't describing what we really mean by "true chaos" as it is still a state of disorder bounded by a pattern - the pattern that is a powerlaw or log/log differential equation. A "true chaos" indeed may seem more like a "true vagueness" in the popular conception, as it would be fluctuations completely without bounds. And powerlaw regimes are definitely bounded in a fashion that completely predicts the statistical patterns that must thus arise.
But anyway. My argument is that once you get the trick that is a metaphysical dichotomy, you can trace dialectics back to its own source. Which is what Peircean pansemiotic logic is about.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Background independence is needed because a quantum version of general relativity would presume that the spacetime metric would itself fluctuate with gravitational self-interaction. So spacetime must be made part of the emergent mix in the next level of a unifying theory.
The Cosmos - as both a container and the contents - would have to arise as a developmental dichotomy. And so the very thing of "a point of view" - as a story of the invariances of fundamental symmetries - would have to emerge and become a stable feature.
So I am cashing out the notion of "points of view" as speaking to the need to ground descriptions of worlds in terms of their generalised invariances
Relativity is all about how local differences don't make global differences - and in fact instead reveal the global sameness.
QFT is all about how the same can apply through gauge symmetry to locales. What global invariance cannot "see", is then what makes the local degrees of freedom, or variance. And this is why particles are shaped by their own local permutation symmetries - the SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) deal of the Standard Model.
Again, dichotomies rule. The Big Bang starts at the Planck scale where GR and QFT don't yet experience any local~global distinction in scale. The energetic fluctuation is just as "curved" as the curved container that is meant to make it distinctive as "a fluctuation". So in fact there is no point of view to be had when there is no distinction between the local QFT differences and the global GR metric sameness.
But as the Big Bang starts to expand~cool from that point, then you have the emergence of invariance on two opposed scales - the QFT local scale symmetries that frame the fluctuations, and the GR global scale symmetries that track the shape of their container.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Do you mean non-locality? Well time - understood as the measure of rest mass locality - has to be emergent as well.
A world composed just of radiation is timeless in the sense that there is action at less than c. It is only when particles gain mass that going less than c, and thus experiencing locality as the possibility of being different, becomes a thing.
A photon experiences no time on its journey. So it already lives in the non-local world. But mass breaks that symmetry to introduce a new variety of physical difference. Another point of view arises where there is the radiation bath of the CMB that "sees" time only as a generalised drop in temperature, and then all the bits of material crud that has gained local mass, along with a fractured collection of different gauge interactions, to become fermions living in a local "proper time" view of reality.
So local~nonlocal would be a further dichotomy or symmetry breaking that follows on to give greater emergent richness and complexity to time as a "dimension".
A photon only sees time as a structure of thermal decoherence. For some reason, it winds up red-shifted when its wavefunction collapses.
An electron lives in a more exciting world where it could be deflected by another particle at any moment. It gets to exchange momentum through a whole history of localised events.
Yeah, the means by which quantum states are decohered isn't a known quantity. Delayed choice quantum eraser experiments don't jive with any sort of simplistic explanation because if you want to say that a measurement causes collapse as it occurs, then the eraser is causing the wave/particle that goes through one or both slits to jump backwards in time and change its past behavior based on whether information about which slit it went through is erased or not. This is obviously not a popular interpretation.
This is a decent point for Copenhagen, since it states that anything before final observation (the observation a person can actually look at, not an observation that then gets deleted) is basically meaningless. But if you're going to assume objective collapse on measurements explicitly at any point such measurement occurs, you have apparent time travel. Point being, it's not just apparatus + photon = decoherence, but consideration of the whole set up for final observation (to what point, Copenhagen leaves blank).
Copenhagen is still the overwhelming plurality favorite of practicing physicists, perhaps because it handwaves metaphysical concerns. "Shut up and calculate," and all.
Idealism <> antirealism, this is a false equivalence. Plenty of idealist ontologies have existent objects, they are just mental objects.
Quite literally something that is impossible to totally pin down because you will never make a purely physical observation, you will only make ones occurring in subjective experience, which is why consciousness causes collapse can live on. Almost all interpretations of quantum mechanics (OC aside) are empirically indistinguishable, as they all predict the same outcomes to quantum mechanical experiments, so there is no scientific claim to be made either way.
Does this mean anything more than that there needs to be things for there to be things?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right, that is why your assertion that it:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
makes no sense.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It doesn't. Distinguishing types of conceivability, the notion of ideal rational reflection, better reasoning, justification, etc. does not show nothing exists if there is no explanation for reality in total, or that thinking and being are the same, or that existence necessitates thinking.
I’d take a different tack. The problem for quantum mechanics is that it has no epistemic cut - a place that marks the collapse of the quantum probabilities into the classical actuality. And so the collapse becomes something indefinitely deferred. Either deferred in the kind of decoherence that ends up in multiverses, or deferred in the way that ends up in Copenhagenism.
Yet biosemiosis models epistemic cuts. And a biosemiotic model of subjective experience let’s you place the observables at the intersection not of the quantum and the classical, but of the informational and entropic.
So it is not about “awareness”. It is about how humans form models and make measurements that convert some physical state into some symbolic state.
A needle moves on a dial and it is seen to point to a number. Right there is the epistemic cut - the collapse - that turns a material event into known fact.
So the physics itself is collapseless. Thermal decoherence only constrains the quantum probabilities to some narrower range of uncertainties (in my non-multiverse view). Material uncertainly always thus exists - even if constrained to the Planckscale.
But the human mind - as is true of biosemiosis in general - then applies a mechanical, and hence classical, grid over the continuity of the wavefunction physics. Questions are posed by our instruments so as to have digital yes/no answers. We ask what number should be put on some event - the numbers being artefacts of the laws of logic, the events being quantum uncertainty being constrained to some point where we can afford to be indifferent about the inherent ontic uncertainty or “measurement error”.
So the collapse is “all in the mind” in the sense that it is a human modelling choice to identify some event with some number, and then continue on talking as if the numbers are the events.
What is then “real” about such reading of dials is that biosemiosis itself - as the mechanical basis of life and mind - can only physically kick in at a particular material scale.
Machines are switches - the physical embodiment of informational states. And nature only supports such switches (or ratchets) at the quasi-classical nanoscale of being (in room temperature water). This is the first point at which mechanical structure - in the form of biological molecules that can do mechanical work - can stably persist in the thermal chaos of a nanoscale liquid environment.
So the epistemic cut is itself a fundamental fact of nature, it is where biological information can first impose itself on quantum indeterminism to the degree that “making readings” becomes a physically possible thing.
This applies to neuroscience as much as biology. Sensory receptors form at the smallest scale at which they can be instruments taking readings without also being blown apart in the process by the physical energies involved.
To bring it back to the quantum physicist in the lab, their eyes can only read numbers on dials. Well, their eyes in a completely dark room could just about detect individual photons emitted by a scintillation counter - biology has great signal processing. But scientists like to work in well-lit rooms where everything is “classical” - ie: as converted to a system of sign - as possible. That is, the numbers must be so easy to read that any question of uncertainty about he reading of dials is made completely moot.
So on the one hand, the quantum physicist constructs instruments - mechanical switches - that are as purely informational as can be. And then those instruments can go beyond the nanoscale limitations of biological switches. We can built switches from metals and other materials that don’t get blown apart in the act of trying to constrain the physics to scales smaller than the nanoscale. We can thus move the effective epistemic cut down to a level where we start to probe the Planckscale limits of physical being itself.
We still only come back with numbers to talk about in Copenhagen fashion. But the physics we are reporting on are that of the thermal decoherent structure that is reality collapsing its inherent uncertainty or indeterminism towards it own Planckscale limit - ie: the point where QFT blows GR apart in our information modelled view of the material actuality.
I'm not sure what the disagreement is.
I am not sure how propositions not existing without thought somehow implies question begging as regards the assertion that: "Whether being does/doesn't exist outside of thought won't make any discernable different for any observer/thinker"
I thought I understood, but clearly didn't.
Very interesting. Any recommendations on Pierce in terms of a starting point for a deeper read? I am familiar with his larger ideas but haven't done a deep study.
I'll have to read the rest again more closely, but I can sort of see how it would work. The lens of symmetry is something I should look in to more. I've generally read more on classical systems, and systems is the operative word there. It'd be nice to find another way of thinking of things, because systems are simply arbitrary.
The issue with the entire universe being its own frame comes up with systems too. I forgot the authors, but their term for the idea that all systems bleed into each other more than we admit was the "blobiverse," which I got a chuckle from.
I'm always being asked that and the truth is ... no.
Peirce never wrote a book to sum it all up. So he isn't easy to study like others who put it into a single text that an undergrad course could prescribe. He left behind a vast library of unpublished manuscripts. The works cover a lot of steadily evolving thought. The scholarship that then sprung up around that was at first mainly theological, only later did scientists catch on.
Analytic philosophy was both deeply influenced by Peirce and sociologically committed to making others its heroes - principally Wittgenstein (as Cheryl Misak documents in her excellent Cambridge Pragmatism - video version). Continental philosophy was likewise past structuralism and already wedded to Sassurean semiotics, and so had no interest on discovering how Peirce would sort all its problems.
I studied hierarchy theory and systems science first. So I could immediately see what Peirce was driving at as soon as a decent surge of academic retellings began to appear in the early 1990s.
This internet source became the place to find good modern papers. There was also a lively Peirce discussion board back when I first got interested.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Symmetry is to physics as dialectics is to metaphysics.
The universe (vicariously through Rasmussen and his clique of followers, Gorgias included): I don't exist!
Mind if I pick you brain on the concept of symmetry.
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One kinda symmetry is geometric, we learn it in high school:
1. Reflection/mirror symmetry. The letters A C, H have them.
2. Rotational symmetry: S and O have them.
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The other kind is what I call Noether symmetry in which the past and the present, through the future are identical with respect to something. Conservation laws seem to possess this type of symmetry: You start with 10 J of energy at time t[sub]1[/sub], you wind up with 10 J of energy at another time t[sub]2[/sub] (law of conservation of energy).
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What's the relationship, if any, between the geometric symmetries mentioned above and Noether symmetry? They seem to be unrelated, yet I sense some connection among them. Can't put my finger on it, alas.
Reflections - and even rotations of triangles - are discrete symmetries. You can see something has changed even if it maps back on to itself. But the rotation of sphere would be an example of a continuous symmetry.
Noether's theorem says there is a conservation law for every continuous symmetry in nature. So you have the two forms of momentum conservation - rotations and translations. Each looks the same amount of action anywhere in a Newtonian conception of space. And then you get energy conservation from actions in the time dimension.
One moment in time is considered no more special or different than any other. It is another continuous symmetry. Shift an event from last year into next year and it does nothing observable to the energy content. So time translation can't change the energy content of the Cosmos.
This is all correct in the Newtonian world, which is suitably closed and thus properly symmetric as both a spatial and temporal coordinate system.
But general relativity is not so rigid. It is an open story of spacetime dimensionality. So energy isn't conserved - although a closure can then be constructed, and symmetry restored, by talking a higher level view that balances the total inertial mass of the system against its total gravitational potential.
So the relationship is simple. Continuous symmetry means you can't see a difference just by shuffling the localised content of a system about in spacetime. Thus some general quantity of a local "stuff" is being preserved in a substantial way - such as momentum or energy.
But all this holds good only if the global container is closed and rigid enough to sustain the continuous symmetry. If spacetime evolves in some fashion, then energy conservation doesn't strictly apply.
Let me see if I got it.
1. Discrete symmetries have stages in transformation that exhibit noticeable in-between changes e.g. rotating an equilateral triangle.
2. Continuous changes are such that no stage in the transformation can be identified as different e.g. spinning a sphere/circle.
3. Noether symmetries are continuous transformations,the transformations being temporal translations.
4. In GR, there are issues with Noether symmetries.
Didn't mean non-locality alone for contextuality, although some people do claim that non-locality demonstrates contextuality.
I was thinking of more recent Bell-Wigner experiments, instead of just testing of Bell inequalities. Because the difference is that assuming non-locality might not be enough maintain an objective world, one where all observers can reconcile their recorded facts.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw9832
Think of it as the global Newtonian 3D spatial container and its local energetic actions. Spinning on the spot, or moving with constant motion in a straight line are both defined as inertias. Momentum is conserved by the moving mass, never being gained or lost (in the frictionless perfection of the gravitationless Newtonian frame).
So that fact reflects the continuous symmetry built into the Newtonian description of the container. Move some local rotation or translation to some other arbitrary point inside the container, and nothing is physically different as far as the amount of rotation or translation that would be observed.
Then likewise, move the action - some translation or rotation - to another moment in time, and it will still reflect the same amount of energetic effort. A one joule shove a billion years ago will look like a one joule shove a billion years from now ... if you grant the fixed symmetry of the Newtonian conception of space and time.
So it is the unchanging invariance of the whole - the spacetime stage in which the local action takes place - that ensures the conserved quantities of those local actions. The same actions would carry the same weight no matter where they happened in time and space.
We call that space-conserved property an object's inertia. And the time-conserved property its energy.
It is an accountancy trick. We know that Newton idealised the situation for the sake of simplicity. But it works at our general scale of being as observers of a now very large, very flat, very cold, and very empty universe.
I admit my views are provisional here. But for me, non-locality and contextuality seem two sides of the same coin - a dichotomy, and thus reciprocally related.
When you break the symmetry of a realist metaphysics, it breaks in these two directions, depending on whether you think you are talking about the localism of the particular interaction, or the globalism of the world that constrains the probabilities.
So like all QM's complementary variables, you can't violate both inequalities at the same time. If you are moving towards the one limit, you are moving away from the other, so to speak. And yet you also know the two are related in a deeper way.
This makes a neat fit as it promotes the two things of entanglement and contextuality to be being a more abstract commutative pair. We can see the holism of the quantum state from both its local and global angles in the one view that is united by entanglement~contextuality as its "central axis of weirdness".
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yep. But to me, this risks doing the usual thing of stumbling across the fact of a dichotomy that stands for an irreducibly triadic relation and then blindly believing it must be reducible to one or other of it two poles in a monistic fashion.
If find we have a binary choice like entanglement vs contextuality, then pick one as foundational. Do we save realism by throwing locality overboard, or by throwing out - in some arguments - the freewill of observers?
My metaphysics would say that such a dichotomy instead indicates a local~global pairs of limits. So locality almost goes overboard, but not quite. Observers go overboard, but not quite. Each would be the extreme case that could never quite be reached.
And this seems the way it works out - nonlocality as the most local view, and contextuality as the most global view, of the weirdness that makes QM non-classical.
So QM is "weird" as it breaks realism. And folk then take one or either path and extrapolate the weirdness to infinity.
That gives rise to the different interpretational extremes. You have the Copenhagenism that offers no stopping point until it arrives at the consciousness and freewill of the human observer.
Or you head in the other no-collapse direction and have the endlessly bifurcating many worlds multiverse.
Each seems the correct interpretation - compatible with the maths. But that is because the maths doesn't contain a cut-off. Only a quantum gravity theory that absorbs all three Planck constants - the irreducible triad of c, G and h - could introduce such a cut-off to physics. And so nothing formally seems to resist the galloping off towards the infinite horizons of metaphysical irreality in one or other of its available directions.
The way to avoid the pathological metaphysics is to realise what is going on. Classical reality is emergent from the reciprocality of a pair of local~global limits. The weirdness of one is going to cancel out the weirdness of the other, at the end of the day.
Which is where we get to with thermal decoherence as a general framework uniting QM vagueness and classical crispness, or counterfactual definiteness.
And biosemiosis becomes the icing on the cake. It draws the further natural line across reality that is the epistemic cut between organisms and their environments. It shows how the Cosmos already decoheres itself, and how what human observers do is add a new level of machinery to the situation where this decoherence can be experimentally manipulated and even exploited for new technological purposes.
So at the Copenhagen end of the interpretive spectrum, you get rid of the conscious observer issue entirely. It can be left at the door of the biosemiotic epistemic cut.
And at the multiverse end of the interpretive spectrum, you can likewise rule out MWI. Decoherence says collapse is real enough due to thermal scale.
Copenhagenism is a claim about limits being taken - contextualised events becoming collapsed to a-contextual numbers. But then that Copenhagenism is just a human story. The physical reality it is based on is the nanoscale of warm water - the quasi-classical transition zone in which quantum coherence is becoming classical decoherence. Strong entanglement is giving way to strong contextuality.
Ne quid nimis. Gracias señor!
The past doesn't exist, it's gone; the future too doesn't exist, it is yet to come; the now is an instant, it is nothing! Existence is an activity, and like all activities, requires a non-zero length of time. How can anything exist?
How can everything not?
Did you follow the argument? It uses Aristotle's views on time, the conclusion is mine though. :smile:
[quote=William Faulkner]The past is never dead. It's not even past."[/quote]
As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I haven't really dug into symmetry. I've been exposed to the concept in physics books, history of science, etc. but haven't really grappled with the mathematics. That said, if I recall my lectures and texts correctly, you are able to "rotate" and "flip" these matrices (e.g., Pauli matrices for spin). So, you get lines like: "An interesting property of spin 1?2 particles is that they must be rotated by an angle of 4? in order to return to their original configuration."
I was always told that this area of physics had some of the most obstruse, difficult mathematics in the whole field and so have always been scared away from actually working through them. I'll stick to Feynman diagrams, causal diagrams, and differential equations thank you very much :groan: .
I thought I was pretty good at math and just had gaps from going to a terrible, collapsing school system growing up because I learned a good deal of complex statistical methods and taught myself to code in several languages. Then I tried to jump into this Teaching Company course on linear algebra, without all the prerequisites (their calculus classes are accessible), and realized there are some things I'll probably just never get and have to accept on good faith.
:lol: Hell, even Aristotle made mistakes!
Any such assertions are clearly due to a lack of understanding of The Philosopher on the part of the student. Haven't you read your scholastic texts!?
That'll be 20 Hail Marys and a five-day bread fast.
It’s all relative.