Why are things the way they are?

Quoting Luke

It is worth reflecting on what sort of answer might satisfy those who ask these "why" questions and whether there might be way of rephrasing them to exclude the "why". In other words, what is the actual question here? Are they asking how such things are made possible? Or are they simply expressing wonder at these facts? Or something else?

A nice issue to bring back up. 'What is the question?' mumbled Gertrude Stein who lay dying. Young Wittgenstein had his own version. I think the 'why' is often enough lyrically indeterminate. It's not how but that the world is that fucks us up. Or fucks those up who're in a mood called 'wonder.'

Quoting Luke

Can you think of any more examples of this sort of "why" question in philosophy?

A version that occurs to me is the apparent inescapability of brute fact in any grand narrative. A child might ask why there is a world in the first place and be told that a god created the world. Then this god is a brute fact, until the same child recognizes the contingency of this god as he did of the world.

Quoting Luke

I have noticed this particular "why" question crops up repeatedly in various guises in philosophy.

It's the search for a causal account. Every particular must be the product of something more general.

Quoting Luke

It is worth reflecting on what sort of answer might satisfy those who ask these "why" questions and whether there might be way of rephrasing them to exclude the "why".

Aristotle list the four general causes - or "becauses". Together, as a unity, they ought to offer a complete account.

Note how some things might be necessary to the reason why something is the way it is. Which is a pretty strong reason for the "why". But other things can be at the other extreme in being a contingent cause - a "mere accident". So the weakest seeming reason for some "why".

Why did the beam buckle, the cookie crumble, or the final straw break the camel's back? We can blame unlucky accident or randomness as the reasonable explanation. We could say absolutely any kind of pertubation, no matter how slight, could have tipped the balance.

So a four causes account covers both structural necessity - formal and final cause - and material accident, or material and efficient cause.

Quoting Luke

Thinking in these terms might also highlight the impotence of the "answer" given by the fine tuning argument. The fine tuning argument answers the question of why there is life in the universe by saying, basically: because otherwise there wouldn't be life in the universe. Or, in its more general form that applies to all of these questions: because otherwise things would not be the way they are.

This seems to conflate two possibilities.

In the one, fine-tuning is the result of structural necessity. Our Comos is what it is because that is the sum over all possibilities. In Platonic fashion, you can only have five Platonic solids. Given the constraints of a 3D world, those are the only fully symmetric regular polygon outcomes.

And in physics, this is the kind of gauge symmetry thinking that gives the Standard Model of particle physics. For Nature to reach its simplest possible state in terms of absolute regularity - a world where particles are excitations of the simplest achievable form - then the options are strictly limited in a Platonic structural fashion. So in this sense, fine-tuning is an illusion. Any world would have the same mathematical constraints.

But then the coupling constants of the Standard Model seem arbitrary. The mass of an electron or the strength of the electromagnetic field seem like arbitrary values - at least in the physics to date. And so the way around that is the anthropic principle. We imagine a multiverse or landscape of possibility in which every random combination of constants is tried. We then become the constraint that picks out the particular world-branch in which - by accident - the combination is such as to be able to produce us. The fine-tuning is again an illusion. But now in the sense that every accidental value will be manifested and so our reality now sits at the opposite end of the spectrum.

It is not Platonically necessary, but as causally contingent as it can be imagined to be.

So a lot now hinges on how much of the causal work done by the physical constants can be hoovered up by some future "beyond the Standard Model" physics. The "why" will be shifted from one causal bin to the other to the degree the arbitrary constants get explained as Platonic necessity.

But note that "contingent" is a causal concept just as much as "necessary". And the two being reciprocal views of "why-ness", we can expect always to have some measure of both in any full account. To be completely a case of one or the other is what we shouldn't expect, and what we don't in fact see.

Quoting lll

I think the 'why' is often enough lyrically indeterminate. It's not how but that the world is that fucks us up. Or fucks those up who're in a mood called 'wonder.'

Yes, this is what I was getting at.

Quoting lll

A version that occurs to me is the apparent inescapability of brute fact in any grand narrative.

Right. I think what these type of "why" questions have in common is that they are givens or necessities of our existence. More specifically, they are what is given, axiomatic or necessary for us to be able to ask these questions in the first place (i.e. our having spatiotemporal existence, life, consciousness).

It's similar to asking: Why is my native language English instead of another language? Or: Why am I me and not someone else? One possible answer might be that it is by virtue of the details of your birth, such as where you were born, who your parents are, who raised you, etc. But I'm not sure that this answer would satisfactorily answer the "why" question.

Even if we knew all the causes of how the brain produces conscious experiences, this still seems to leave untouched the question of why the brain produces conscious experiences.

The fine-tuning argument is, as the name itself suggests, entirely predicated on the precision in the values of certain physical constants if the universe is to be the way it is, if life is to evolve the way it did.

However, mammalian evolution, therefore our own (human) existence, was made possible by a fluke (an asteroid as per consensus that caused the extinction of the dinos). In other words humanity or intelligence, both essential components of the fine-tuning argument for god, were simply contingent and not necessary.

Furthermore, as Carl Sagan once put it, if you rewind the clock of evolution and let it run again, there's no guarantee that humans & intelligence would evolve. Something totally different could happen.

The long and short of it: fine-tuning doesn't mean humans would come into existence. So much for the special relationship (we think) we have with god. Anthropic principle into the trash can.

Quoting Luke

Even if we knew all the causes of how the brain produces conscious experiences, this still seems to leave untouched the question of why the brain produces conscious experiences.

Yeah. The how questions are questions about material and efficient causality. The why questions go to formal and final cause.

But why an organism would want to know its world seems an easy thing to see a purpose for. And how it does that is by constructing a neural modeling relation with that world.

The misstep in the causal analysis is to then talk about "conscious experience" as if it were just a product of the material "how" and not the finalistic "why".

Quoting apokrisis

Aristotle list the four general causes

Formal cause: The blueprint/design
Material cause: The stuff that the craftsman works with
Efficient cause: The craftsman (God)
Final cause: The purpose (God's intentions. The meaning of life).

The fine-tuning argument attempts to explain the universe as the perfect environment for humans i.e. the universe has been designed with us in mind.

Ok, here we are. What are we supposed to do now? What is the meaning of life? An unanswered subquestion of the final cause.

We know the purpose (the final cause) of the universe: A home for humans.

We do not know our own purpose (final cause): What is the meaning of life?

Looks like all we did was kick the can down the road.

Quoting Luke

Even if we knew all the causes of how the brain produces conscious experiences, this still seems to leave untouched the question of why the brain produces conscious experiences.

One understanding of an explanation of an event is that the event is shown to be derivable from a familiar 'law' or pattern which is itself (for the moment) taken for granted. The strange is linked to the familiar and we move on, forgetting that the familiar itself can be questioned.

Along those lines, I can imagine some pattern/law being established from which what gets interpreted as conscious experiences can be derived. But then either this law is contingent ('true for or no reason') or one can climb up the chain to the most general pattern which is currently accepted and find contingency there. To me this suggests a necessary lacuna in human inquiry (perhaps as @apokrisis mentions we are always between the impossible poles of contingency and necessity.) A nice metaphor is the diagonal argument that proves the uncountability of infinite sequences of bits. Our inquiry always casts a shadow.

.Quoting Agent Smith

Furthermore, as Carl Sagan once put it, if you rewind the clock of evolution and let it run again, there's no guarantee that humans & intelligence would evolve. Something totally different could happen.

Excellent point. Dawkins and Dennett also stress this. Randomness plays an essential role. So beyond the brute fact of the most general pattern there's the 'micro' version where brute fact is understood as a goo on every grinding gear.

Quoting lll

Randomness plays an essential role

Unless the dino-exterminator asteroid was a planned event. We could find out, you know. What did the dinsoaurs do for the 200 millions years they flourished that homoformed (make suitable for homo sapiens) the planet? Sabrá Mandrake!

Quoting Agent Smith

Unless the dino-exterminator asteroid was a planned event.

I was thinking of randomness on the level of particles, which must play a role in mutation and add up to whether a rock falls on the head of a critter or even (eventually) whether an asteroid smashes into our blue planet.

Quoting lll

I was thinking of randomness on the level of particles, which must play a role in mutation and add up to whether a rock falls on the head of a critter or even (eventually) whether an asteroid smashes into our blue planet.

Indeed, to understand randomness at all scales, one has to go its source, the level where it's most conspicuous, most apparent, most obvious - particles.

Quoting Agent Smith

Indeed, to understand randomness at all scales, one has to go its source, the level where it's most conspicuous, most apparent, most obvious - particles.

And does that not just piss brute fact over inch and pore of us? Making havoc of explanations? If memory serves, there was a moment of hubris where some leading scientists thought that reality was pretty much explained. Ah but we just didn't have equipment that was sensitive enough. We were fooled by low resolution and the law of large numbers...

Quoting Luke

Can you think of any more examples of this sort of "why" question in philosophy?

A lot of those sorts of questions might be meaningless even though they seem to make sense to humans whose entire worldview is tied up in measuring things and trying make meaning. Why isn't the world 25% larger than it is?

Quoting lll

hubris where some leading scientists thought that reality was pretty much explained.

[quote=Lord Kelvin]There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.[/quote]

How much does precision determine the validity of scientific theories? If a missle is accurate within 200 m, does it follow the same laws of nature as one that can hit a traget with an error of 10 m?

Any mathologers around here who could help?

Quoting Agent Smith

How much does precision determine the validity of scientific theories?

Quoting Agent Smith

Any mathologers around here who could help?

I'm a mathologer myself. You ask a deep question. But I think it's safe to say that Newtonian physics seemed so convincing because the speeds and masses involved meant that the Newtonian map/model was good enough to seem like more than a map.

I can't vouch for this source, but this example is what I was hinting at. Such anomalies might be written off as a noise or due to some subtle unseen cause, at least until a more comprehensive and/or more accurate theory comes along.

As seen from Earth the precession of Mercury's orbit is measured to be 5600 seconds of arc per century (one second of arc=1/3600 degrees). Newton's equations, taking into account all the effects from the other planets (as well as a very slight deformation of the sun due to its rotation) and the fact that the Earth is not an inertial frame of reference, predicts a precession of 5557 seconds of arc per century. There is a discrepancy of 43 seconds of arc per century.

This discrepancy cannot be accounted for using Newton's formalism. Many ad-hoc fixes were devised (such as assuming there was a certain amount of dust between the Sun and Mercury) but none were consistent with other observations (for example, no evidence of dust was found when the region between Mercury and the Sun was carefully scrutinized). In contrast, Einstein was able to predict, without any adjustments whatsoever, that the orbit of Mercury should precess by an extra 43 seconds of arc per century should the General Theory of Relativity be correct.

https://aether.lbl.gov/www/classes/p10/gr/PrecessionperihelionMercury.htm

Surely ‘natural law’ must form some part of the answer to this question. Why water flows downhill, why bodies fall at the same rate, why nothing can move faster than light, and so on, are part of a huge range of questions that can be answered with reference to laws, principles, axioms, and so on. But there’s no answer to why those laws are as they are, in the same way that there’s no sense in asking why 3 is prime.

Quoting apokrisis

. Every particular must be the product of something more general.

So, I’m thinking that the two key ideas here are the necessary and the contingent. The domain of natural or scientific law is one of necessary truths. I suppose that also pertains to the domain of logic. But contingent facts seem lower down the scale than necessary truths - are they not? Contingencies are just that - contingent, dependent, not necessary, could have been other. Whereas natural laws, principles and so on - could not have been other. That’s what makes them ‘laws’.

But let me also observe that the notion of necessary truth is unpopular - because it seems to suggest, or be underwritten by, the notion of a necessary being, which is of course a no-go idea for naturalism.

Don’t know if I’m on to something here or not, if anyone has feedback.

Quoting Wayfarer

Whereas natural laws, principles and so on - could not have been other. That’s what makes them ‘laws’.

I think the 'law' metaphor just expresses our expectation that the pattern will hold. It's logically possible that the 'laws' could change. With computers it's easy to simulate alternative worlds with different laws, such as a world where gravity is an inverse cube law.

Quoting Wayfarer

But let me also observe that the notion of necessary truth is unpopular - because it seems to suggest, or be underwritten by, the notion of a necessary being, which is of course a no-go idea for naturalism.

To me it makes more sense to speak in terms of a restlessness with brute facts. To find necessity is to find causal linkage, possibly exploitable. The PSR is perhaps more an expression of human curiosity than some primordial cosmic logic. We want to know why why why. This makes sense as an evolved trait, too, since it's presumably useful to always sniff around for correlations and 'handles' (places where small effort leads to great reward) and not be satisfied with 'useless' or 'meaningless' or 'brute' presence. The idea of God makes every single detail of the world meaningful and justified.

.

Quoting lll

It's logically possible that the 'laws' could change.

The laws are such that living beings have evolved. They might have been otherwise, but we would never have been around to discuss it.

Quoting Wayfarer

The facts are such that living beings have evolved. They could easily have been otherwise, but we would never have been around to discuss it.

I agree that a relative stability of physical laws so far makes sense with the rest of what we know, but this is no proof of necessity. I see how one can make a case that the law of gravity has held for centuries, but I don't see how that case can be extended to the future. Only a circular argument comes to mind (the future will resemble the past because the future resembled the past in the past.)

Reply to lll :up:

Can you explain?

As the accuracy of measurement increases, do we have to switch between theories like it was done in your example with Mercury's precession?

Like you said, somewhere, it's about resolution - images (of the universe) at different resolutions isn't a question of plugging in more accurate values into the same equation; we need an entirely different set of equations. I can't quite wrap my head around this. It feels odd.

Reply to Luke "Why" questions which are not addressed to some particular person about her intentions / reasons are incoherent. Usually, what's intended are general, causal / explanatory "How" questions about nature or the universe itself. Philosophers, IMO, ask "Why" questions of other philosophers in order to prompt 'speculative answers' to (unstated) "How" questions the domains of which tend to be empirical-hypothetical rather than ideal-categorical; taken or intended literally indicates that the philosophers' language has gone on holiday (Witty). This site is populated (swarmed) almost exclusively by amateurs (& poseurs & proselytizers), so asking nonsensical "Why" questions is deeply endemic.

Quoting Agent Smith

As the accuracy of measurement increases, do we have to switch between theories like it was done in your example with Mercury's precession?

As I understand it, it's logically possible that a theory keeps on working indefinitely as we crank up the 'resolution' of our measurements.

The point is that lots of models can fit the same set of data points (which are generated via a randomly generated law with a varying amount of noise.) The model is 'underdetermined' in this sense. This is where factors like economy, coherence with the rest of our beliefs, and beauty come in.

Quoting lll

beauty

A curve is beautiful, feminine. I wonder why we're hell bent on finding linear correlations. So masculine straight lines are.

I'd rather use a sine wave or some such like than a straight line. It would make my life hell, but women, they seem to love to do that to me!

Quoting Agent Smith

I wonder why we're hell bent on finding linear correlations.

Dirt cheap. Easy to grok. Two parameters. Sum up millions of points with a couple of 64 bit floating point numbers. You can do a sine wave model with 2 or 3 parameters and get a dirt cheap curve. Or a quadratic model, even cheaper to calculate. The basic idea is a 'family' of functions which only vary in their 'settings' (parameters.) How many knobs do I have to twist? How many dimensions much I search through for good settings? Neural networks can have billions of dimensions, but SGD can (amazingly) hack this search space if one is willing to foot the bill for it...

Reply to lll Occam's razor, :kiss: Men are simple folk. Women, no, they remind me of Rube Goldberg machines, they do!

Quoting Agent Smith

Men are simple folk. Women, no, they remind me of Rube Goldberg machines, they do!

I suppose, I suppose. Though perhaps we are simple in one way to be all the more complex in another.

Quoting lll

I see how one can make a case that the law of gravity has held for centuries, but I don't see how that case can be extended to the future.

Said Hume.

Reply to lll Scientific laws exist where logical necessity meets physical causation. (Explored further on this off-site thread.)

Quoting Wayfarer

Scientific laws exist where logical necessity meets physical causation.

I think you know that Newton (Kant's inspiration, I think) was wrong, and that science deals in tentative hypotheses and models that work well enough so far. Is that not already a refutation of this claim ? At the very least your usage of 'law' looks nonstandard.

Science distinguishes a law or theory from facts. Calling a law a fact is ambiguous, an overstatement, or an equivocation. The nature of scientific laws has been much discussed in philosophy, but in essence scientific laws are simply empirical conclusions reached by scientific method; they are intended to be neither laden with ontological commitments nor statements of logical absolutes.
...
Laws differ from scientific theories in that they do not posit a mechanism or explanation of phenomena: they are merely distillations of the results of repeated observation. As such, the applicability of a law is limited to circumstances resembling those already observed, and the law may be found to be false when extrapolated.
...
Like theories and hypotheses, laws make predictions; specifically, they predict that new observations will conform to the given law. Laws can be falsified if they are found in contradiction with new data.
...
The fact that laws have never been observed to be violated does not preclude testing them at increased accuracy or in new kinds of conditions to confirm whether they continue to hold, or whether they break, and what can be discovered in the process. It is always possible for laws to be invalidated or proven to have limitations, by repeatable experimental evidence, should any be observed. Well-established laws have indeed been invalidated in some special cases, but the new formulations created to explain the discrepancies generalize upon, rather than overthrow, the originals. That is, the invalidated laws have been found to be only close approximations, to which other terms or factors must be added to cover previously unaccounted-for conditions, e.g. very large or very small scales of time or space, enormous speeds or masses, etc. Thus, rather than unchanging knowledge, physical laws are better viewed as a series of improving and more precise generalizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law

Reply to lllThanks, that is highly relevant. One of our contributors posted a link to a paper by called No God No Laws by Nancy Cartwright which is about exactly this (she's also reference in that Wikipedia article you've quoted.)

I still feel there's a deep issue behind all of this with regards to contingency and necessity. It seems to me when it is said that laws could have been otherwise, that this distinction is being lost. But of course it's a very big question.

[quote=Wikipedia]Laws can be falsified if they are found in contradiction with new data.[/quote]

I'd be interested in some examples.

Quoting Wayfarer

No God No Laws

I'm just flummoxed by the fact that when I do something bad, I don't break any known laws of nature. Evil is perfectly compatible with the known laws of the universe. Quite dishearteningly, good seems less harmonious with how the world works. There's the reason why miracles are thought of as divine - they violate the laws of nature in a manner of speaking. God vs. God! He must be outta his mind!

Quoting Wayfarer

I'd be interested in some examples.

Look up a bit and see the issue with Mercury, which helped support Einstein against Newton.

Quoting Wayfarer

I still feel there's a deep issue behind all of this with regards to contingency and necessity. It seems to me when it is said that laws could have been otherwise, that this distinction is being lost. But of course it's a very big question.

It is a big question indeed. You mention necessary beings, and I think we crave (at times anyway) an escape from contingency and pragmatic conjectures into a completely knowable world designed by an idealized humanlike intelligence (for if not humanlike then not comprehendible by us). Sartre might be hinting at this from another angle. We want the impossible combination of freedom and substance (to be human is to want impossibly to become God, be 'done' with everything but still alive.)

Quoting Wayfarer

Surely ‘natural law’ must form some part of the answer to this question. ... But there’s no answer to why those laws are as they are....

The laws of relativity arose as there had to be an equivalence or symmetry that united gravity and acceleration, and then space and time, and then mass and energy. The laws of quantum mechanics arose as the blackbody radiation of an object couldn't be a continuous spectrum without then being infinite in its energy. The laws of thermodynamics arose for the same atomistic reasons, plus statistical mechanics.

So in general, the natural laws are speak to the causality of symmetries and their breakings.

Going upwards to the global level is a way of discovering the ever greater generality to be found in higher states of symmetry.

Going downwards to the local level is reciprocally the way to discover the ever greater particularity to be found in broken symmetries.

Okun's cube of laws - the story of how modern science has been working towards the task of unifying the Planck triad of fundamental constants in the one quantum gravity theory - shows you how utterly programmatic and Platonic this all is.

Quoting Agent Smith

We know the purpose (the final cause) of the universe: A home for humans.

What? Those hairless apes that immediately cooked their own planet?

Sounds legit. :razz:

Reply to Luke

Quoting Luke

Thinking in these terms might also highlight the impotence of the "answer" given by the fine tuning argument. The fine tuning argument answers the question of why there is life in the universe by saying, basically: because otherwise there wouldn't be life in the universe. Or, in its more general form that applies to all of these questions: because otherwise things would not be the way they are.

‘Why’ questions look for an overarching explanatory scheme to organize particular facts or subordinate the patterns.

“But if wonder (namely, about the “obvious”) is one element that motivates philosophical questioning, it can be only the occasion for asking a real question instead of getting thrown off by some prejudgment. For even here, Lotze is caught in a widespread prejudgment that remains just as dominant today, namely, that we must simply accept and leave untouched, these supposedly basic concepts—even in the case of the most general concept: “being” / actuality.”

“All great and genuine philosophy moves within the limited sphere of a few questions which appear to common sense as perennially the same, although in fact they are necessarily different in every instance of philoso­phizing. Different not in any merely external sense, but rather in such a way that the self-same is in each case essentially transformed once more. Only in such transformation does philosophy possess its genuine self-sameness. This transformation lends a properly primordial historicity to the occurrence of the history of philosophizing, a historicity which makes its own demands.”

“ Only because the nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder-the manifestness of the nothing-does the "why?" loom before us. Only because the "why" is possible as such can we in a definite way inquire into grounds and ground things. Only because we can question and ground things is the destiny of our existence placed in the hands of the researcher.”
(Heidegger)

Quoting lll

Look up a bit and see the issue with Mercury, which helped support Einstein against Newton.

Right. Those were the observations that Eddington made which helped validate Einstein's theory for the first time. But as I understand it the theory of relativity supersedes Newtonian physics in some respects, but it doesn't overturn it, as Copernican theory overturned Ptolmaic cosmology. It just showed that Newtonian laws have a limited range of applicability.

Quoting Agent Smith

I'm just flummoxed by the fact that when I do something bad, I don't break any known laws of nature.

You live in a culture that doesn't believe in natural moral laws. Put another way, the only natural laws that our culture recognises are physical. In other cultures it was assumed that misbehaviour would reap its consequences either through divine retribution or the law of karma.

Quoting apokrisis

The laws of relativity arose as there had to be an equivalence or symmetry that united gravity and acceleration, and then space and time, and then mass and energy.

Right, but in practice it isn't so neat and tidy, is it? I think it remains true that according to the projections on the basis of known physics, the universe shouldn't exist.

Quoting lll

I think we crave (at times anyway) an escape from contingency

[quote=Neil Ormerod, The Metaphysical Muddle of Lawrence Krauss; https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-metaphysical-muddle-of-lawrence-krauss-why-science-cant-get-/10100010]In metaphysical terms, both the theory of a multiverse and the "theory of everything" are seeking to move beyond contingency to necessity, to formulate what would in traditional terms be called "necessary" being. This approach is an attempt to bypass the traditional response which would identify such a necessary being with God. But the simple fact is that no mathematical formula creates anything. In itself, it is the creation of the mind that conceives it. It may help explain what exists, but it does not create the thing it explains.

The anxiety over contingency is nonetheless a valid anxiety because without some necessary being - such as God - the drive towards the intelligibility of the universe, which is the foundational drive of science, hits a brick wall with existence itself, which remains radically unintelligible, without explanation, unless it is related in some way to necessary being.

This, of course, is not a proof that such a being exists, but it does indicate why the notion of a divine being arises in relation to the problem of contingency; it also indicates the vacuous nature of the question, "Who made God?" Necessary being is self-explanatory; it needs no further explanation, no "maker" to explain it. It also shows why God's existence or non-existence can never be a scientific question. Scientific method is predicated on the need for empirical verification, which means it can only deal with contingent being, not necessary being. [/quote]

Hence the ubiquity of relativism and subjectivism which is all-pervasive in modern philosophy.

Reply to Luke
Yeah why questions seem to have an unfalsifiability to them as they can't ever verify an answer and become effectively uninformative and useless. It's a similar issue with any negation like "no" to any question but that suffers from unverifiability.

Quoting Wayfarer

But as I understand it the theory of relativity supersedes Newtonian physics in some respects, but it doesn't overturn it, as Copernican theory overturned Ptolmaic cosmology. It just showed that Newtonian laws have a limited range of applicability.

That limited applicability is due to the model 'not noticing' or 'accounting for' the bending of space by mass (it's been awhile, perhaps a physicist can chime in.) An analogy might be fitting a quadratic model to data that's generated cubically, where the generating function is 'basically' or almost quadratic in the region in question. Or consider the description of a scene by a color blind person. For many purposes this is fine. Animals with color vision, as I understand it, tend to need it, perhaps to gauge the difference between edible and poisonous fruit, etc. It should be noted that measurements are noisy or approximate and that no model fits a data set perfectly.

Quoting Wayfarer

Right, but in practice it isn't so neat and tidy, is it? I think it remains true that according to the projections on the basis of known physics, the universe shouldn't exist.

We know there must be CP violation based on the same lawful structure of global symmetry coupled to local symmetry breaking.

And then we have both experimental evidence and theoretical frameworks to show such CP violation is a fact.

The current issue is that there isn't enough known sources of CP violation to complete the job according to the degree of CP violation we seem to observe.

Hence, at best, you are making a premature call. The glass half full view would be that physics is closing in on its stated target.

Quoting Neil Ormerod, The Metaphysical Muddle of Lawrence Krauss

The anxiety over contingency is nonetheless a valid anxiety because without some necessary being - such as God - the drive towards the intelligibility of the universe, which is the foundational drive of science, hits a brick wall with existence itself, which remains radically unintelligible, without explanation, unless it is related in some way to necessary being.

Reply to Wayfarer

This recognition (correct or not) of brute fact or pure contingency seems to be 'the mystical' for young Wittgenstein and 'the nausea' for young Sartre's Roquentin. Also there's Hilbert's we must know, we will know. Philosophy begins in wonder and yet we're instructed also to be astonished at nothing. These imperatives are like dueling twin brothers. Be not astonished is perhaps that 'restlessness' I referenced in the face of the arbitrary. The wise child's why slices infinitely thin. Is it not in the very structure of our inquiry that some kernel remain 'true for no reason'? The only alternative, which I think is cheating, given its ineffability or outright unintelligibility, is to melt into a somehow self-explained divinely intelligent necessary being.

Quoting Wayfarer

Hence the ubiquity of relativism and subjectivism which is all-pervasive in modern philosophy.

There's plenty of that to be had, but there's also presentation of a fragile absolute. If the ego or subject has been revealed as a tired and tangled fiction, that hardly sounds like subjectivism. Cultural relativism is a more plausible complaint. Many philosophers these days will, I think, grant that we can only see by the light of our imperfect, inherited torches. This is just a mutation of the Kantianism that Hegel raged against and yet assimilated to radicalize it against its own modesty. (The view-from-nowhere is a piece of our view-from-somewhere. Here be dragons! )

Quoting Wayfarer

But as I understand it the theory of relativity supersedes Newtonian physics in some respects, but it doesn't overturn it, as Copernican theory overturned Ptolemaic cosmology. It just showed that Newtonian laws have a limited range of applicability.

Again these are all stories of following the Nile back to its source. We move up to greater theoretical generality by adding back all the symmetries that got broken.

So Newtonian physics is based on the invariances of the Galilean symmetry group - namely the inertias of translation and rotation. Then Einsteinian physics added the further symmetries of a Lorentzian boost that come with the step to the unified 4D spacetime view.

Newtonian particles have just six broken symmetries as their global degrees of freedom - their three directions of spin and three directions of straightline motion.

Einsteinian particles gain their further four degrees of freedom which result in relativistic invariance - the symmetry that zeroes energetic boost between different inertial frames. They have all 10 freedoms of the unified Poincaré symmetry group.

Even Copernican theory only overturned Ptolemaic cosmology in the sense of climbing this same ladder of symmetry un-breaking to arrive at a higher level of mathematical abstraction.

So this is the historical model of how fundamental physics has progressed. It separates reality into its global necessity and local contingency. Or in maths speak, its globally-unified symmetries and locally-broken degrees of freedom.

Each step in one direction is also a step in the other direction so far as the modelling of reality is concerned - because they are a reciprocal or dichotomous deal. They are yoked together as a unity of opposites.

If you manage to identify the aspects of the Cosmos that have Platonic necessity, that brings with it by definition the aspects of the Cosmos that are the dialectically contingent.

All that is not constrained to be the case is then free to be whatever.

Simple as.

Quoting apokrisis

What? Those hairless apes that immediately cooked their own planet?

Nice!

Reply to lll :wink:

Quoting Joshs

Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder-the manifestness of the nothing-does the "why?" loom before us. Only because the "why" is possible as such can we in a definite way inquire into grounds and ground things. Only because we can question and ground things is the destiny of our existence placed in the hands of the researcher.”

Nice quote !

Quoting apokrisis

Even Copernican theory only overturned Ptolemaic cosmology in the sense of climbing this same ladder of symmetry un-breaking to arrive at a higher level of mathematical abstraction.

But the Ptolmaic cosmology was mythological - crystalline spheres, a geo-centric universe, epicycles. Those were factually incorrect posits. And its overturning was not simply mathematical but observational and empirical. (Actually I have a rather good book on all of this, A More Perfect Heaven, by Dava Sorbel which I must get around to reading.) So I think the Copernican revolution was more radical than Einstein's in that sense, as Einstein didn't invalidate the basic tenets of Newtonian physics in the way that Copernicus did Ptolemy.

Quoting apokrisis

If you manage to identify the aspects of the Cosmos that have Platonic necessity, that brings with it by definition the aspects of the Cosmos that are the dialectically contingent.

'Just six numbers, imprinted in the “big bang,” determine the essential features of our entire physical world.' (Another book I have, although it's an extremely dry read.)

Quoting Wayfarer

But the Ptolmaic cosmology was mythological - crystalline spheres, a geo-centric universe, epicycles. Those were factually incorrect posits.

Flat earth theory is good enough for the local geographic point of view. Epicycles likewise give you an acceptable celestial mechanics.

Everything works fine until it doesn’t.

The Copernican revolution only got as far as shifting the centre of creation from the Earth to the Sun. Newton then got us to the level of the Cosmological Principle and it’s Galilean symmetry. Einstein took it a step more general than that.

Nothing gets invalidated here. It is just a story of increasingly comprehensive generality concerning the modelling.

Quoting Wayfarer

You live in a culture that doesn't believe in natural moral laws. Put another way, the only natural laws that our culture recognises are physical. In other cultures it was assumed that misbehaviour would reap its consequences either through divine retribution or the law of karma.

Your reply is an eye-opener for me. Merci beaucoup, monsieur!

Kant was, I believe, trying to make moral laws as all-encompassing and as strict as natural laws. Act only according to maxims that you would will to be universal laws(Categorical Imperative). I guess his view was it's aut Caesar aut nihil (all or nothing).

As you so kindly reminded me karma and retribution is a law of nature: Don't we (try to) settle scores? It feels natural to avenge a wrong. Hence justice, its civilized avatar. Don't we also like to return a favor or repay a kindness? The law of karma is real, at least in the here and now, in this life.

I've discovered another reason why miracles (violation of the laws of nature, including karmic law) are associated/atrributed to divinity (godliness). When one refuses to retaliate for a wrong you are, surprise, surprise, in breach of the natural law of karma i.e this is as miraculous as Jesus' resurrection.

Of course, the flip side of it is to, well, bite the hand that feeds you, an instance of again going against the law of karma. Evil too can perform miracles and in the days of yore this was known as witchcraft and sorcery (Satanic magick).

Quoting apokrisis

What? Those hairless apes that immediately cooked their own planet?

Sounds legit

:smile:

Quoting Agent Smith

Kant was, I believe, trying to make moral laws as all-encompassing and as strict as natural laws.

:up:

Quoting Agent Smith

The law of karma is real, at least in the here and now, in this life.

Have a read of this blog post.

Quoting Agent Smith

When one refuses to retaliate for a wrong you are, surprise, surprise, in breach of the natural law of karma

Not so - retaliating, 'paying someone back', is not karma. On the contrary, it would be regarded as a bad karmic act.

I asked grandma 3 yo ”is there a tap in heaven where the water in the sea comes from? “. Thats kind of philosophical, right?

Quoting Wayfarer

Not so - retaliating, 'paying someone back', is not karma. On the contrary, it would be regarded as a bad karmic act.

Yes, I was mulling over that. What is karma?

[quote=Wikipedia]Karma (?k??rm?/; Sanskrit: ????, IPA: [?k??m?] (listen); Pali: kamma) means action, work, or deed.[1] For the believers in spirituality the term also refers to the spiritual principle of cause and effect, often descriptively called the principle of karma, wherein intent and actions of an individual (cause) influence the future of that individual (effect): Good intent and good deeds contribute to good karma and happier rebirths, while bad intent and bad deeds contribute to bad karma and bad rebirths.[/quote]

Are you agreeing/disagreeing with the above exposition on Karma by Wikipedia?

I thought karma is what goes around comes around, positively and negatively; in a you reap what you sow kinda way.

I'm genuinely curious, lemme ask again, what is karma?

9Reply to Agent Smith that’s a perfectly acceptable definition but teasing out the implications requires some persistence. I think it’s also important to state that in Indic religions, the goal of liberation (mok?a, Nirv??a) is not achieved through the accumulation of meritorious karma. It is outside the framework of reward and punishment. Don’t ask me to explain that as I don’t really understand it myself.

Reply to Wayfarer I didn't mean to suggest that karma is a means to an/some end. I simply wanted to point out that karma is a law of nature, every bit as real as Einstein's E = mc[sup]2[/sup] or, more to the point, Newton's action = reaction.

Reply to Agent Smith Actually in the early 20th c when Buddhism was first becoming popular in the West, the idea that Karma was like Newton's laws was quite popular. It lent credence to the notion of Buddhism being a 'scientific religion' to distinguish it from the so-called superstitious dogma of other religions.

Unfortunately I think it's a spurious comparison. The point about physical laws - which is where we started this digression - is that they only concern physical objects. And Western philosophy in the modern period tended to exclude any notion of intentionality from its reckonings. So, while I agree that karma is a natural law in the sense that Thomas Aquinas would recognise - 'The master principle of natural law is that "good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided"' - it's certainly not a natural law in the sense modern science would recognise. (But then, another of the themes that has come up in this thread is that it's not at all clear what the 'law' in 'natural' or 'scientific law' actually means.)

Reply to Wayfarer Well, it seems rather natural to respond in kind, oui? It feels right so to speak to scream/hit back when screamed at/struck. That's what usually happens when people interact with each other, it's (kinda sorta) a (social) law and people, for better or worse, follow it (unknowingly or not).

That's karmic law, and, in my humble opinion, it seems to be as law-like as any physical law that scientists have discovered and described (mathematically or not).

As to the question of intentionality, we seem capable of controlling our actions, if not completely at least partially, and that counts, a lot, when it comes to deciding and executing deeds in the moral dimension In short we can break the law of karma, as Jesus, the paragon of goodness in Christianity had done. The thought of crucifying those who crucified him never even crossed his mind; instead, he broke karma, and turned the other cheek. How many cheeks did Jesus have? :smile: He must've surely run out of them via dolorosa.

Anyway, why do you question what a law is? A law is a description of the behavior of objects, people are objects to, so are mind, the behavior being consistent across time and space.

Quoting Wayfarer

The laws are such that living beings have evolved. They might have been otherwise, but we would never have been around to discuss it.

If living beings have evolved, and the universe has evolved, then why not believe that the laws have evolved as well?

Quoting Wayfarer

So I think the Copernican revolution was more radical than Einstein's in that sense, as Einstein didn't invalidate the basic tenets of Newtonian physics in the way that Copernicus did Ptolemy.

The Copernican revolution did a very odd and sort of paradoxical thing, and that is that it gave birth to modern relativity theory. If the motions of the planets could be represented equally through the Ptolemaic model as through the Copernican model, then both models are actually "correct", when correctness is determined by usefulness. They are both useful in their own way. But if both models are actually correct, then there is no true or absolute perspective, from which to judge motion, and motion is best represented as relative, and relativity theory is derived.

If we take the position, that one of these models is the correct, or the true perspective, then we deny the relativity of motion, and assume an absolute, or true perspective for motion. But when we take the perspective of relativity theory, we deny that any model of motion is the true model.

The paradox is that the lay person will see the Copernican revolution as giving us the true model of the solar system, while the physicist will see the Copernican revolution as demonstrating the utility of relativity theory. So we, as the laity, come away from the Copernican revolution thinking that it has been demonstrated that there is an absolute truth to motions, while the physicists come away thinking that it has been demonstrated that the best way to model motions is as relative. So the Copernican revolution has demonstrated to some of us, the truth of absolute motion, while it has demonstrated to others, the validity of relative motion, i.e. relativity theory.

Quoting Agent Smith

That's karmic law, and, in my humble opinion, it seems to be as law-like as any physical law that scientists have discovered and described (mathematically or not).

Hey I agree.

The objections to the idea of laws is that the word implies a power that makes something happen, whereas in natural law, there's no such observable power. See Nancy Cartwright's No God No Laws.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

If the motions of the planets could be represented equally through the Ptolemaic model as through the Copernican model, then both models are actually "correct", when correctness is determined by usefulness.

You didn't mention that the Ptolmaic model was geocentric.

Reply to Wayfarer
Both models are useful. So if usefulness is the basis for judgement of correctness, then both are correct. But the point is, what this example provided. If there is no true way of modeling motions, i.e. different ways of modeling the same moving bodies are useful for different purposes, then the judgement of theories is based in usefulness rather than truth. Following from this, relativity will become the prevailing theory, because it is naturally versatile by allowing the same moving bodies to be modeled in whatever way proves to be the most useful. If you are one to believe in "truth" you will see that relativity theory is a forfeiture of truth.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

Both [goecentric and heliocentric] models are useful.

But only one is realistic.

What I was questioning and what I poorly attempted to articulate in the OP was supposed to be whether there is a particular set of "why" questions that cannot be answered any further than by responding that this is just the way things are.

Quoting apokrisis

I have noticed this particular "why" question crops up repeatedly in various guises in philosophy.
— Luke

It's the search for a causal account.

I was questioning whether such "why" questions are always a search for a causal account. I see now that I had been thinking of a causal account only in terms of "how" questions. As I said previously, knowing all the causes of how the brain produces qualitative experience does not touch the question of why we have those qualitative experiences. However, you are right that I had overlooked the causal account given by a final (or efficient?) cause. After completely accounting for how the brain produces qualitative experiences, the question of why we have qualitative experiences could be accounted for in terms of god or evolution. It could then be asked why god or evolution exist, but these seem like further "how" questions.

Admittedly, I'm still a bit unclear on the difference, if any, between "how" and "why" questions, but this is helpful:

Quoting Joshs

‘Why’ questions look for an overarching explanatory scheme to organize particular facts or subordinate the patterns.

:up:

@180 Proof also has a point that these questions cannot exist in a vacuum outside of any context, and perhaps it is this context which determines what is considered necessary and contingent and which sets the limits that allow or disallow further questioning in actual discussion.

Quoting Wayfarer

But only one is realistic.

Yes, that's the way we look at it, as the laity, but it's not the way that the principles of relativity theory dictate that we look at it. By relativity theory we do not judge a model of moving bodies on the basis of which model is more realistic, the judgement is made on other principles such as which model is more useful for the purpose at hand, which is usually some sort of prediction.

Are you familiar with model-dependent realism?

Quoting Luke

However, you are right that I had overlooked the causal account given by a final (or efficient?) cause.

Efficient cause answers the question of what particular event(s) conspired to trigger the observed result. So it sits with material cause (as the material potential which could be the substance partaking in the change) down at the "how" end of things.

Quoting Luke

After completely accounting for how the brain produces qualitative experiences, the question of why we have qualitative experiences could be accounted for in terms of god or evolution. It could then be asked why god or evolution exist, but these seem like further "how" questions.

Perhaps "how" and "why" are rather rough and ready folk terms when it comes to analysing causality? So the better thing to do is move on and only employ the technical categories of Aristotle's metaphysics?

Anyway, finality in the modern systems science view can be further broken down into the three categories of teleomaty, or material tendency; teleonomy, or biological function; and teleology, or consciously formed purpose.

So the Second Law of Thermodynamics - the demand that Nature must materially entropify - is an example of mere material tendency. It is kind of purposeful in a finality sense. It goes to the "why". But it is also a very weak notion of final cause by our usual human standards.

If you get the right causal language, causation should start to seem more common sense and not so dualistically divided between world and spirit, or whatever.

Quoting Wayfarer

Hey I agree.

The objections to the idea of laws is that the word implies a power that makes something happen, whereas in natural law, there's no such observable power. See Nancy Cartwright's No God No Laws.

Men make laws; look around you, this law, that law, we seem to be completely immersed in it from womb to tomb and sometimes beyond the grave. Perhaps it's this plain fact of life that makes us think (erroneously?) that where there are laws, there must be a legislator, someone who frames these laws. In theism, this someone is god.

Buddha stands out from the rest in this regard. Being averse to metaphysical speculation, an inevitability, he kept mum (noble silence). He must've thought it best to stick to demonstrable truths like karma and anicca as far as possible and minimize the metaphysical elements of his philosophy, Buddhism.

Quoting Agent Smith

Men make laws

Right - which is why the description 'scientific law' is treated with suspicion. It sounds anthropomorphic to some.

Quoting Agent Smith

He must've thought it best to stick to demonstrable truths like karma and anicca as far as possible and minimize the metaphysical elements of his philosophy, Buddhism.

:up: Quite right!

Quoting Wayfarer

Right - which is why the description 'scientific law' is treated with suspicion. It sounds anthropomorphic to some.

Reminds me of hunting game. We don't block all escape routes for the prey, we leave one open. Of course it leads to a trap but you get the idea. What's the alternative to anthropomorphism? Do only humans make laws?

Quoting apokrisis

Efficient cause answers the question of what particular event(s) conspired to trigger the observed result. So it sits with material cause (as the material potential which could be the substance partaking in the change) down at the "how" end of things.

I admit to being not very familiar with Aristotle's Four Causes, but the Wikipedia article on the topic associates efficient cause with an Agent:

Quoting Wikipedia article: Four Causes

Agent (the efficient or moving cause of a change or movement): consists of things apart from the thing being changed or moved, which interact so as to be an agency of the change or movement. For example, the efficient cause of a table is a carpenter, or a person working as one, and according to Aristotle the efficient cause of a child is a parent.

It seems to me as though this (Agent, efficient cause) would be the sort of cause that god is, and possibly evolution too? In my previous posts I identified god and evolution as possible answers to the question of why the brain produces qualitative experiences, as opposed to the question of how the brain produces qualitative experiences.

Quoting apokrisis

Perhaps "how" and "why" are rather rough and ready folk terms when it comes to analysing causality? So the better thing to do is move on and only employ the technical categories of Aristotle's metaphysics?

Perhaps, but I was querying the distinction between "how" and "why" questions and whether "why" questions are necessarily questions of causality.

Quoting apokrisis

If you get the right causal language, causation should start to seem more common sense and not so dualistically divided between world and spirit, or whatever.

As an atheist, the only intelligent design I believe in is the type found in the creations of humans and other animals, so I don't have this problem.

Quoting Agent Smith

Do only humans make laws?

I think the issue is that with laws, there is a sense of agency - that laws are able to compel things to happen, that they govern outcomes. So a 'law' of nature is also a regularity or an invariable pattern - but does it make sense to call that a 'law'?

I asked the question on another forum last year: what is the connection between logical necessity and physical causation. In fact I even asked that of a retired lecturer in philosophy. The answer that came back was there is no necessary connection. This from the lecturer:

Logical necessity and physical causality: Logical necessity is a function only of truth. The[re] is no intrinsic connection between antecedents and consequents in conditionals, or between premises and conclusions, apart from the truth functional form. Thus, as the Stoics first understood, a conditional means that it is false only if the antecedent is true and the consequent false. In formal deduction, if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. It doesn't matter what the meaning of the terms is. David Hilbert said that the terms could be beer steins and sausages as well as anything else (-- those Germans).

With causality, there are extra concepts. The principle of causality is that the cause makes the effect happen.

One answer I got on Stack Exchange was:

There is no causation in logic. Some formulas are equivalent to others, and common language confuses the issue with formulations like "this circle has circumference Pi because its diameter is 1", when in fact saying one proposition is the same as saying the other. It is not analogous to physical causation (I.e. The observation that some events often happen in succession).

I see the point, but I can't help but think there's something wrong with it. I mean, it seems to me science relies heavily on the application of logic to the analysis of causal relationships. And that 'natural law' is where these meet. You conjecture that if [x] then [y], and then carry out an experiment or make an observation that confirms or disconfirms it. So I'm considering the idea that scientific law is where logical necessity and physical causation intersect, but I've never heard anyone else say that.

When pressed further, the prof pointed me to this page.

Reply to Wayfarer

Indeed, causation is, as Hume discovered, not deductively necessary (re the problem of induction). The best we can do is describe patterns in nature, one such kind being causality where we tell ourselves that the cause brings about the effect provided the correlation is strong and consistent across spacetime.

If causation has no deductive basis, all bets are off: there's no way we could predict the future, today a ball may bounce off the ground and tomorrow it might stick to it. If so, what about the law of karma? Buddha did emphasize anicca (the problem of induction). The world is going to be full of surprises then, oui? Today you might hurl invectives at someone and get beaten black and blue for it and the next day, doing the same thing, you might end up with a marriage proposal.

Basically, anicca (impermanence) is a warning, it alerts us to chaos (an ever changing set of rules/laws or, god forbid, cosmic anarchy).

Unfortunately, without some kinda pattern (laws/rules/principles), the world becomes incomprehensible and that's what Zen koans must be designed to evoke in the unsuspecting practitioner: utter perplexity and anxiety (can one hand clapping make a sound? It just might, panta rhei)

Coming to the notion of agency as relates to laws/rules, it seems to be an argument from incredulity. We can't imagine laws sans legislators; ergo, one erroneously concluded, every law (of nature) must have an intelligent being as its source.

Quoting Agent Smith

Indeed, causation is, as Hume discovered, not deductively necessary (re the problem of induction). The best we can do is describe patterns in nature, one such kind being causality where we tell ourselves that the cause brings about the effect provided the correlation is strong and consistent across spacetime.

If causation has no deductive basis, all bets are off: there's no way we could predict the future, today a ball may bounce off the ground and tomorrow it might stick to it. If so, what about the law of karma? Buddha did emphasize anicca (the problem of induction). The world is going to be full of surprises then, oui? Today you might hurl invectives at someone and get beaten black and blue for it and the next day, doing the same thing, you might end getting a marriage proposal.

I think an argument can be made that some kind of uniformity of nature was in play during our evolution at least so that our 'irrational' (non-deductive) expectation of continuing uniformity makes evolutionary sense (it paid off to 'act as if' nature was a good girl.) I don't know of any good arguments (non-circular) against the logical possibility of everything going to pieces in the future. It might be that we can't even talk intelligibly about a causally unstructured reality (return of the ghost of the world as it is when we can't know anything about it).

Like this :

Quoting Agent Smith

Unfortunately, without some kinda pattern (laws/rules/principles), the world becomes incomprehensible and that's what Zen koans must be designed to evoke in the practitioner: utter perplexity and confusion (can one hand clapping make a sound? It just might, panta rhei)

Quoting Wayfarer

I see the point, but I can't help but think there's something wrong with it. I mean, it seems to me science relies heavily on the application of logic to the analysis of causal relationships.

Not my field, but I do understand that a mathematical model can be transformed into a mathematical equivalent that might nevertheless be more useful or intuitive to its user.

Along these lines, symbolic logic can be used as a detector/checker of non-obvious tautologies. The platonist might say that the tautology was 'always there' but not being looked at. Mainstream math is 'eternal,' while badboy intuitionism lets time in.

Quoting Wayfarer

So I'm considering the idea that scientific law is where logical necessity and physical causation intersect, but I've never heard anyone else say that.

I think the necessity is in the mathematical formalism. If you tell me [math] y = exp(bx) [/math], then 'necessarily' or 'logically' or 'grammatically' I know that [math] log(y) = bx [/math]. Assign x to a quantity of somethings and y to the number of related somethingelses and you have a model with b as a single parameter. I don't see how the mathematical 'necessity' can escape into the world and bind whatever is counted by x and y. The parameter b (and of course the exponential model type) must be chosen according to what has been recorded so far. The model's relevance for the future is where Hume's problem comes in, seems to me.

Reply to lll @Wayfarer

That causation has no deductive basis and given that most "laws" of nature are causal in nature, suggests an absence of an intelligence (god), a designer for the universe.

Perhaps it's just that we're stupider than we think we are and simply don't possess the processing power to suss this out.

So many possibilities...shouldn't we just take the world as it appears to us instead of racking our brains trying to figure out the (real)truth, assuming there is one as of yet under the veil of Isis?

Quoting Agent Smith

shouldn't we just take the world as it appears to us

You make that sound easy! We've evolved to worry ourselves, friend. The dead don't breed.

Quoting Agent Smith

instead of racking our brains trying to figure out the real truth?

I think this applies to some metaphysical issues, and I can't bring myself to fret anymore than Hume could. It's a glitch in the matrix. Still some of them are maybe good for target practice or as scratching posts.

Quoting Agent Smith

Perhaps it's just that we're stupider than we think we are and simply don't possess the processing power to suss this out.

Could be. And perhaps we are too stupid to appreciate just how stupid we are. Is stupidity not relative? This touches on another metaphysical chestnut. In what way does or can the sage exist for the fool ? Except as a vague promise ? Can the fool understand the sage without becoming the sage? I don't think so. And yet the fool must trust in the sage to stick around long enough to become him. Or is it like music, where taste can run ahead of chops ? There's something tricky about talking about either genius or stupidity from the outside. It's like writing a check and the money ain't in the bank yet.

Quoting lll

Assign x to a quantity of somethings and y to the number of related somethingelses and you have a model with b as a single parameter. I don't see how the mathematical 'necessity' can escape into the world and bind whatever is counted by x and y.

Isn’t it that if x and y are isometric against some measurable values and the relationship between them is described in the equation, then the mathematical model maps against the outcome. Get [X] wrong, and your [bridge][rocket launch][whatever] fails. What am I not seeing?

Reply to Wayfarer
In the simplest situation, the model will be fit to a set of measurements, which always refer to the past.

The data underdetermine the model. If a model does fit well, then we use it make predictions, and it's basically a video game simplification of reality. We 'pretend' that the data was actually generated by the model in the context of some random noise, and can then get new dependent values from any independent values we choose (though it's prudent to stay where we have lots of data, as this where our model tends to be robust.)

Assuming the uniformity of nature, the bridge would collapse because our 'video game version' of it was wrong (wrong enough), and we made a decision that trusted the model when we shouldn't have (too heavy of a truck, tardy replacement or maintenance.) (I'm mostly a stats/computer guy who knows the math better than the applications, so maybe others can say more and say better.)

Quoting lll

There's something tricky about talking about either genius or stupidity from the outside.

Indeed! One has to be bat to answer the question "what is it like to be a bat?" Logic/reason is useless? Give me an opaque box and ask me "what does this box contain?" How do I approach this problem? A beetle of course! What is a beetle, outside/inside a box?

Nevertheless...

Quoting lll

target practice or as scratching posts.

I think I'm a bat. How did Zhuangzhi become a butterfly?

[quote=Zhuangzhi]Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.[/quote]

Quoting Wayfarer

if x and y are isometric against some measurable values

What does that mean?

Quoting lll

Assuming the uniformity of nature, the bridge would collapse because our 'video game version' of it was wrong (wrong enough), and we made a decision that trusted the model when we shouldn't have (too heavy of a truck, tardy replacement or maintenance.) (I'm mostly a stats/computer guy who knows the math better than the applications, so maybe others can say more and say better.)

Do video game bridges collapse under extreme/excess weight like real bridges do?

Quoting Agent Smith

Indeed! One has to be bat to answer the question "what is it like to be a bat?" Logic/reason is useless?

With a bat, it seems hopeless. With geniuses, I think we slowly 'become' or assimilate part of them as we keep reading and thinking and writing. They fade in. But it's always a fusion.

Quoting lll

With a bat, it seems hopeless. With geniuses, I think we slowly 'become' or assimilate part of them as we keep reading and thinking and writing. They fade in. But it's always a fusion.

Like the thing in The Thing!

Quoting Agent Smith

Do video game bridges collapse under extreme/excess weight like real bridges do?

If you want them to, yes. It could be a very simple program without graphics that answers yes or no to the weight of a vehicle or it could be some rich, visual presentation, etc. I toyed around with the Unity game creator system briefly. It's got an impressive 'physics engine.'

Quoting lll

If you want them to, yes. I toyed around the Unity game engine briefly. It's got an impressive 'physics engine.'

What does it have to be that way? How does the bridge know "that's the last straw, I'm collapsing"? :smile:

Quoting Agent Smith

What does it have to be that way? How does the bridge know "that's the last straw, I'm collapsing"?

Well, a really terrible but cheap model is to have the program say 'yes' for collapse if the input is greater than 2000 pounds and no otherwise. (It's terrible because the 2000 pounds was randomly picked.)

Reply to Agent Smith
Differential equations will offer more interest and fun. You can solve them numerically, watch a virtual cup of coffee cool.

Quoting lll

Well, a really terrible but cheap model is to have the program say 'yes' for collapse if the input is greater than 2000 pounds and no otherwise. (It's terrible because the 2000 pounds was randomly picked.)

Quoting lll

Differential equations will offer more interest and fun. You can solve them numerically, watch a virtual cup of coffee cool.

:lol:

So, a real bridge is following instructions like in a video game?

@Wayfarer Isn't that interesting, I never thought of it that way. Not only does it seem natural to infer a sentient law-giver, the things that follow laws might need to be intelligent as well. :chin: Panpsychism & Theism rolled into one!

Differential equations, @lll, are they part of load & stress equations in re bridges? Can you explain them to me, please? Simplify them, if you can or want to.

Quoting Agent Smith

So, a real bridge is following instructions like in a video game?

If you believe that the laws of physics are correct models in a context of the uniformity of nature, then I think yes. That's why folks went crazy for Newton, I think. He found God's source code (differential equations.)

Quoting lll

n the simplest situation, the model will be fit to a set of measurements, which always refer to the past.

How does that follow? If I'm plotting rocket path, then I'll obviously be relying on both Newtonian and relativitistic physics. How do they 'refer to the past'? There's something other than inductive logic at work here isn't there? Has anyone ever reported that force equaled something other than mass times acceleration?

Quoting lll

I don't see how the mathematical 'necessity' can escape into the world and bind whatever is counted by x and y.

We're sorrounded by the products of applied maths and physics. The very devices we're using to conduct this conversation rely on quantum physics (I'm foggy on how - I seem to recall that many of the fundamental breakthroughs in semi-computer design required application of quantum principles to micro-electronics.) The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences is writ large in most routine daily activities, we're sorrounded by it. And that relies on this interplay between mathematical conjecture, prediction, measurement and observation. So again I'm having trouble understanding why logical necessity and physical causation are regarded as separate domains, when our technology brings them together to such enormous effect.

'How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality?'

Einstein , 1934.

Quoting Agent Smith

Differential equations, lll, are they part of load & stress equations in re bridges? Can you explain them to me, please? Simplify them, if you can or want to.

I've never studied bridges in particular, unless it was a textbook problem. Definitely there are diffeqs 'in there' at some level of magnification. I spent more time with Maxwell's laws. But I won't dare to jump into vector calculus. Instead I'll give you the simplest example which is still beautiful.

In a differential equation, you are solving not for a number but for a function. They are 'differential' because the equation expresses relationships between the unknown function and its derivatives. A classic equation is [math] f = f' [/math]. In other words, you are asked to find a function whose slope at x is equal to its height at x. This represents something whose growth rate is equal to its current size, which makes it (with some parameter sauce) a good model for things like a pile of germs in plenty of foodgoo. The solution is [math] f(x) = e^x [/math].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_function

Quoting Wayfarer

How do they 'refer to the past'?

The measurements refer to the past, as indicated by the grammar, unless you know something about time that I don't.

Quoting Wayfarer

There's something other than inductive logic at work here isn't there?

It seems clear to me that we are projecting the structure of the past onto the future. Inductive, yes? This is how I understand the assumption of 'the uniformity of nature' in the Humean context. I can't doubt it any more than Hume can outside his study. But I can't deduce it either. That's why it's so gloriously weird ! It's 'irrational' and yet rationality itself.

Quoting Wayfarer

Has anyone ever reported that force equaled something other than mass times acceleration?

That was taught to me as a definition of force, but not all teachers do that. The larger issue is maybe whether 'laws' are ever proven wrong, and we've already discussed that Newton's model was wrong, though successful enough to give many the sense that they had the source code that moved both the planets and the apples on their trees.

Quoting lll

It seems clear to me that we are projecting the structure of the past onto the future.

If something is knowable a priori, then it's known independently of experience, so I don't see how the past comes into it. That really only applies to a posteriori propositions.

Quoting lll

we've already discussed that Newton's model was wrong

Not wrong. It's applicability is shown to be limited but within the range of applicability it's not wrong. Lunar landers rely on the calculations of both Newtonian and relativistic physics, don't they?

Quoting Wayfarer

Not wrong. It's applicability is shown to be limited but with the range of applicability it's not wrong.

Well now you're coming over to my filthy 'instrumentalist' camp which isn't so concerned with the really really real. From a realist perspective, and unless my rusty physics knowledge is betraying me (hopefully a physicist will jump in)... it's wrong, but the errors in its 'range of applicability' are so small that one can ignore them for practical purposes. Hence this range will itself be a function of how much precision is needed for a particular purpose. Recall also that measurement is always noisy. So folks back then didn't notice these errors and/or tried to explain away issues like the Mercury thing.

Quoting Wayfarer

If something is knowable a priori, then it's known independently of experience, so I don't see how the past comes into it.

We could make up all kinds of mathematical models without data even. We could then transform them according to the grammar of math and call it a priori knowledge (though actually we did need the experience of the moving the symbols around, and the 'ideality' of math is its own issue.) The only reason to rely on a model, however, would seem to be that it summarized past experience and therefore, given the assumption of the uniformity of nature, should be good for predicting the future (like the path of a rocket.)

Reply to lll But it also enables novel discovery - phenomena that haven’t ever been seen before.

(On that note, thank you for the thought-provoking discussion, and good evening.)

Reply to Wayfarer
Yeah, I love the novel discovery part. I guess theoretical physicists are searching through the space of all possible video games for one that looks like ours (like the one we imagine behind the noise of our world, I should say.)

Have a good night!

Reply to lll You get an F! :smile:

May be I wasn't clear enough. Oh well! Your answer is, I'm certain, a notch above the rest.

Quoting Agent Smith

May be I wasn't clear enough. Oh well! Your answer is, I'm certain, a notch above the rest.

It takes some time to grok differential equations, so it was a bit of a fool's errand for me to even try to dish it out in a post (a fun one, though.) In a video game world, you can think of updating the position and the velocity and the acceleration of a pong ball at every tiny time step according to a rule that takes the current values of those attributes into account. Some might find that easier to understand. Imagine if your current acceleration is set to be equal to your current speed. That'd be quite a ride, if you start with a positive speed.

Reply to lll Swipe your fingers on the screen of your smartphone. Notice anything interesting/weird?

Reply to Agent Smith
Not anything unexpected.

Here's one more answer to your question about what makes you you and me me. Also touches on qualia, I guess. All this seems very pre-Wittgensteinian to me. It's just that analytics shit their pants at the name of Hegel perhaps, so it took the mathy smelling guy to tell them.

It is by means of Empfindung or sense experience that sentient beings are able to distinguish individuals from one another, including, in some instances, individuals that share the same essence. The form of experience is temporality, which is to say that whatever is directly experienced occurs “now”, or at the moment in time to which we refer as “the present”. Experience, in other words, is essentially fleeting and transitory, and its contents are incommunicable. What we experience are the perceivable features of individual objects. It is through the act of thinking that we are able to identify those features through the possession of which different individuals belong to the same species, with the other members of which they share these essential features in common.

Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famously referred in the Phenomenology as “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel [1807] 1977: 110). Pure spirit is nothing but this thinking activity, in which the individual thinker participates without himself (or herself) being the principal thinking agent. That thoughts present themselves to the consciousness of individual thinking subjects in temporal succession is due, not to the nature of thought itself, but to the nature of individuality, and to the fact that individual thinking subjects, while able to participate in the life of spirit, do not cease in doing so to exist as corporeally distinct entities who remain part of nature, and are thus not pure spirit.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/

Quoting lll

Not anything unexpected.

:chin:

Reply to lll Wires crossed I'm afraid!

Reply to Agent Smith

Does it help if I tell you I have a nice big quad HD monitor and not a smartphone, and I used that instead?

It's so late here that it's early again, so I gotta get to bed soon!
Reply to Agent Smith

Quoting lll

Does it help if I tell you I have a nice big quad HD monitor and not a smartphone, and I used that instead?

No, not really. Forget I ever mentioned it.

Quoting lll

I gotta get to bed soon!

G'nite!

Quoting lll

It takes some time to grok differential equations

How much time did it take you?

Quoting Wayfarer

But only one is realistic.

Incidentally, I believe what I described is why the observations of quantum mechanics are so difficult to interpret. Because relativity principles are so deeply entrenched in modern physical theories, the consequence is that any interpretation is correct, but no interpretation is the true interpretation. As it turns out, Many Worlds becomes the best interpretation, but that's just a reflection of the logical consequences of staying true to the principles employed. The conclusions reflect the premises. And so it is a nonsense interpretation which denies the possibility of a real world, thrown out to us, because the principles plugged in, deny the possibility of a real world.

Quoting Wayfarer

One answer I got on Stack Exchange was:

There is no causation in logic. Some formulas are equivalent to others, and common language confuses the issue with formulations like "this circle has circumference Pi because its diameter is 1", when in fact saying one proposition is the same as saying the other. It is not analogous to physical causation (I.e. The observation that some events often happen in succession).

I see the point, but I can't help but think there's something wrong with it. I mean, it seems to me science relies heavily on the application of logic to the analysis of causal relationships. And that 'natural law' is where these meet. You conjecture that if [x] then [y], and then carry out an experiment or make an observation that confirms or disconfirms it. So I'm considering the idea that scientific law is where logical necessity and physical causation intersect, but I've never heard anyone else say that.

Actually there is causation at work in logical necessity, it is final cause. This is a very important philosophical principle to understand. It is Plato's "the good", described in "The Republic" as that which makes intelligible objects intelligible, like the sun makes visible objects visible. Why do we adhere to logic, and say that conclusions are necessary? Because it is good and useful to do that. Why do we understand "2+2=4"? Because it is good and useful to understand this. That is final cause at work.

Quoting Wayfarer

We're sorrounded by the products of applied maths and physics.

The "products" you mention here are "the goods" which the intelligible objects help to bring into existence as final causation. Notice that the intelligible objects themselves are not the actual cause. The desire for the good, what we call "intention" is the actual cause, and the intelligible objects are the means to that end. They become intelligible to the individual, because the individual has the desire for the end. That is why the good, as final cause or intention, is not the intelligible object itself, but that which makes the intelligible object intelligible, like the sun makes visible objects visible.

Plato exposed this principle, and it has a long history in theology. The revelation of the true nature of the good as a cause, final cause, is called "seeing the light" because of Plato's analogy. Why is there a world? Because God saw that it was good, final cause. Under this principle all human knowledge falls to pragmaticism. But then a higher form of knowledge is revealed to us, that which knows the truth, divine knowledge. And when we make "the truth" the good which is sought, we allow ourselves to be ruled by divinity, making human knowledge compatible with divine knowledge.

Quoting apokrisis

Yeah. The how questions are questions about material and efficient causality. The why questions go to formal and final cause.

It seems to me that "why" questions could be just as easily asking about causality. Formal and final causes are illusory in that the goal in the mind in the present is what is causing something to happen. Goals don't exist in the future, but are visions of the future in the present moment and it is always the state-of-affairs in the present that determine the future, not the other way around.

Quoting apokrisis

It's the search for a causal account. Every particular must be the product of something more general.

The general is the illusion that other events can be the same as another event and therefore lead to the same effects. Similar states-of-affairs lead to similar effects, not the same effects.

Quoting Wayfarer

We're sorrounded by the products of applied maths and physics. The very devices we're using to conduct this conversation rely on quantum physics (

That's the usual defense in favor of the view that scientific, mathematical reality is a real one. We use it to construct technology with. But we can turn that around. We constructed a very limited reality, a subset of a more comprehensive one. Which we have transformed, broke up and divided by math and experimentally constructed as to conform to this image.

Quoting Agent Smith

Occam's razor, :kiss: Men are simple folk. Women, no, they remind me of Rube Goldberg machines, they do!

Men being a straight line is having a great privilige. Woman, in their curvy appearances, are anorexiously in search of the right metric, leading to creepy Kardashian-like appearances.

Quoting Luke

Why are things the way they are?

It depends on the objective reality one lives in. In the context of killer whale-gods, wasp-gods, red ant-gods, bonobo-, and even homo sapiens-gods, things are the way they are because they were fed up with eternally making love and hate. They created and developed very special particles to lay back eternally in their heavenly pastures to watch the creatures developing from them in a universe they created for them. The heavenly heavens can be considered a giant cinema screen.

About scientific law:

A piece of the context, from Feynman:

"You might ask why we cannot teach physics by just giving the basic laws on page one and then showing how they work in all possible circumstances, as we do in Euclidean geometry, where we state the axioms and then make all sorts of deductions. (So, not satisfied to learn physics in four years, you want to learn it in four minutes?) We cannot do it in this way for two reasons. First, we do not yet know all the basic laws: there is an expanding frontier of ignorance. Second, the correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore, one needs a considerable amount of preparatory training even to learn what the words mean. No, it is not possible to do it that way. We can only do it piece by piece. Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected."

So we know that what we don't know all the laws yet. And therefore, everything we know is an approximation only. There is an expanding frontier of ignorance, and I think he means the frontier that exists when looking to small scales. Of course every expanding sphere of knowledge brings a frontier along. Separating what's outside that sphere and inside of it. There are more things outside of that domain than inside, and maybe each new piece of the domain of nature has its own laws.

We can't know everything, but it's imaginable that when we look to smaller and smaller scales, some ultimate truth can be found (Popper would call such a theory non-scientific, but how can you falsify something if you have hit rock bottom so to speak?).

You can't, obviously, just state the laws of nature. You have to grow into these laws, and once you're in you have to realize that what you've learned is an approximation only. Again, I'm not sure if he means the laws at the bottom or higher level laws, which are approximations always. They are still laws and they can operate quite independently of the laws deep down.

The laws on the smallest scale, which are what we call fundamental laws, can't be exactly right yet and we know it, according to Feynman. So we must let go what we have learned, or at least correct it and see it as an approximation to the deeper theory.

I'm not sure if he thinks that a final theory is possible. I don't see why not, and when we think we have found one, it will always be nature that makes the final call, like in all physical laws we create or find out about.

Quoting Agent Smith

How much time did it take you?

I think it was around my third semester, with my schedule full of math and physics all the way there, that I got the 'main idea' of differential equations. You can start with numbers as the basic objects and climb (in one direction) to where functions are the basic objects.

Quoting Luke

the Wikipedia article on the topic associates efficient cause with an Agent:

A carpenter is an organism and is indeed autonomous to the degree they embody all four causes. The carpenter can act with form, with purpose and with mechanical actions, like hammering and sawing, so as to craft the desired material outcome.

So you are confusing the wholeness of that definition of "an agent" with the part that is just the efficient cause - which is the immediate physical actions that bring about the material change (according to the constraints of form and purpose). So the agent in this sense is the carpentry, not the carpenter. The hammering and sawing is what caused the matter of the wood to become the form of the new chair that the carpenter wanted to sit on.

Quoting Harry Hindu

Goals don't exist in the future, but are visions of the future in the present moment and it is always the state-of-affairs in the present that determine the future, not the other way around.

This is why the nonlocality in quantum mechanics, and the principle of least action that grounds physics in general, are such a metaphysical problem for the reductionist point of view.

How does a particle know which path between two points is the shortest, even before it sets out on its journey? How can nature be ruled by the finality of least action before anything has begun to happen?

Physics just plugs this global finality in as a law. And it uses integration - inverse differentiation - to make the calculation. It is then silent on how all this fits into a view of reality as being merely the sum of its mechanical (ie: material + efficient) causes.

Quoting Harry Hindu

The general is the illusion that other events can be the same as another event and therefore lead to the same effects. Similar states-of-affairs lead to similar effects, not the same effects.

That would certainly be my constraints-based view. Top-down constraints only add context to restrict the local degrees of freedom.

So as Peirce argued, Nature is fundamentally tychic or probabilistic. Constraints can only limit the spontaneity, the contingency, of any part. Determinism is achieved only in the limit.

The laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics build this into their generalised accounts of Nature.

So generality is just as real as particularity. And just as unreal in that each is a bounding limit on reality, and so something that can only be approached with arbitrary closeness, never actually realised.

If you could set up exactly the same circumstances twice, the outcome ought to be exact. But because you can't, you can only get arbitrarily close to making history repeat.

Quoting Agent Smith

(can one hand clapping make a sound?

Indeed it can; try it and see.

Quoting apokrisis

If you could set up exactly the same circumstances twice, the outcome ought to be exact. But because you can't, you can only get arbitrarily close to making history repeat.

Can't see why that would be so, given Quantum indeterminism.

Quoting Janus

Can't see why that would be so, given Quantum indeterminism.

That is what quantum indeterminism describes - the impossibility of classically exact knowledge of a system's initial conditions, coupled to the possibility of also getting arbitrarily close.

Reply to apokrisis Sure I understand that, but even if we could establish initial conditions, if some events are truly uncaused and random, then the unfolding would never be the same; and the less so, the longer the timeframe, no?

Reply to Janus The more narrowly you can constrain the initial conditions set-up, the less scope there then is for any quantum surprises. So the two ends of some story of "cause and effect" are tied together, even if you would want to argue that the quantum uncertainty infects the whole of this story in a nonlocal way.

Nothing is truly random and uncaused. Even that is a relative judgement.

This is the advantage of having the third logical category of vagueness to ground our notions of contingency and necessity. For an event to be random and uncaused, there would have to be a context that underwrote that as some definite counterfactual.

The throw of a die can only be random if the toss is suitably careless enough to ensure a lack of causality in our description of this as an "absolutely" contingent event. Likewise, the careful placing of the die so the winning 6 is shown stands as the counterfactual that makes the careless toss its acausal "other".

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle only makes this yo-yo story - the reciprocality of the random and the determined - mathematically explicit. You become radically uncertain about one side of the story - a particle's location - to the degree you gain certainty about the other, its momentum.

So to drill down below this division of reality into its locations and momentums, you would have to start talking of quantum vagueness. The realm of the virtual particle (which mysteriously only appear to come and go in swiftly and mutally annihilating pairs!).

So there are a lot of accounting tricks employed to maintain the notion of a local~global separation - a crisp dichotomisation of the possibilities - that extends "all the way down to the foundations of being". But eventually, foundational being must dissolve into the mists of a logical vagueness, an apeiron, where the PNC no longer applies.

Remember also that QM defined uncertainty as having a single concrete scale - the Planck scale, as scaled by Planck's constant, h. So that is the scale where quantum vagueness (or the quantum spacetime foam) would be broken in a quantum gravity theory. It is where the "thingness" starts in terms of being able to tell an energetic fluctuation apart from the larger world that is - counterfactually - its "acausal" context.

So if we are talking quantum indeterminism, the Planck scale defines both where this is maximal, and where it first even starts as something new to give a structure to the unbroken purity of the symmetry that is a vagueness.

And then QM has now glued on statistical mechanics to give the modern decoherence model. This now includes the impact of developing classical and thermal scale. The quantum indeterminism still exists, but its effective strength is diluted exponentially. And so a classically ordered world appears to emerge.

We recover a fully deterministic description - more or less. A world were dice and other games of chance can exist because it makes a counterfactual difference whether you throw objects about in a careless or careful fashion.

It is only when we return to the scale of the very small, or the very hot, that we start to see the world again with a greater degree of quantum coherence, because we have removed the decoherence that scaled the quantum vagueness out of sight, leaving only the classical dichotomy of the random~determined as the crisp division in our sight.

Quoting apokrisis

That is what quantum indeterminism describes - the impossibility of classically exact knowledge of a system's initial conditions, coupled to the possibility of also getting arbitrarily close.

So is quantum indeterminism describing knowledge of a system, or the system apart from any knowledge of it? If the former, then is quantum indeterminism in the field of neurology, or if the latter a field in physics?

Quoting apokrisis

How does a particle know which path between two points is the shortest, even before it sets out on its journey? How can nature be ruled by the finality of least action before anything has begun to happen?

I don't know how a particle knows anything. So again, is QM a theory of knowledge or physics?

I don't understand how nature is ruled by anything. Humans create rules as general descriptions of the basis of some observation. Rules did not exist before nature began to happen. Nature happens and humans use general rules to help them make predictions for similar circumstances.

You seem to be engaged in anthropomorphizing nature and particles.

Quoting apokrisis

Physics just plugs this global finality in as a law. And it uses integration - inverse differentiation - to make the calculation. It is then silent on how all this fits into a view of reality as being merely the sum of its mechanical (ie: material + efficient) causes.

Physics is also effectively silent on the role of the observer, or more specifically - the conscious observation of such things - as if physicists have direct access to the processes they are attributing laws to.

Quoting apokrisis

This is why the nonlocality in quantum mechanics, and the principle of least action that grounds physics in general, are such a metaphysical problem for the reductionist point of view.

Seems to me that reducing everything down to QM, thermodynamics, trinities and semiotics would have similar issues. QM also has the problem of not integrating with macro-style physics.

Quoting apokrisis

If you could set up exactly the same circumstances twice, the outcome ought to be exact. But because you can't, you can only get arbitrarily close to making history repeat.

Arbitrarily meaning based on the particular goal in the mind at the moment. In using generalities to make predictions of future outcomes we often aren't concerned with circumstances that don't affect the outcome that we are looking to use to achieve some goal. Like I said before, information exists everywhere causes leave effects. In interpreting your use of language, I could be interested in knowing where you are from, what your level of education is with the language you are using, or simply in what you are trying to say, depending on my goal. In trying to interpret what you are trying to say, I'm ignoring the causes of where you are from and your level of education has on the way you are using some language. I'm only focused on your idea that you are intending to communicate to me.


I remember this discussion I had with Marchesk a while back:
Reply to Marchesk in talking about Sara Walker's ideas about the relationship between biology, chemistry and physics: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/01/13/79-sara-imari-walker-on-information-and-the-origin-of-life/

Marchesk:Thus the Standard Model is based on the emergent biological information abstraction. Sara mentions it being a loop between our probing regularities at tiny scales and the biology that produced the abstraction used to understand it. But this loop is not included in the Standard Model. It's similar in some ways to the observer problem in QM. It's a recursive problem.

She says the desire is to reduce biology to physics, but physics (as a field of human knowledge) emerges from biology.

Quoting Harry Hindu

Seems like you could say the same thing about biology. The question is whether or not the scales and levels of the universe are epistemological or ontological.

Reply to Harry Hindu

Quoting Harry Hindu

Physics is also effectively silent on the role of the observer, or more specifically - the conscious observation of such things - as if physicists have direct access to the processes they are attributing laws to.

I’ve been reading Michel Bitbol, a philosopher of quantum
physics who argues that the most profound i mplicario. of the new physics is that “Quantum Mechanics is nothing more than a general method for predicting
experimental and technological phenomena that are co-produced by our own activity.” He has elaborated a metaphysics for a radical neurophenomenology that is not a neutral monism placing consciousness and naturalism on an equal footing , but a grounding of naturalism in consciousness. Consciousness must be primary, since all our objective science are activities within and of consciousness. “…experience is not one node in an intellectual graph among other nodes; it is not one box in a functionalist diagram among
other boxes. Experience is the lived origin and byproduct of any process, including the
intellectual process. Experience is all that there is at this very moment when I am writing and you are reading. Indeed, experience is the lived background of the very
intellectual inference that there is something beyond experience.”

https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/70309754/Dialectic_of_Body_and_Consciousness_Last2-libre.pdf?1632745964=&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B+filename%3DThe_Tangled_Dialectic_of_Body_and_Consci.pdf&Expires=1647977298&Signature=aF-czUmBimH59xOAXfaQoEn1uOuQ57sLMG7As9~BZKRLHrAHk5UeDrJ6IDng569AX-zZ-uWJ-nZJ-dFKqQ~ZjGpQfYLZiGAetqEJ5gf~vhYMBxufFbkYgd2PnESSj9bj6LVwXvmHxyzS4nvCyd2Gl0oahJ08Bzb0hR1LHNlvwZruw9OSvOMMOkTYhROS7Gw5AbN5bwuaGuKng~cPIX9G--3jvQ1xZ2eUobu22tckaebjTc4-x9MQLkCJXB6qLgMyrMUsK-j6Ww-w5ZLMD8J-jszJFlI4A2VjRegUTt7-lA5EFoEKjFRD~tPkOIpRG3xIz4u2rL-pL2AlCgdn5Yx-~Q__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA

“Michel Bitbol is emeritus researcher at CNRS/Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France. He received a M.D., a Ph.D. in physics and a “Habilitation” in philosophy. After a start in scientific research, he turned to philosophy of science, editing texts by Erwin Schrödinger and formulating a neo-kantian philosophy of quantum mechanics. He then studied the relations between physics and the philosophy of mind, in collaboration with Francisco Varela, and drew a parallel between Buddhist dependent arising and non-supervenient relations in quantum physics. He also developed a first-person conception of consciousness expressed from the standpoint of an experience of meditation. More recently, he engaged a debate with the philosophical movement called “speculative realism”, from the same standpoint.

His research interests are mainly focused on the influence of quantum physics on philosophy. He first worked on Erwin Schrödinger's metaphysics and philosophy of physics.[3]

Using theorems demonstrated by Jean-Louis Destouches, Paulette Destouches-Février, and R.I.G. Hughes, he pointed out that the structure of quantum mechanics may be derived to a large extent from the assumption that microscopic phenomena cannot be dissociated from their experimental context.[4] His views on quantum mechanics converge with ideas developed by Julian Schwinger[5] and Asher Peres,[6] according to whom quantum mechanics is a "symbolism of atomic measurements", rather than a description of atomic objects. He also defends ideas close to Anton Zeilinger's, by claiming that quantum laws do not express the nature of physical objects, but only the bounds of experimental information.

Along with this view, quantum mechanics is no longer considered as a physical theory in the ordinary sense, but rather as a background framework for physical theories, since it goes back to the most elementary conditions which allow us to formulate any physical theory whatsoever. Some reviewers suggested half-seriously to call this view of physics "Kantum physics". Indeed, Michel Bitbol often refers to the philosophy of I. Kant, according to whom one can understand the contents of knowledge only by analyzing the (sensorial, instrumental, and rational) conditions of possibility of such knowledge.

Reply to Joshs I've read small amounts of Bitbol and seen him deliver lectures. Interesting fellow. From your reading of these 'conditions of possibility' is he a Kantian idealist or an an idealist in any sense?

Reply to Tom Storm Quoting Tom Storm

From your reading of these 'conditions of possibility' is he a Kantian idealist or an an idealist in any sense?

Definitely not a Kantian Idealist. Rather, he uses Kant as a source of inspiration. Bitbol accepts no notion of formal categorical contents of subjectivity. The phenomenological approach is about correlations that shape and reshape both the subjective and the objective poles of experiencing in each moment of actual experience. If that makes him an ideas or then all the physicalists, materialists and naturalists on this site are major idealists.

“ Consciousness is the name we give to the astounding realization of immediate existence, even before
its more intricate connotations such as reflective self-consciousness or moral conscience. Consciousness, in this very elementary sense, is existentially primary. These obvious (yet destabilizing) remarks are not derived from any reasoning. They rather arise when we suspend any judgment, and just state the elementary features of what we are living. They express what E. Husserl (1913/1931) called a phenomenological description ; a plain statement of what is immediately experienced, irrespective of any interpretation of the contents of experience in naturalistic terms. So, asserting that consciousness is “existentially
primary” is no metaphysical doctrine ; this is no idealist or panpsychist doctrine of the ontological primacy of consciousness to be contrasted with a doctrine of the ontological primacy of matter.

This is just an invitation to be faithful to our own lived experience in its most pristine form. Is such lack of reasoning a defect of the (phenomenological) approach ? Actually, it might well be its major quality. Indeed, as E. Schrödinger (1964, p. 19) noticed, when the problems of mind and consciousness are dealt with, the reasoning is part of the overall phenomenon to be explained, not a tool for any genuine explanation. Here again, radical self-referentiality must be taken
into account. As any reasoning, a reasoning about consciousness involves a conscious experience ; aknowledging the validity of a personal reasoning, or even of a mechanical inference performed by a Turing machine, is still a conscious experienice.”

Reply to Joshs Thank you. I know this is a digression but how would a phenomenologist read idealism in the Kantian or Schopenhauerian sense? Are you getting at this when you write:

Quoting Joshs

Bitbol accepts no notion of formal categorical contents of subjectivity.

Reply to Tom Storm Quoting Tom Storm

how would a phenomenologist read idealism in the Kantian or Schopenhauerian sense? Are you getting at this when you write:

Bitbol accepts no notion of formal categorical contents of subjectivity.

Yes, Bitbol keeps from the Kantian notion of Idealism that the experienced world is a world of ideas rather than senseless objects. What makes an idea an idea is that it provides a formal element tying together subject and object. For Kant this formal element is metaphysical categories of space time causality etc. For Bitbol what ties subject and object together is memory and anticipation

Quoting Harry Hindu

So is quantum indeterminism describing knowledge of a system, or the system apart from any knowledge of it?

Doesn't that depend on your preferred interpretation? At the moment, the maths can't distinguish between a Copenhagen and a Multiverse point of view. So either the collapse of the indeterminism to classicality is an epistemic belief or an ontic fact. But all we can report is the maths works.

Quoting Harry Hindu

Nature happens and humans use general rules to help them make predictions for similar circumstances.

You seem to be engaged in anthropomorphizing nature and particles.

But I talk of constraints and habits rather than laws and rules when I am speaking for my own particular pansemiotic position on the Cosmos. I emphasise the immanence and self-organisation of Nature and point to how talk of laws and rules indeed falls into the usual dualistic bind of transcendent accounts.

So here you are critiquing a problem that reductionism definitely has, and which my systems approach would resolve.

Quoting apokrisis

Nothing is truly random and uncaused. Even that is a relative judgement.

I could equally say that nothing is truly determined and caused, and that a claim that it is is also a relative judgement.

Quoting Janus

I could equally say that nothing is truly determined and caused, and that a claim that it is is also a relative judgement.

Indeed. And that is what I already say. The deal is reciprocal. Our notions of the determined and the random are the pragmatic limits which reality can approach with arbitrary precision. But reality can't finally become wholly either the one or the other, because then it would be leaving its grounding "other" completely behind.

Its a yin-yang kind of thing. :smile:

Quoting apokrisis

How does a particle know which path between two points is the shortest, even before it sets out on its journey?

It doesn't. It's what we let it do mentally. And then afterwards say that it took the one of least action. In qft reality, it probes all paths, non-locally, zipping from one to another, in accordance with the probability weights of all paths.

Reply to apokrisis :up:

Quoting EugeneW

It doesn't. It's what we let it do mentally. And then afterwards say that it took the one of least action. In qft reality, it probes all paths, non-locally, zipping from one to another, in accordance with the probability weights of all paths.

Yeah sure. Which might be why my point was...

Quoting apokrisis

This is why the nonlocality in quantum mechanics, and the principle of least action that grounds physics in general, are such a metaphysical problem for the reductionist point of view.

...So reductionism depends on the presumption that locality rules. Yet reductionism also quietly depends on the nonlocality - or holism and finality - enshrined in path integral calculations and the principle of least action generally.

Quoting Joshs

E. Schrödinger (1964, p. 19) noticed, when the problems of mind and consciousness are dealt with, the reasoning is part of the overall phenomenon to be explained, not a tool for any genuine explanation. Here again, radical self-referentiality must be taken
into account. As any reasoning, a reasoning about consciousness involves a conscious experience; aknowledging the validity of a personal reasoning, or even of a mechanical inference performed by a Turing machine, is still a conscious experienice.”

:clap:

[quote=Erwin Schrodinger, Nature and the Greeks]We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it. Not only my own body, but those of my friends, also of my dog and cat and horse, and of all the other people and animals. And this is my only means of communicating with them....

The scientific world-picture vouchsafes a very complete understanding of all that happens — it makes it just a little too understandable. It allows you to imagine the total display as that of a mechanical clockwork which, for all that science knows, could go on just the same as it does, without there being consciousness, will, endeavor, pain and delight and responsibility connected with it — though they actually are. And the reason for this disconcerting situation is just this: that for the purpose of constructing the picture of the external world, we have used the greatly simplifying device of cutting our own personality out, removing it; hence it is gone, it has evaporated, it is ostensibly not needed.[/quote]

[quote=Erwin Schrodinger, Mind and Matter]The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it...[/quote]

@Tom Storm - you may recall discussion of this very point in another thread yesterday. Schrodinger is known to have been a perceptive reader of Schopenhauer and also Indian philosophy. See also
Schrodinger and Indian Philosophy, Michel Bitbol.

Quoting Joshs

He has elaborated a metaphysics for a radical neurophenomenology that is not a neutral monism placing consciousness and naturalism on an equal footing , but a grounding of naturalism in consciousness. Consciousness must be primary, since all our objective science are activities within and of consciousness. “…experience is not one node in an intellectual graph among other nodes; it is not one box in a functionalist diagram among
other boxes. Experience is the lived origin and byproduct of any process, including the
intellectual process. Experience is all that there is at this very moment when I am writing and you are reading. Indeed, experience is the lived background of the very
intellectual inference that there is something beyond experience.”

I think we need to be careful as to not become a hammer that sees everything as a nail. I don't understand what it would mean to say that consciousness is primary. Consciousness seems to complex to be primary. What exactly do you mean by, "consciousness"? How is saying "consciousness is primary" or "experience is all there is" not simply implying that solipsism is the case?

I think that the substance of consciousness is primary and consciousness is a complex arrangement of that substance (neutral monism in that it is neither physical nor mental). Think of the substance as like an analog signal and consciousness as a digitization of the analog signal - like making particles/objects out of waves. A view (first-person) emerges from the way the information is organized and as a relationship between body and environment. As a relationship between the two we find it difficult, if not impossible, to separate the experience(r) from what is experienced.

For me, "naturalism" is simply the idea that things exist and they exist in particular ways. Whatever is the case is natural and how it changes is natural. All explanations that attempt to describe or symbolize the way things are are natural explanations. Even god would be natural if one were to exist and has a causal influence on everything else. If solipsism were the case, then solipsism would be the natural state of affairs.

Quoting apokrisis

The why questions go to formal and final cause.

Quoting Harry Hindu

It seems to me that "why" questions could be just as easily asking about causality. Formal and final causes are illusory in that the goal in the mind in the present is what is causing something to happen. Goals don't exist in the future, but are visions of the future in the present moment and it is always the state-of-affairs in the present that determine the future, not the other way around.

Quoting apokrisis

How does a particle know which path between two points is the shortest, even before it sets out on its journey? How can nature be ruled by the finality of least action before anything has begun to happen?

Again you're simply making the case that knowledge causally precedes any use of that knowledge - that knowledge of the shortest path causes the particle to move a certain way and in a particular direction so I don't see how this could be an example of a final cause. It could be an example of a formal cause in that the knowledge some particle has is part of what it is to be that particle and that causes it to behave in certain ways, but we're still talking about basic causation of causes preceding their effects. Aristotle's four causes are merely multiple facets of the same thing.

Quoting apokrisis

But I talk of constraints and habits rather than laws and rules when I am speaking for my own particular pansemiotic position on the Cosmos. I emphasise the immanence and self-organisation of Nature and point to how talk of laws and rules indeed falls into the usual dualistic bind of transcendent accounts.

Constraints and habits = laws and rules.

Reply to Harry Hindu Quoting Harry Hindu

How is saying "consciousness is primary" or "experience is all there is" not simply implying that solipsism is the case?

How is Quoting Harry Hindu

For me, "naturalism" is simply the idea that things exist and they exist in particular ways. Whatever is the case is natural and how it changes is natural. All explanations that attempt to describe or symbolize the way things are are natural explanations. Even god would be natural if one were to exist and has a causal influence on everything else. If solipsism were the case, then solipsism would be the natural state of affairs.

If making consciousness primary is solipsistic, how is a naturalism that claims the existence of entities independent of awareness of them not also a solipsism? After all , this alleged ‘independence’ of things is always only perceived through conscious construal. There’s a certain radical connectness between the subjective and objective poles of experiencing which can never be transcended. It wouldn’t be a ‘substance’ we’re talking about, since that brings us back to the assumption of entities ‘outside of’ warner’s of them. It would instead be be a relational point of view that is primary.

Quoting Harry Hindu

Think of the substance as like an analog signal and consciousness as a digitization of the analog signal - like making particles/objects out of waves. A view (first-person) emerges from the way the information is organized and as a relationship between body and environment.

Signals , waves, particles , codes and information are neutral entities belonging to nobody in particular. But these are never perceived as these neutral , dead in-themselves generic things. We only end up with this way of thinking about them by ignoring the subjective context of sense in which they are construed in awareness.

“ The standard question “where does consciousness come from ?” provides us with a good illustration of how misguided one can be if this radical self-referentiality is ignored. When we ask the question “where ?”, we prepare ourselves to focus our attention on some restricted region of our conscious experience : right or left, up or down, nearby or far away, inside or outside the skull, in this or that part of the brain. And when we think we have got the answer, after a deep speculative reflection or after a long experimental inquiry, this answer inevitably consists in pointing towards an object or a process that we can describe, think about, or even sometimes imagine. In other terms, answering a question about the origin of consciousness is tantamount to singling out a given content of our consciousness, and encouraging others to modulate their own consciousness accordingly. Everything looks as if we were trying to ascribe consciousness as a whole to some part of it ; as if conscious experience, this all-pervasive fact that constitutes our lives, were tentatively encapsulated in a fraction of it.”(Michel Bitbol)

Quoting Joshs

If making consciousness primary is solipsistic, how is a naturalism that claims the existence of entities independent of awareness of them not also a solipsism?

But that is what I'm trying to ask you. If consciousness/experience is all there is then are you only referring to your consciousness/experience? Where is your consciousness/experience relative to mine? If you're saying that consciousness exists everywhere are the boundaries of everywhere your own consciousness, or is there consciousness outside of your own? Do other minds only exist within the boundaries of your own consicousness/experience or are they separate from yours? If the latter, then what is the medium that divides one mind from another?

Quoting Joshs

After all , this alleged ‘independence’ of things is always only perceived through conscious construal. There’s a certain radical connectness between the subjective and objective poles of experiencing which can never be transcended. It wouldn’t be a ‘substance’ we’re talking about, since that brings us back to the assumption of entities ‘outside of’ warner’s of them.

Was my mind independent of yours before we started our discussion?

Quoting Joshs

It would instead be be a relational point of view that is primary.

Then relationships would be primary and not consciousness.

Reply to Harry Hindu Quoting Harry Hindu

. If consciousness/experience is all there is then are you only referring to your consciousness/experience? Where is your consciousness/experience relative to mine? If you're saying that consciousness exists everywhere are the boundaries of everywhere your own consciousness, or is there consciousness outside of your own? Do other minds only exist within the boundaries of your own consicousness/experience or are they separate from yours? If the latter, then what is the medium that divides one mind from another?

Viewpoints among phenomenologists differ on this issue.
Husserl took individual consciousness as primary. But this is not the consciousness of a natural-biological human being. I constitute a world of objects, myself as natural entity and other persons at higher levels of constitution from a more primordial stratum of expereincing in which myself as person , other persons and a world of natural
objects only exist as unidentified phenomena. But these objective facts are all contingent and relative. Only the constituting activity of intentionality is primary. This is what Husserl means by consciousness. Not a substance, object, intrinsic quality or sets of a priori formal categories. Rather a constantly flowi g , changing site of intersection between memory , present and anticipation. Even though he argues we must begin from the point of view of my own consciousness, Husserl also believed that an indefinite community of consciousnesses interact to form a total, intersubjectivitely valid world.

Gendlin allows us to understand a world history prior to human consciousness, but the important point t is that the nature of this ‘naturalism’ is consistent with Husserl’s analysis of consciousness. There are no neutral , dead impersonal particles, waves , codes, information. Rather , living and pre-living phenomena function according to a radical relationality that does not conceal relevance, sense, normativity and point of view within an ill-conceived neutral monism that remains stuck within the natural attitude.

Gendlin can describe a natural history pointing backward from my own human consciousness that is consistent with phenomenological concepts because he
transforms the nature of naturalism and biological embodiment so that they are consistent with the dynamics of consciousness. Neutral
monisms instead force consciousness into the old naturalist mold. One only needs a monism with two components ( subjectivity and objective reality) because one has failed to integrate them.

“However, the problem of those neutral monisms, both in their static and dynamic versions, is that they posit a false symmetry between consciousness and its objects. This symmetry is false because it is a purely intellectual construct, in which the constituted bodily objects and the constituting embodied consciousness are formally put on a par with one another. But whenever intellectual constructs are perceived as such, and one starts to become aware of the lived background of the process of construction, the symmetry is lost. One then understands that the only coherent strategy is to dwell continuously within the lived process of constitution of an objective domain by concrete present consciousness, instead of just simulating the constitutive dependence of manifest objects on an abstractly conceived consciousness (as dynamical neutral monisms do). We are thus drawn back to a phenomenological form of performative idealism, after a detour through reflexive monism. This should not be a surprise since even reflexive monism arose from a phenomenological insight: “what I normally thought of as the ‘physical world' … and my ‘experience of the world' were one and the same!” ( Bitbol)

Reply to Luke Years and years ago, I knew some really smart European brothers that ran one of the local gas stations in my area, and I would come to them with various logical problems and talk with them about intellectual topics. One of them told me that I was trying to figure out a new way to do mathematics, which I found quite interesting. I thought I was creating philosophical ideas but it turns out it was just math :snicker: since I was using numbers for that particular work.

Anyways, I remember one of our conversations, in which the same brother (the other one usually stayed quiet and just watched us talk) gave me an insight about a particular philosophy of their people. I was lamenting to them about the question of "why". I remember saying to him that "why" is the greatest question that we can ask because In all of life's quandaries it is "why" that persists. I was expressing my frustration about this ever-persistent question of "why" and how it really is the only thing that stands in the way of our knowledge (obviously not articulating it as explicitly as here).

He told me that where they come from, the people there say that (in his broken english), "if you keep ask why, you die".

You know that profoundly changed the way that I thought. And I'm quite sure they were smart enough to know the effect they would have on me. And ever since then, I hardly ever ask "why". But I do always ask "how" (kinda escape that trap). :snicker:

Reply to Harry Hindu You are trying to make an argument by claiming a definition. So, yeah nah.

The OP's query is deep!

Are there people (mayhaps there's only one among us) who wake up in the morning, perform the customary ritualistic ablutions and go "perfect!" Then drive to work, watch the chaos of traffic, witness a road rage incident and go "perfect!" Reach the office, get summoned to the boss's office and get reprimanded for your poor performance and go "perfect!". After work, get stuck in a traffic jam for 6 hours and go "perfect!". Arrive home only to realize that they've left the only key to the door at the office and go "perfect!". It's a perfect, perfect world! Dr. Pangloss and Ms. Pollyanna are living somewhere in the Sahara. Scorching heat, little water, dust storms, no one for thousands of miles, the nearest health facility 3 whole days away, Perfect as perfect can be!

Reply to Agent Smith

Reminds me of a story. "Fuck you fuck you!" "Fuck you!"

Quoting EugeneW

Reminds me of a story. "Fuck you fuck you!" "Fuck you!"

Don't remind me of activities better than being on this forum, EugeneW!

Quoting Agent Smith

Don't remind me of activities better than being on this forum, EugeneW

:lol:

Is that a proposal...?

Between the world of "Perfect" and "Fuck you!" lays the world of the perfect fuck.