Does QM, definitively affirm the concept of a 'free will'?
I've never really seen anyone affirm definitely the fact that QM can be used to justify the concept of having a 'free will'. I have seen some refutations of the PoSR (Principle of Sufficient Reason), which is the groundrock belief upon which determinism or necessitarianism hinge upon.
So, can it be affirmatively asserted that QM affirms the concept of having a 'free will'?
So, can it be affirmatively asserted that QM affirms the concept of having a 'free will'?
Comments (109)
"[One must] reject the common sop that somehow the indeterminism of quantum physics helps us out here. First, there is no evidence that the neurons of the brain are subject to indeterminancy in the way, say, firing of elections is (and in fact there is much evidence against it); even if that were the case, however ... the indeterminancy of some outcomes in the brain would not help with establishing personal causal origination of actions. For randomness in fact would make us more rather than less subject to unexpected turns of fact. ...
Moreover, human free choice would not be made possible by neuronal randomness in any case (and all the evidence so far seems to be against it) because no conscious human choice could ever operate to refashion neural networks directly at the neuronal level. Neural networks change through experience, not through will. ... We do not have direct access to neurons and their patterns of firing any more than we have the capacity for direct intervention into the functioning of our liver, even if the liver sometimes were to function randomly". (Heidi Ravven, The Self Beyond Itself)
I hesitate to opine on this bc I know nothing about neuroscience, but I feel very sympathetic to what you said.
The indeterminacy of QM offers nothing in explaining the contradictory nature of free will. Free will asserts both something occurring outside the causal chain as well as the agent's control, and therefore responsibility, over that event, which is to suggest a God-like property that defies explanation.
Consider if the laws of nature forced you into a Choice A, then we'd say you lacked responsibility and control over the act. Why though would you say anything differently than if your choice were determined by the flip of a coin or a truly indeterminate event?
Free will is what @tim wood, R.G. Collingwood, and I call an absolute presupposition. As Collingwood says "...the distinction between truth and falsehood does not apply to absolute presuppositions at all..." He also says ""Absolute presuppositions are not verifiable. This does not mean that we should like to verify them but are not able to; it means that the idea of verification is an idea which does not apply to them...."
I think this is a problem that afflict some libertarian (so-called) 'contra-causal' conceptions of free will. According to such conceptions, while most natural events are governed by universal laws, acts of the will interfere with the working of those laws such that, in the case where an agent did something, if the history of the universe were to be rolled-back to its initial state before the person acted, then, in those exact same 'circumstances', the possibility that she could have done otherwise remains open; and the counterfactual actualization of this possibility also is being construed as the manifestation of an act of the agent's will. (This is one possible construal of the principle of alternative possibilities, of PAP).
The main trouble with this conception relates to what Robert Kane has called 'the problem of intelligibility'. If in the exact same 'circumstances' where an agent might equally give expression to the state of her will though doing A or doing B, where A and B are two incompatible actions that satisfy incompatible rationales, then how do we account for such acts of the will that are thereby insensitive to reasons that may favor A over B (or vice versa)? We would have to imagine that the 'state the will' of the agent -- which presumably includes some degree of awareness of, or sensitivity to, the reasons that the agent has for acting -- resides outside of the 'circumstances' of the agent, where those 'circumstances' are construed by the contra-causal libertarian as to includes the agent's whole history down to the exact neurophysiological state of her brain.
On my view, compatibilists are right to object to such a thin (and likely incoherent) conception of the agent and of her will such that they are not only free from the constraints that natural laws put on material processes but such that they can also act against them. Compatibilists rather (and more plausibly) seek to account for the features of the will in such a manner that, while it isn't so much as partially free from natural constraints, many of those 'constraints' aren't best construed as constrains on the agent's freedom but rather as rational or motivational constraints that the agent herself exerts on her own actions. She doesn't exercise them from outside of her 'circumstances', as the contra-causal libertarian would have it, but rather while still being subjected to the 'internal' circumstances that are partially constitutive of who she is as an embodied rational agent. Such 'internal circumstances' include some features of her history that have led to her acquiring practical rational deliberative abilities and some contingent set of motivations.
So, when QM is being construed as providing some leeway into the broadly deterministic laws of nature, such that if the 'state of the universe' (or the 'state' of an embodied agent and of her 'circumstances') were to be rolled-back to some fixed earlier state, then, in that case, the agent might have acted differently, no satisfactory account is thereby provided of the freedom of the agent. And that's because of the aforementioned 'problem of intelligibility'.
On the other hand, another feature of QM could have some relevance -- analogical rather than explanatory -- to the problem of free-will and determinism. And this feature has very little to do with the fundamental indeterminacy of the potential outcomes of measurement processes effected on quantum mechanical 'systems'. It rather has to do with the radical inseparability of the physical phenomena from the embodied and situated context within which those phenomena are being teased out from a determinate experimental set-up. It is because of this fundamental inseparability that it makes no sense to inquire about the actual position of an electron in the circumstances where the experimental set up has been established so as to measure its momentum. On that view, the very idea of the position of an electron (which is called an 'observable' in QM) is essentially relational rather than being a characterization of the intrinsic state of an individual electron. The position of an electron characterizes possible interactions of the electron with an observer which are only possible in a range of set-ups that are inconsistent with the observation of its (precise) momentum, and vice versa. So, attempts to characterize the electron's behavior deterministically, such that prior to having been observed it would already be disposed to manifest determinate positions and momenta, are attempts to separate the phenomenon from the circumstances of its constitution. This can't be achieved according to Bohr's or Heisenberg's interpretation of QM. On my view, hidden-variable or many-worlds interpretations of QM can be construed as attempts to rescue the metaphysical view from nowhere of physical reality such that quantum phenomena can be given non-relational descriptions that, however weird, still comport somewhat with our intuitions of the classical-mechanical universe: an universe that is populated with items that have the kinds of determinations that they have quite independently from the nature of our interactions with them. Both of those classes of interpretations seek to dispense with the essentially relational nature of quantum phenomena. They reflect attempts by the theorist to radically separate herself from the universe which she seeks to describe and explain from a point of view that abstracts (per impossibile) from her constitutive relations with the phenomena that she observes.
I'd like to propose that both contra-causal libertarian accounts of free-will and most compatibilist accounts of free-will suffer from a defect that is deeply analogical to the 'metaphysical' (or 'realist') interpretations of QM. In the case of free-will accounts, though, the impossible task that is being attempted is the task of separating the agent from her world rather than the task of separating the observer/theorist from her world. Most compatibilist philosophers, on my view, only recognize partially the essentially relational character of agency since, unlike contra-causal libertarians, they acknowledge that parts of the 'circumstances' of an agent really are constitutive of who she is, as a radically embodied agent, rather than representing constraints on her agency which only operate 'from without'. On the other hand, they tend to theorize this separation between internal 'circumstances' (e.g. desires, values, reason) and external circumstances (knowledge, coercitions, physical limitations) from a point of view that is still a view from nowhere, and hence that allows from a deterministic psychology of the 'internal circumstances' of an agent. Because of that, I think, most compatibilists miss out on the nature of rational-causation, and of the autonomy of practical reason, as a neo-Kantian might conceive of them in irreducibly relational terms.
Even if you can free your mind from the grip of determinism (unlikely), what then fills the causal vacuum becomes your new dictator: mere dice.
Strictly speaking, quantum spookyness is still a mystery that needs more deciphering, and who knows, maybe Horton's soul is surfing an electron somewhere, but according to observation it's beyond unlikely. We think fundamental particles are the smallest possible units of matter, and if this is true it's good reason to assume that they're not individually animated by some intelligent force beyond themselves but instead by basic and seemingly universally applicable laws of physics which govern all things. Like when we roll a pair of dice, we presume that the basic and fundamental facts of the system govern the outcome of the dice roll, not the will of the roller; it would be nonsensical unless the dice were weighted, or unless you could roll with such precision so as to predict and achieve the desired outcome.
I cannot tell you free-will isn't out-there somewhere, perhaps in a hitherto un-penetrated dimension, and maybe the collapsing wave function of quantum particle "spin" has something to do with how it mechanistically endows us with itself. I can tell you there's no evidence for it, there's evidence against it (not proof as of yet), and our willingness to see free will in the ripples is mostly our own wishful thinking.
We found quantum dice that we cannot fully predict; an empirical black box. It may be a (de)-limitation of matter, or it might be a limitation of empirical science (local or global), and these dice rolls are happening everywhere, not just inside you. Electrons in nature entangle and collapse as a natural result of proximity, real world double slits cause interference in the position of quantum particles without us knowing or caring; the entire universe is oscillating at the fundamental - quantum - level with such frequency (perhaps) that we cannot measure it. And yet, out of the chaos comes an average stability; quantum particles tend to behave coherently, we find them more often in the position we left them in, and we can even guess the probability of finding a previously measured particle in a given new position; and we never find quantum particles doing the exact opposite of what they're told (if you orient an electron in a specific way, there's a 0% chance that when you remeasure its orientation (you orient it via measurement in the first place) that it will be in the diametrically opposite position).
We may only ever find plausibly a-causal behavior in quantum particles, but it is evident that as particles begin to form larger structures, the noise of their quantum uncertainty is somehow muted. Atoms decay with some degree of uncertainty (AFAIK) but the average is very reliably measured. Molecules gain more stability and coherence still, and extended and extensive molecular and atomic structures make up most of the solid matter that exists at the human scale, and within which science has been magnificently successful at caging fundamental uncertainty.
A final analogy: when an ant is following a pheromone trail and reaches a fork in the nose, it needs to make a decision about which trail to follow. It sniffs for other pheromones - signals - and it sniffs to determine which pheromone trail is thicker or fresher. It takes this information, performs a quick calculus, and carries on. Not all ants make the same decision in the same situation; some ants smell better, some ants are just rebels, but each ant makes decisions based on physical cause and there is widespread cohesion across ant-decision frameworks (there's an average that produces stability). If ants made completely random decisions they would also be making a lot of dumb decisions, and it would be foolish to think that every ant has a free-ant-soul that is looking out-and-ahead, and somehow informing thought and action. Verily, that the ant obeys its material and evolution-endowed structures, and that those structures are stable, is what allows ants to continue existing. Evolution can be cruel and certainly does roll dice, just not at the quantum level...
The freewill problem arose out of the discovery of Newtonian determinism and its LaPlacean implications. So quantum indeterminism definitely challenges the Newtonian/LaPlacean paradigm that gave the freewill debate all its sociological charge.
Noting of course that it was essentially a theistic issue anyway, as mind or spirit - representing organismic notions of autonomy or agency - were being opposed to science's mechanistic view of nature.
But anyway. QM demonstrates that nature is essentially spontaneous. However it also demonstrates that this spontaneity is subject to constraints. Randomness or unpredictability always occurs in a context that is imposing some degree of limitation.
So the deeper message of QM is not that nature is random and therefore nakedly free. It is that nature is the result of persisting constraints on such randomness. Thus if we are modelling something human like freewill, we should understand it in the same fashion - as the suppression of the unpredictable to the degree that it matters.
In that light, it becomes natural that individual human choices occur in socially and environmentally pragmatic contexts. It takes those contexts for individual action to have a definite meaning, and not merely be random and meaningless.
Now as a matter of freewill, you could choose not to wear matching socks. That might serve some sartorial purpose - one that means something, sends a definite signal to your social context. Or you might arrive at the same position by simply getting dressed in the dark and not checking. And that kind of sloppiness might also signal something to your social context.
So freewill is a term that targets the kind of action which is thoughtful and purposeful as a considered response within the constraints of some larger social or environmental context. It says being an "individual" is about having enough autonomy to go with the flow, or go against the flow. But that counterfactuality is itself wholly dependent on some understanding of context.
If you wear unmatched socks deliberately, you seek to signal your allegiance to some higher sartorial purpose. You definitely don't want to be mistaken for an actual, dress in the dark, rando. You most probably want to be granted the status of being such an autonomous being that you don't need to care that you might look like a rando. A complex game of social double bluff.
[This example sticks in my mind because David Chalmers chose to wear one red sock, one blue sock, when he gave his first big audience talk on the explanatory gap/quantum consciousness schtick. And he is one socially crafty dude.]
This is still seeking some kind of mechanistic account - the "experiential" weighting of syntaptic connects that determine an output state.
Neural patterns need to seen as representing constraining contexts. They represent the information that limits the otherwise spastic operation of the body's many degrees of freedom.
This constraints-based approach to autonomy is what neuroscience finds when it studies the development of skilled action.
A beginner at a sport sends a confusion of control messages to their muscles. The result is a jerky and poorly timed action as the beginner winds up trying to push and pull at the same time. Skilled athletes have very quiet muscles when recorded with EEG. They are maximally efficient in limiting the spasticity or randomness in what their body would otherwise do.
It is the same kind of story when recording the brains of babies as they learn to make perceptual sense of their world. It is all about learning meaningful neural constraint. At first, a neuron in the visual pathway will fire wildly in response to pretty much anything. But quickly it learns to limit its firing to some very precise kind of stimulus - like a line slanted at some particular angle. It learns to shut up the rest of the time.
So brains - as neural networks - arrive at specific behavioural choices by evolving meaningful states of constraint.
You as an individual could be doing anything at any particular moment - and what that would look like is the chaos of an epileptic fit. Luckily neural networks do learn from experience. They form useful interpretive habits. They form contexts that constrain the chaos to a pragmatic minimum.
Randomness may still lurk. In nature, spontaneity is irreducible - as QM proves. But agency is about being able to suppress degrees of freedom to the point where any remaining variety is not a problem for the achieving of a goal. The irreducible spontaneity - the remaining quiver in the dart thrower's hand - is still suppressed enough that the goals are met. The bullseye gets hit often enough.
Good post.
But I think the many worlds stuff renews it though. Since that is completely (super?) deterministic and people have no will over which worlds they find themselves in. Consciousness trailing behind and the bottom up processes well ahead in front.
Yeah sure. There are many interpretations that try to recover that lost determinism. You can go that route too. In the end, you can hide what you can't find out of sight, either as hidden local variables, or hidden entire worlds.
So in desperation, you might believe absolutely anything to preserve your faith in the rule of physical determinism.
Yet a constraints-based physicalism already explains the world better.
And QM is moving towards that kind of interpretation with the quantum information or quantum reconstruction projects. MWI and Bohmian Mechanics are the last gasp of an out-dated way of conceiving of physicalism. Their advocates are especially passionate probably because they know they are a passing story. :)
Tut tut, my lad! :D
Father Determinism may be on his death-bed, but grand-father Free-Will has been long since mourned!
The levels of analysis that are relevant for making sense of CNS are neuronal, neuronal-population, and molecular. These can be mechanistically analyzed using newtonian mechanics no? I don't know why we'd need to use wave functions to model or describe a neuron or its macromolecular parts ...
Ultimately we can say decision-making is mediated by neuronal population interactions, which are governed by laws of classical mechanics + some derivative chemical laws. All of those laws + knowing structure and functions of types of neurons and their parts within the networks they form allow for predictable and deterministic dynamics.
No.
Well you can analyse them that way and discover nothing about what makes them tick.
But if you are a neuroscientist, you might hope to decode what the patterns of activation mean by the way they correlate with observable behaviour. Which is analysing them semiotically.
It is just the same as understanding some ancient writing system. Knowing everything there could be to know about how the marks came to be impressed on a clay tablet or scratched on a rock will tell you zero about what the marks meant to their makers. The physics of marks isn't the semantics of marks.
Quoting aporiap
Hell no. Even the most reductionist of neuroscientists believes that you would need some kind of laws of information processing.
As a machinery, populations of neurons may be ruled by some kind of standard syntax. And you might even use physical analogies as the inspiration for the kind of syntax that could work - like the "simulated annealing" popular as the kind of algorithmic constraint used in neural network modelling.
But Newtonian mechanics has zip to do with it. The whole bleeding point of information processing systems is that those kinds of physical constraints don't have anything to do with it. You can't run a computer program on hardware that is flipping all its gates for merely physical reasons, like they are feeling too hot or too cold. Information processing works only to the degree the vagaries of the real world material processes have been shut out.
So it is the other way round. For information processing to be predictable and deterministic, it must have the material world completely controlled.
Any links where I can read about this? (QM moving towards this view as opposed to MWI or alternatives?)
This was a paper I particularly liked - http://iopscience.iop.org/1751-8121/47/42/424009/article
And here is a pop account that takes things further to include GR - https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-solve-the-biggest-mystery-in-physics-join-two-kinds-of-law-20170907/
For balance, these are other approaches that I didn't like so much -
https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-theory-rebuilt-from-simple-physical-principles-20170830/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-bayesianism-explained-by-its-founder-20150604/
And for the historic view, Wheeler's it from bit is still great - http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf
That is true, but somewhat misleading in the context of the free will debate, even granting, for the sake of the argument, the dubious metaphysical picture that underlies the 'many-worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics. While an agent can't determine, prior to a quantum measurement, which 'world' it is that she would find herself into -- in which a single determinate measurement result is actualized -- from the set of all all the potential results (or 'worlds'') that had a finite probability of occurrence (or that she could find herself into) -- she can still control those probabilities by means of the prior set up. If she sets up Young's double-slit experiment, for instance, she can ensure that a photon (almost) never will strike the vicinity of a region of zero-amplitude on the receiving screen even though she will not control which one of the several bands with large amplitude the photon will strike.
The more germaine question, then, is whether the agent can control the probabilities of the event that are occurring causally upstream of her own practical deliberative process. Libertarian philosophers are likely to demand that she ought to be able to do so. But it seems to me that compatibilist philosophers are right to deny there to be any need for an agent to be able to fully control such processes in order that her actions can be deemed free, and her own, in most of their relevant respects.
Thanks a lot I'll look through them tomorrow :smile:
And yet infinitely often, the zero-amplitude strikes will also happen in some worldline of the observer. Which screws any claim to have done something which has constrained the probabilities to these observed bands.
Under MWI, there will be infinitely many worlds in which all the bands are composed of the least likely events. So the bands will be exactly where they shouldn't be for an infinity of observers.
If you take MWI seriously, you can't take the probabilistic success of QM seriously. Everything that can happen, happens infinitely often.
That's why you can't take MWI seriously.
The MWI is a metaphysical gloss on Everett's relative-state interpretation. Everett's own interpretation is somewhat anti-metaphysical inasmuch as its main philosophical import is negative. It consists in denying the metaphysical reality (local realism) with respect the alleged collapse of the wave function. It is still somewhat 'realistic' inasmuch as it achieves this denial though reifying the state vector associated with the observer and then accounts for the singularity of the measurement result though relativising (one-to-one) the projected states of the observed system to the corresponding projected states of the observer that it is interacting with. This yields the problem of the determination of the privileged basis for the projections of the combined 'oberver+system' super-system. Decoherence theories seek to solve this privileged basis problem by means of an appeal to the interactions with the environment but run into other problems while attempting to factor out the quantum mechanical descriptions of the composite 'system + observer + environment' in a principled way. (This problem is intractable and ill-conceived, it seems to me, mainly owing to its reliance on the possibility of an un-situated God-eye-view on the whole universe (or its state vector) as a theoretically 'pure' standpoint from which to effect the factoring out of this universe onto the three components: oberved-system, observer and environment.)
The problem that you are raising for the MWI also arises within the framework of decoherence theories, but it seems to be mostly technical and relatively minor. If we don't reify the many-worlds as metaphysically real entities then we could account for the probability densities of potential quantum measurement (relative to 'observers') by means of coarse-grained descriptions of them. The main trouble with such interpretations, on my view, isn't so much the difficulty in accounting for the empirical verification of the probabilities derived from the Born rule so much as the ad hoc character of the definition of 'observers' (or or the 'worlds' of the MWI) seemingly devised for the sole purpose of rescuing metaphysical realism from the challenges posed to is by the profoundly relational character of the observables associated with quantum mechanical micro-physical 'states'. The realist interpretations seek to make QM palatable to the philosophically prejudiced theorist, with her 'classical' intuitions, but, in the process, obscure its most radically pragmatist implications.
Quite. I am all for decoherence as the right general idea. It ties it all back to an emergent thermodynamical evolution in time.
But you can't hide the basic metaphysical issue in an infinite splitting of the universe into tinier thermal compartments any more than by splitting whole worlds ... into infinite "world-lines".
At some point you have to stop deferring the imposition of some limit, some cut-off. And once you accept that, you may as well turn around and start with the very thing of limits - ie: constraints - as your metaphysical primitives.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
...then we might as well stick to Copenhagen minimalism.
I think the historical issue here is that MWI has piggy-backed on the legitimacy of decoherence as a formal extension to quantum theory. The maths of QM got glued to the maths of statistical mechanics and a better model has resulted.
But at the level of interpretation, MWI has smuggled itself in on the back of this. And for no special reason. Decoherence doesn't demand anything more than the epistemology of CI. And if your interest is in ontology, then MWI remains an extravagance and decoherence is essentially about thermal constraints on quantum indeterminism. We can now ask why coarse-graining would work.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Yep. And so decoherence turns the environment into a generalised observer. Hierarchy theory can be applied to account for the effects of spatiotemporal scale. Simply put, at sufficient distance, any fluctuating process turns into a solid-looking blur. The quantum looks like the classical.
So I object to MWI because it is business as usual for bottom-up constructive notions of ontology.
Something has to put a lid on quantumness. We know the difference between the quantum, quasi-classical and classical states of being. It gets silly to pretend there is no kind of wavefunction collapse, even if it is an emergent decoherent illusion - what things look like at a distance - on the microscale.
Given we have to accept constraints or limits and can't keep hiding the fact in inaccessible places, like an infinity of worlds or an infinity of thermal scales, then we might as well do the flip of treating constraints as ontically primitive. And that is how I understand the emerging quantum information approach - the reconstruction of QM that starts by ontologising probabilty rather than trying to defuse it via the unlimited worlds of modal realism.
To my knowledge, the physics involved in modeling neural circuit doesn't go past basic EM and thermo. Wave mechanics of course for characterizing field potential fluctuation and action potential but not for modeling any properties or behavior of biological objects (macromolecules, neurons, neuronal populations).
So no, not just newtons 3 laws but nothing 'special', spooky, nothing traditionally connoted with the colloquial understanding of quantum mechanics.
You can probe a basic sensory system, layer by layer in something like drosophila and attempt to determine how stimulus information is represented within each layer. There are bottom up approaches that don't have the same inferential limitations as behavioral research.
If by semiotic analysis you mean analysis of 'meaning' or what spatiotemporal patterns of activity within a set of cells represents then, of course that is the form of analysis or study that's commonly used. But the system is instantiated in a physical substrate so the 'symbols' of the referents are biophysical and biophysical principles need to be assumed in order to make sense of how those symbols relate to objective stimulus features
Understanding neural representation/semantics - isn't the only substantive project, it's just a fundamental requesite for any other kind of neural study. Biological mechanisms are what constrain and determine (1) the kinds of representation that can be had (2) decision-making process (3) valuation/value binding process (4) higher order brain process - decision-making, valuation/value binding process, attentional control, reasoning/inference making. You will need biophysical (and chemical) principles and design constraints to make sense of both semantic and mechanistic questions.
There would be additional information processing laws but my point was that, within the biological context, 'initial conditions' - developmental precursor state + existing natural laws constrain the evolution in a way that the outcome is an adaptive, information processing system. CNS comes out of a self-guided natural process, ie deterministic play out of the precursor cells.
Let’s stop mucking about.
Perhaps my reading is even more superficial than the article, but it seems to me that the new probabilistic approach being sketched in the article is just a vamped-up epistemology of QM, not a radically new metaphysical interpretation. It may end up predicting new experimental results and new ways of applying QM, but the metaphysics seems largely untouched.
As for attempting to link QM and GR, for me that has always been based on a fundamental error in understanding GR. Gravity is a force under Newtonian mechanics. Under GR gravity is not a force at all, it is the manifestation of the structure of spacetime, and is thus not something that can be transmitted from one body to another via particles like gravitons.
Under GR the gravitational effects still are attributed to a field and to disturbances of this field by matter. This field just happens to be the structure of space-time in this case. The fundamental equations of GR are Einstein's field equations. They relate the metric tensor (characterizing the geometrical structure of space-time) to the source of the field (characterized by the stress-energy tensor, which registers the distribution of energy and momentum throughout space-time). So, the idea of a quantum theory of gravity is to quantize the field of gravity (that is, the perturbations in the structure of space-time) just as all the other fields are being quatized in quantum field theory. This is easier said than done, of course.
You can thus think of the graviton as a quantum of excitation of the metric of space-time roughly in the same way as you can think of the photon as a quantum of excitation of the electromagnetic field. Of course, your intuition is correct that the graviton can't be correctly conceived as a point particle that is traveling through space-time and somehow interacting with it. But this naive picture wouldn't be correct as applied the the photon's relation to the electromagnetic field either!
@apokrisis By the way, there is a paper, which I haven't yet read, by Jean-Michel Delhôtel, discussing both Hardy's and Bitbol's approaches to the intepretation quantum mechanics: Quantum Mechanics Unscrambled.
Yeah. Some say it is going back to CI. But for me, that is ontic in that it puts the observer - or at least, points of view - in the spotlight as the critical factor.
So - as in Wheeler's participatory universe - the observer constructs the constraints that shape the probability spaces or wavefunctions. But this can't be human observers, so it must be some generic notion of an observer as the informational limits to constraint itself.
The telling idea is that when it gets down to it, two opposing questions can't be asked of the same event simultaneously. Constraining the uncertainty regarding one of the variables results reciprocally in the loss of constraint on its complementary partner.
So because "asking questions" = "constraining indeterminacy", the quantum information approach does suggest an ontology of an observer-created reality. Or to be Peircean, a pan-semiotic metaphysics.
Bottom-up metaphysics starts with concrete events and then the weirdness starts when bare possibilities themselves become the concrete events. Everything that is possible also exists - leading to the need for the many worlds in which that concretely is the case.
But I am talking about a top-down metaphysics where nothing is ever at base completely concrete, only relatively constrained in its indeterminacy. And quantum mechanics arises out of the impossibility of constraining states of affairs to the degree that two opposing questions can be answered with limit state accuracy in the same act of measurement.
So the weirdness arises out of the limits that exist for top-down constraint - the quite logical limits - and not on assumptions about the concrete nature of bottom-up possibilities, which in turn require as many worlds as there are countable possibilities.
Nobody (as far as I know) has ever proposed a naive picture whereby a photon travels through the electromagnetic field. That would be a complete misunderstanding of electromagnetic theory. The naive picture, if there is one, is that the photon travelling through a region of spacetime is what constitutes the electromagnetic field in that region of spacetime. It is just here that the graviton as a particle model breaks down. The description of a graviton as a quantized part of spacetime (which I think is what you are getting at, but correct me if I'm wrong) makes perfect sense, at least if one allows that the structure of spacetime is discrete and not continuous, but the relation of the graviton to spacetime then becomes one of part to whole and the graviton is no longer a particle at all - it becomes a discretely identifiable element of the medium through which energy-bearing particles such as photons and gluons etc transfer their energy. However, one fairly standard picture of a graviton is to model it precisely along the lines of a photon insofar as it is also something that transfers energy from one part of space time to another, and that is the picture which I believe is fundamentally confused about what gravity actually is.
So for you the "shut up and calculate" approach of some of those who support CI is no longer an option under these new "Bayseian" interpretations?
Just read it. Overly complicated - one suspects that at some points he is just showing off that he's technically proficient with QM formalism and complex analysis - and it is almost entirely devoid of any metaphysics, so I wouldn't bother wasting your time, unless you are interested in the technical idea that QM theory can be reshaped as a new kind of probability theory. At a couple of points he touches on the idea that what these "novel" approaches are proposing is just some kind of instrumentalism/operationalism, but he does nothing to actually argue that they should not be taken in precisely that kind of way.
I'm over my head here. But I've seen MWI described as superdeterministic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism
The future of all measurements is already known it's just that you happen to be in the one where the train of thought has completed. Presumably the worlds where your train of thought gets completed are the ones that are relatively normal with the illusion of the higher level regularities (breathable atmosphere ect). In that sense notions of identity and control are eliminable or instrumental.
I understand some say that it is not true and the state of things are that there are more (normal) worlds which is why when you think: "I raise my arm" the arm does go up rather than say your leg because there are more of the former than the latter. But I'm not sure why that is (more worlds of a certain kind than others).
The constraint based physics being posted by Apokrisis here makes more intuitive sense to me but what seems intuitive might not be true.
My argument, which was relying on the partial acceptance of the compatibilist notion of free will, addresses the sort of challenge posed by superdeterminism. What it is that evolves superdeterministically, on such a conception of the 'multiverse', never is, as you note, the trajectory of a conscious observer but rather the state vector which represents the 'state' of the whole multiverse. The effect from the manifold 'spitting' of observers over time ought not to be anymore troublesome to a compatibilist conception of free will than is the fact that, within any determinate history of a single observer, there are unlikely events that occasionally occur as the outcome of the uncontrolled amplification of quantum fluctuations. This is not sufficient to remove the agent's control where it matters, except in very restricted and artificial situations, since not all features of the emergent classical domain are subject to such uncontrollable fluctuations.
To be honest, I am not sure either in what way, exactly, many-worlders account for the empirical verification of the Born rule in the individual 'worlds' (or individual splitting world-lines) of the agents/obervers (and it is a problem that used to trouble me greatly when I was myself a fan of David Deutsch and of many-world interpretation) but that is a problem that is quite distinct from the problem of superdeterminism (as it allegedly relates to the free will debate).
I am quite sympathetic also with the main drift of Apokrisis's constraint-based approach. But I think is it quite congenial to the pragmatist (or relational) interpretation of QM that I also favor over the alternative metaphysically 'realist' interpretations. It is indeed thanks to thermodynamical constraints that the structured and controllable 'classical world' emerges at all from the chaos of the homogeneous gas of the early expanding universe.
(We are veering a bit off-topic...)
I've now read about two thirds of it and let me demur. It seems to be an excellent paper. Rather than it being devoid of metaphysics I would rather say that it targets with great accuracy the metaphysical prejudices that sustain some of the most popular interpretations of QM. From what I see, he also is rather careful to distinguish his own pragmatist account from the cruder forms of positivism that it now has become fashionable to ascribe to Bohr and to Heisenberg. It is not entirely unfair to charge Bohr himself with operationalism but Delhôtel (just like Bitbol before him) also is careful to disclaim the idea of reducing quantum phenomena to classical 'observables'. He rather deflates the metaphysical implication of the quantum formalism through displaying how the generality and empirical adequacy of this formalism derives (and, indeed, can be mathematically derived) from principles that apply to classes of experimental contexts that obey some very general pragmatic requirements (such as the necessity to account for phenomena that are partially constituted and/or produced by the very circumstances of their observation) and simple norms of logical consistency.
I am getting to the point where Delhôtel seemingly is going to distinguish his approach from Bitbol's own approach (developed in Quantum Mechanics as Generalised Theory of Probabilities). This is quite interesting. I'll comment later.
No. That's more a conceptual/philosophical issue that one brings to QM. And, as it happens, the Schrodinger equation is deterministic.
Quoting Wikipedia
For fun, you might like Conway and Kochen's free-will theorem that basically says that if we have free-will then so do particles. But note that free-will, as Conway and Kochen define it, just means that the outcome is not determined by the prior history of the universe.
Huh? Of course an epistemic instrumentalism is always a sound default position here. So I'm fine if that suits people's needs. But I personally am interested in the metaphysical story. Which should be OK too - especially given that this is a philosophy forum.
It takes a theory to beat a theory... I think David Wallace's comments are worth reading on this subject (particularly his answers to Q9 and Q10).
Quoting Interview with David Wallace
Zero-squared is still zero, experimental imprecisions aside.
Quoting apokrisis
It doesn't have to be that way. You can reject actual infinities and consider limits such as Planck-length and light-speed to constrain the locations a particle can be in since it was last measured. As Max Tegmark, who advocates MWI, says:
Quoting Infinity Is a Beautiful Concept – And It’s Ruining Physics - Max Tegmark
This is where we - SX included - agree. Just on the physics of brains alone, quantumness doesn't come into it as there is no evidence to suggest that consciousness depends on some kind of clever amplification of fluctuations. Instead, the brain would appear to rely on a routine thermal suppression of those fluctuations.
Furthermore, I argued on the grounds of biosemiotics or standard biological theory that life and mind are further insulated from physics in toto to the degree they are informational processes. So quantum or classical - it doesn't make a difference to the degree that brains are processing signs, doing some kind of neural computation, and so cognition would be a multi-realisable function. The algorithms could be implemented in any kind of hardware in principle.
Having stated that general case, then come the critical caveats. An enactive or biosemiotic view of cognition does argue that brains aren't actually computers. Symbol and matter, software and hardware, are entangled in a structural relationship tide to the embodied purposes of Darwinian flourishing, and more generally, entropy gradient dissipation.
And then still more crucially, biophysics reveals that the actual physical basis of life and mind is the nanoscale quasi-classical realm where the quantum and the classical phases of existence are in a poised state of critical instability. Organic chemistry in room temperature water has some very special properties that do explain how life and mind - as semiotic structures - could even exist.
So a little ironically, it is not about either the classical or the quantum realm. Consciousness, as what brains do, has its roots in the existence of a quasi-classical transition zone where the physics still swings both ways.
Does that make freewill now a quasi-classical phenomenon? Well no. As I argued earlier, freewill is a much higher level socially constructed deal. It is about the construction of a "thinking self" that negotiates between a set of established cultural norms around behaviour, and some set of needs and feelings that represent "our selves" as a biological and psychological individual within that wider framework.
Freewill is a contra-causal thing because that is just a basic logical requirement. It needs to be based in counterfactual thinking to allow the needs of society vs the needs of the individual to even get negotiated and arrive at some pragmatic balance.
So what we end up with here is a thread of semiotics - a balance of integration and differentiation - that starts right down in maximal simplicity of the quantum mechanics and continues with ever greater elaboration all the way up to the massive complexity of humans living as social creatures.
There are the disjunctions that separate, but then also the relations that still connect.
And a constraints-based metaphyics accounts for that. It finds its foundations not in some ground - whatever it is that sits at the level immediately below the level in question - but in the fact that there is some boundary between two levels ... a boundary with the third thing of a bridging relation.
So it is the irreducibly triadic relation which is the grounding thing.
Which is also why a quantum interpretation that focuses on the observer rather than the observables, the complex epistemic relation rather than the simple ontic facts or events, would be the way forward.
Well, Pierre-Normand was talking about almost zero amplitudes. But that is all part of the fudging when it comes to calculating using infinities. It is part of the same can of worms.
Quoting Andrew M
There you go! That's what I am talking about - accepting actual cut-offs in principled fashion. I find it encouraging that Tegmark is blogging in a way that sounds like confessing his sins. :)
Yes, I quite agree; and so do I with most of the rest of your excellent post, with only minor reservations...
Indeed!
Superdeterminism is a one-world theory that apparently has about three supporters including 't Hooft. It basically says that if you have a beam splitter, then it is predetermined which way the particle will go. Whereas Many Worlds says a particle goes both ways.
Bell's Theorem makes three assumptions - locality, classical realism (counterfactual definiteness) and freedom-of-choice (in what measurement to perform).
Superdeterminism rejects freedom-of-choice. Many Worlds rejects counterfactual definiteness.
In his defense, he does note that infinity seduced him at an early age...
I'm not sure that you and Apo are saying anything very different to MWI proponents such as David Wallace regarding a preferred basis, emergence and pragmatism. For Wallace, worlds aren't postulated in the quantum formalism, they are stable structures that emerge via decoherence.
So the decoherence basis is the preferred basis for all of us that are here to observe those emergent structures (the view from somewhere). But at a lower-level, there is no preferred basis - any way of factoring things is valid. It's just that not every way of factoring things necessarily persists to form macroscopic structures that we can observe.
As Wallace puts it (before going on to describe higher-order ontology and the role of structure):
Quoting The Everett Interpretation - David Wallace
The value of relational QM, I think, is that it gives us a language for talking about the familiar world that we observe from our individual point-of-view rather than an idealized view-from-nowhere. Which is to say, we are each participants in a localized part of a much larger quantum universe that evolves unitarily.
Thanks for the reference to Wallace on Everett's interpretation. I just looked up his book The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory According to the Everett Interpretation. The second part of the book, entitled Probability in a Branching Universe is of much interest to me. There is a short discussion on pp. 135-137 on the (pseudo-)problem of free will in the context of Everett's interpretation that I'm heartened to see appears consistent with my prior take on it in this thread. There is some discussion of the preferred basis problem that I will also look into. I'll postpone the task of making more explicit the grounds for my dissatisfaction with the metaphysical underpinnings of the multiverse approaches to quantum theory. I still have much ongoing readings to finish.
Let me just note that Rovelli and Bitbol both endorse relational approaches that share some features with Everett's interpretation. But they don't reify the multiverse anymore than they do its branches.
My point was just meant to highlight that quantum level mechanics isn't needed to model or characterize the physical aspects involved in neural signal generation, exchange, and population level interpretation; classical mechanics (which is what I should have said, not newtonian) is sufficient for that. Quantum indeterminacy, which (as far as I know) is inability to fully characterize the state of an isolated quantum system, doesn't impact, in any meaningful way, the behavior of systems describable by classical mechanics which includes brains and neurons. The semiotic discussion is separate from this and I just wanted to make it clear.
Going to the semiotic point, you are saying that information processing laws are independent of material substrate and they are needed in addition to biophysical and chemical constraints to make sense of neural processing. I agree on this but then it seems like there is another point you make - that all questions or most every question in neuroscience has to do with neural semantics and natural mechanisms don't play any meaningful explanatory role in how or why a given neuro phenomenon or function is the way it is. My point is that mechanisms matter for explaining how brains work.
You may also be interested in Carroll and Sebens' derivation of the Born rule which Sean Carroll discusses on his blog.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I think emergent branching aside, what is fundamental are the relative states of the wave function. In this respect, Rovelli's RQM is essentially equivalent to the Everett interpretation (it's unitary, local, complete, non-classical, etc.), except it uses relational terminology to index all descriptions to the observer.
Agreed. I will reread the paper and perhaps start a new thread. Whilst the author certain says that his position should be distinguished from what he refers to as "crude operationalism" (which may be a straw man in any case) just saying that his position should be so distinguished doesn't make it distinguishable.
QM is quite a diverse range of ideas.
Perhaps you should give a brief definition of what you mean by QM.
For myself, I can only positivistically affirm quantum time and quantum energy.
But consider this:
If we made a machine that analyzed all your atoms so that it could perfectly predict your behavior
would you not go out of your way to defy it?
How do you do that?
But quantum mechanics tells us that we don't inhabit a space-time, rather we inhabit a multiverse, which to a good approximation, is a countably infinite set of parallel space-times. Under this scenario, while the futures already exist, just as in general relativity, our personal future is open.
This multiverrse stuff sounds like a sophisticated version of the god delusion... A nice way of filling in gaps and silencing critics. Other Universes are not relavent to our universe and discussions as to their existence are just another example of atheistic gods.
Bell himself felt the ultimate question is one of determinism, and the only problem with determinism is the fact that people are afraid of it and don't know what to do with it, and cannot reconcile it with thought, or free will. It (determinism) is readily reconcilable with SR and QM, it its less reconcilable with the fear of its intellectual import.
It is impossible in principle to know which futures you will inhabit, not even a "god" can do that. Also, it is possible to set the quantum amplitude of certain futures to zero by the application of knowledge.
Quoting Marcus de Brun
Sure, you are willing to declare reality is a space-time based on special relativity, but are unwilling to accept what quantum mechanics tells us. Strikes me as glaringly inconsistent.
Quoting Marcus de Brun
QM is a fully deterministic theory.
This mode of discussion, smacks of the new religion of the materialist. One feels as though one is at an inquisition of sorts, questioning the almighty God of modern materialism. The 'which future' rejoinder leads one to a reductio absurdum and cannot be escaped, just as the almightly absurdity of God was medieval ne plus ultra of the dark ages.
"Which future" from this assertion one must conclude that within each of these futures there are also an infinity of futures and within each of those futures an infinity of futures... and here at last the materialist can cling to the the desperate notion of free will. The 'which future' is the rabbit hole down which an escape for the new God of self and free will might be effected.
Sorry, I don't buy it.
One Universe one past and one future. You can certainly have a multiplicity of Universes if one finds this notion pleasing, however the suggestion that this Universe (big bang to present) contains a multiplicity of futures would be contingent upon its possession of a multiplicity of pasts, which it does not
contain.
A single universe with a multiplicity of futures must also contain a multiplicity of pasts, an infinite number of such pasts each different. If there is such a thing as an objective real basis to this (our shared Universe) we cannot observe different pasts. We can only observe the past, a single history confined to our single shared Universe. One past might only be derived from one future. We do not know what the precise nature of the single future is and as such we might say or feel that it has infinite possibility, however the possibilities can only be assigned to the event components that we cannot as yet predict. Our inability to predict certain determined future forms of the universe does not lend the future any additional futures. One past is the consequence of one determined future. Multiverses and multiple futures are a veritable rabbit hole.
Why do we rush to hide down the rabbit hole when the temporal structure of our single and relevant Universe is so obvious?
M
Agreed. So lets get on with the essential business of providing an intellectually valid Universal construct that combines the determined and atemporal nature of the Universe with the phenomenon of thought and avoid the self serving delusion of multiverses.
M
But you're happy with a stationary space-time block, because it does not "smack of the new religion of the materialist"?
The statonary space-time block does not make you "feel as though one is at an inquisition of sorts", or that you are "questioning the almighty god of materialism"?
If the stationary space-time block is not religious, or inquisitory, or materialist, then why are a collection of space-time blocks those things?
Please expand upon what you mean by 'The stationary space-time block'
This is your phrase (not mine), and you have suggested I am happy with it?
Please allow me the courtesy of a definition, prior to the assumption of my contentment with it's philosophical content.
M
I don't need to "expand", you expressed it well enough.
Quoting Marcus de Brun
Quoting Marcus de Brun
It's standard nomenclature for what special relativity (your choice) and its generalisation to include gravity, mandates. I take no credit for it.
Quoting Marcus de Brun
Right.
Tom
You have declined to define what you mean by "The stationary space-time block" and yet you are telling me that I am referencing this idea when I write.
"One does not need QM to prove the absence of free will. Special relatively already achieves this without equivocation. Temporal shifts at high velocity travel have proven special relatively correct. The future already exists and as such free will is precluded."
— Marcus de Brun
In this quote I make no reference to this "stationary space time block" of yours. Special relativity is concerned with a relative fluidity of space-time as consequenced by relative motion between observers?
You further state
"It's standard nomenclature for what special relativity (your choice) and its generalization to include gravity, mandates. I take no credit for it."
Special relativity mandates relative temporal dilation or contraction this appears to be the inverse of what you are suggesting.
You call it standard nomenclature and yet I don't find the phrase anywhere in respect of Special Relativity, which in essence would be very unlikely to have a place for stationary time blocks in the context of temporal dilation and contraction relative to motion.
Why the reluctance to define 'your' terms? It certainly does not appear as standard nomenclature, and comes up a blank when put to the brutality of a google search.
Perhaps you are busy? Please define what you mean, rather than conceal it behind this convenient notion of "standard nomenclature"?
M
I await your reply?
M
He's been banned.
That is interesting all good philosophers are banned at some point!
Any idea why?
It seems that if one can perform one non deterministic act in the world that would settle the issue. Here is how it could be done IF quantum events, in this case radioactive decay, are really random:-
Set up a Geiger counter alongside some radioactive material.
Count the hits on the counter.
Stop the experiment after a set period of time.
If the number of hits is odd have a coffee at home.
If the number of hits is even have a coffee at your local restaurant.
Your decision has been determined randomly and is therefore a non deterministic decision.
The determinism/non determinism of the world seems to be closely linked to whether we can create a truly random number.
I suspect you are thinking of physicsforums. Topic like this are shut down there as soon as they come up because it is speculation, not physics.
Speculate about it as much as you like. Many do, and enjoy it tremendously. But please bear in mind that what you're doing is considering different possible interpretations of physics. There is no question whatsoever of QM 'definitively affirming' your conjecture.
I do not understand, for I am simple and humble.
Anyway I'm not certain wether QM takes into account the mediation of their founding principles: the relativity regarding the observer and measurement.
So, to save the PSR all we need to do is say that the agent is the sufficient cause of his or her choice. One can deny this, but not on the ground of the PSR. One simply has to decide if agents can determine their own choices or not. If they can, they are sufficient to the task of making the choice. If they cannot, there is no free will. Either way, the PSR is unviolated.
I rather agree with that, since I endorse a variety of agent-causation (and rational causation) myself. Many libertarian philosophers, and some compatibilist philosophers, endorse some sort of agent-causal view of the source and explanation of free human actions. The main challenge that is being presented to the compatibilist versions is the problem of dealing with causal overdetermination, or so called arguments from causal exclusion.
No.
But university PhD physicist specialists in QM have said that QM lays to rest the notion of an objectively-existent physical world.
Michael Ossipoff
Too bad they haven't studied philosophy or the would know that the problem was laid to rest by Aristotle in Metaphysics Delta.
So, just to backtrack on an old topic, I think the issue here is the determination by reason of a causal event. In another topic, I talked about whether QM affirms or denies the concept of causality. I even posted that topic over at PhysicsForums and there was much discussion about it, with no clear answer. I believe science and some experiments have confirmed that causality can be negated by QM.
If nature cannot be comprehended or even more logically, simulated in a complex enough computer, then it must be the case that the PoSR has failed us somewhere. Hence, if we talk about people having a free will, then it's fruitless to assert the PoSR due to the fact that some mental activity could not be determined.
That's all I gather from this topic. Others might differ; but, I don't see on what grounds you can differ.
It is fine not to be bothered by problems that exercise proponents of dubious -isms (such as physicalism). I am not overly bothered by them either. But it's even better to provide a rationale as to why one is entitled not to be bothered by their specific objections to our non-physicalist views.
Incidentally, some quite smart non-physicalists (or anti-Humeans) about causation, such as Ruth Groff, counter Kim's causal exclusion argument by rejecting the principle of the physical closure of the physical. That seems to me to be a blunder. This principle is fine, although limited in scope. (Michel Bitbol argued that it is consistent with strong emergence, and the existence of systems that exhibit downward-causation). The faulty premise in Kim's argument, on my view, rather is the principle of the nomological character of causation (also famously endorsed by Donald Davidson).
Thanks for pointing that out.
Michael Ossipoff
Standard quantum mechanics says that while observations may be random, systems that are unobserved develop in an entirely deterministic way. Physics, as physics, has nothing to say about any intentional act, including free will. So, what I am about to argue is constrained by the self-imposed limits of physics.
Consider two nested systems S1, which comprises a quantum system, S0, to be observed and everything required to observe it, O1, and S2 which includes S1 and a potential observer, O2. Over time, O1 makes its observation of S0. At the same time O2 makes no observation of S1. So, relying on standard quantum theory, O2 knows that S1 has behaved in a completely deterministic fashion. That means that the observation by O1, however unpredictable it may be, is deterministic. Thus, for quantum theory to be consistent, not only unobserved systems, but observations, must be fully deterministic.
Now, why does physics have nothing to say about intentional acts? Because of the Fundamental Abstraction of natural science, which I have explained earlier on this form. Every act of knowledge involves both a knowing subject and a known object. At the beginning of natural science, a decision is made to focus on the physical objects observed to the exclusion of the intentional operations of the knowing subjects. Having made this choice, natural science is bereft of data and concepts on subjects' intentional operations. So it lacks the information required to connect its findings on the physical world to subjective, intentional acts. That is why physicalism is an instance of Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness (confusing abstractions with reality).
Quoting Posty McPostface
The PSR is not a claim that nature behaves algorithmically. If is only a claim that every operation is preformed by an agent able to perform it.
Quoting Posty McPostface
Not at all. Determinism vs. free will means that the act of the agent is fully immanent in the state of the cosmos before the agent acts. The PSR here only requires that the agent be adequate to the task of making a free choice. These are entirely different claims.
Of course. As I said, I have many reasons to reject Jaegwon Kim's Principle of Causal Closure, which states that "all physical states have pure physical causes." Kim argues that "If you pick any physical event and trace out its causal ancestry or posterity, that will never take you outside the physical domain. That is, no causal chain will ever cross the boundary between the physical and the nonphysical." (Mind in a Physical World, p. 40)
The first and simplest reason is that we are able to discuss our intentional acts. If these acts were not involved in a causal chain leading to physical acts of speech and writing, we would be unable to discuss them. One could claim that intentional acts are physical, but doing so not only begs the question, it equivocates on the meaning of "physical" which refers to what is objective, rather than what is subjective. (See my several discussions of the Fundamental Abstraction on this forum, including the precis in my last post in this thread.) Further, if the causes within Kim's enclosure include any being we can discuss, the principle makes no meaningful claim, for it excludes nothing.
Second, with regard to the supporting argument, if we confine our attention to the temporal sequences of physical events ("trac[ing out its causal ancestry or posterity"), of course all we are going to find are physical events. This is neither surprising, nor a reason to support the principle. What it ignores is concurrent causality.
As noted long ago by Aristotle, and canonized in the physical principle of locality, an effect here and now requires the operation of a cause here and now -- not elsewhere or at another time. This kind of causality is not the time sequence by rule discussed by Hume and Kant (accidental causality), which has become the sole focus of modern philosophers. Accidental causality connects two disjoint events and so, as Hume pointed out, has no intrinsic necessity (the separation allows an outside agent to insert itself between the events and disrupt the dynamics).
On the other hand, concurrent or essential causality involves only a single event and has an intrinsic necessity. Aristotle's paradigm case is the builder building the house. The builder building (cause) is inseparable from the house being built (effect). In fact, the builder building the house is identically the house being built by the builder. The necessity of essential causality rests on this identity.
The relevance of this distinction here is that Kim's tracing out of temporal lines of causation completely ignores it. One might respond that Kim's principle applies to only to time-sequenced or accidental causality, but that is to ignore the fact that accidental causality is the integral effect of essential causality. To see this consider the temporal evolution of a physical state. From the perspective of accidental causality, the initial state is the cause of the final state. Physics looks deeper. What it sees is that at each space-time point the laws of nature act (concurrently) to modify the state -- and the integral effect of these concurrent modifications connects the initial state to the final state. Thus, Humean-Kantian accidental causality is the integral effect of Aristotle's concurrent or essential causality.
So, if intentionality acts concurrently, if willing progress toward our goal is identically progress toward our goal being willed, then the concurrent act of willing will modify the connection between the events Kim is examining and his argument fails.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I think my analysis above addresses the nomological character of (accidental) causation, but not fully. I have previously argued on this forum that the laws of nature are intentional in character -- (1) being alone with human committed intentions in the genus of logical propagators and (2) meeting Brentano's "aboutness" criterion. Thus, the laws of nature and human committed intentions share a common theater of operation -- as confirmed experimentally by a staggering amount of data showing that human intentions modify "random" physical processes.
Let me expand. Metaphysics Delta is Aristotle's philosophical lexicon. In it he discusses the meaning of quantity as an attribute of reality. He notes that there are no actual numbers in reality (no variables with actual values). Rather "quantity" in reality refers to countability and measurability, with actual numbers deriving only from counting and measuring operations. Thus, the objective side of quantitative physical observations lies not in an actual number to be discovered but in the determinate measurability of the natural world. So, the fact that no determinate value exists in physical reality independent of any measuring operation has been known for more than 2500 years. Further, it is not a threat to objectivity.
Certainly the dependence of measured values on the details of the measuring process became more explicit with the advent first of Special Relativity and then of quantum theory. Still the underlying principle was pointed out long ago by Aristotle -- who incidentally, was the founder of mathematical physics.
The physical world is more "natural" than...what? Human-constructed architecture and pavement?
I'm not saying that the physical world isn't natural. But the non-physical describable metaphysical basis of the "physical" world isn't less natural. Likewise, I'm not quite sure why Atheists and Materialists believe that God (when they speculatively refer to God) would be less "natural" than the physical world.
You mentioned the objective side, but it's there only by inference from our subjective experience.
As you mentioned, there have been philosophers who were saying that before there was QM, but now, with QM, there are physicists who are taking physicalism down by saying that the notion of an objective physical world has gone the way of phlogiston.
Michael Ossipoff
Of course that statement quoted from Kim is true. It's true, and it doesn't contradict Subjective Idealism or Theism.
In fact, I take it a bit farther, and point say it about metaphysics as well as physical events and causes. Substiture "describable metaphysics" for "physical states", "physical events" and "physical causes".
Just as physical events and things have physical explanation in terms of other physical things and events and the laws of physics, so metaphysics, too, is self-explanatory, explainable within itself.
I suggest that metaphysics has that same closure that the Kim describes for the physical world..
...and that, too, doesn't conflict with or contradict Subjective Idealism or Theism.
So then, what's the metaphysical world's relation to or influence from larger Reality? I don't claim to have a complete explanation. There's Theism that doesn't claim to explain such things. As I've said, there's very little that can be said about such things.
(...but to answer a comment that an Atheist recently made, no one's saying that unknowability is the whole entire bases of a Theism. A few things are said by all Theisms.)
Michael Ossipoff
That's a non-problem invented by Materialists.
We're physical. We're physical animals in a physical world. In other words, our hypothetical life-experience-story is the story of the experience of a physical animal in a physical world.
So yes, we're physical, and, as physical animals, we're complementary with our physical surroundings in our hypothetical life-experience-story. Of course we, the protagonist of that story are central and primary to it, and are the reason why it's an experience-story.
An animal, such as us, is a biologically-originated purposefully-responsive device.
...just as we were taught in our pre-secondary school science-courses.
Michael Ossipoff
The natural world excludes spiritual reality, which, while real, is not measurable.
I also object to naturalists' use of "supernatural" as a term of derision. God is, as Aristotle saw, the logical completion of our investigation of nature.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I disagree. We experience the objects of the lived world. We do not infer them. Locke was wrong is saying we only know our own ideas. Rather ideas are acts by which we may know objects. (My idea
This is typical of the confusion between formal and instrument signs that permeates modern philosophy. Ideas are formal signs -- their only reality, the only thing they do, is signify. Text, smoke and road signs are instrumental signs. They have a primary reality of their own (ink on paper, particulate suspensions, paint on metal) and secondarily signify. We do not need to recognize that
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
And, as I have pointed out, they are confusing objective measurability with having a determinate value. These were never the same, and to lack a determinate value is not to lack objectivity.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
No, it is false. I did not say that previously, but it is false. If I ask why the end caught the pass and follow the sequence of events back in time, I come to the quarterback's decision to throw the pass to that end rather than another receiver. That decision is an intentional, not a physical act.
Subjective Idealism and Theism are logical distinct positions. I am a philosophical theist. I am no sort of idealist.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I'm unsure what you are saying here. To me, metaphysics is the science of being as being, and so deals with all reality. Obviously, any causal relations are contained within reality.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I agree that we are natural beings, but I think it is important to distinguish physical and intentional operations (aka "spiritual" operations). As Brentano pointed out, intentional operations have an intrinsic "aboutness" that is not required to specify physical operations (even though physical operations are ordered to ends).
This (and the rest of your post) is a very good response. I'll comment more fully shortly, within a day or two, hopefully.
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I don’t know exactly what you mean by spiritual reality, or whether you believe that it’s something that there really is, or just something that other people believe in. But, whatever it is, you seem to be saying that it’s unnatural in some sense.
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I don’t have an argument with your statement that spiritual reality is unnatural, because I don’t know what you mean by spiritual reality.
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So then, is it that anything that isn’t measureable (physical)? is unnatural? So you’d say that God (hypothetically, if you don’t believe there’s God) isn’t natural? …and that abstract-implications, even they’re the structural basis of the describable world, are unnatural?
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I’m just saying that I don’t what Materialists mean by “the natural world”. Yes, you’ve explained it, and I’m not asking for additional explanation.
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Then we agree on that.
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God is, as Aristotle saw, the logical completion of our investigation of nature.
[/quote]
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Then we agree on that too, if, by “nature” you mean the physical and describable metaphysical realms.
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Well, I don’t entirely agree, because you’re talking about evidence (defined by Merriam-Webster as “outward sign”). Yes there’s outward sign to justify Theism, but there are also discussions that more directly justify faith, aside from outward sign. I define faith as “trust without or aside from outward sign”. There are discussions that justify faith.
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But, if you’re not a Materialist (“Naturalist”), then I’d suggest ditching Materialist language like “nature” and “the natural world”.
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You experience them, and then you infer objective existence for them. We experience the things, but the objective existence is only an inference.
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But don’t you see that that claim about an objectively-existent physical world is what you’re arguing for? You can’t use it as an argument for itself. What I quoted directly above is just a restatement of your claim about an objectively-existent physical universe.
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Of course you know about apples because you’ve experienced them. No one denies that. Your life-experience story’s one requirement is consistency, because there are no mutually-inconsistent or mutually-contradictory facts. Apples are among the things and events that are in your self-consistent hypothetical life-experience-story.
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The things and events of your experience (including your experiences about evidence of past events) must be consistent with you being here, in this life. That means that, for one thing, there must be, in your experience-story, edible things, such as apples. If there hadn’t been apples, it would have been something else edible, because we animals couldn’t live without edible things
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No doubt infinitely-many terminologies are possible. I don’t disagree with them, but I don’t use all of them.
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Again, that’s just a re-statement of the position that you’re arguing for. So you can’t use it as an argument for that position.
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I was just quoting those physicists. I wouldn’t presume to correct them regarding their specialty. …but that’s what you’re doing. Physics, quantum-physics in particular, is their specialty, their field. …not yours or mine. We can quote them, we can even disagree with them philosophically, but we can’t correct them about their physics.
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Anyway, after I post this reply, I’m going to immediately-subsequently post a copied-and-pasted definition and description of my Eliminative Ontic Structural Subjective Idealism metaphysics.
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In that post, I’ll ask you a few questions about what you mean by this physical world’s objective existence and reality, over and above what my metaphysics says.
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But here’s something that I can ask you now:
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In what context, other than its own, do you want or believe this physical universe to be “existent” or “real”?
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It doesn’t contravene physical law. The quarterback is a physical, biologically-orignated, purposefully-responsive device.
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In this physical world, there’s no contravention of physical law. Sometimes there are observations that conflict with known physical law, but there’s been a tendency for new physics to eventually explain such observations.
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Yes, we have words for events that result from a choice made by an animal. You’ve been using some such terms that aren’t in ordinary popular usage, and I have no objection to that. But it doesn’t mean that there’s contravention of physical law.
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No one’s denying that Idealism and Theism don’t mean the same thing, or that they’re positions distinct from eachother. But they aren’t incompatible with eachother.
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Theism isn’t really about logic. There are discussions that tell reasons for Theism, and there are discussions that directly justify faith, without regard to indirect reasons based on results. I define faith as trust without evidence (which Merriam-Webster defines as “an outward sign”, a concise way of saying what I mean by evidence).
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But none of those discussion are about logic or proof. Theism isn’t that kind of a topic.
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Then, you must be a Materialist or a Dualist. I don’t think you can be a Theist and a Materialist, so doesn’t that make you a Dualist?
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As for myself, I’m a Theist and a Subjective Idealist.
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No, because I said, “Substitute “describable metaphysics”…”
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Describable metaphysics only discusses the describable. I don’t claim that all of Reality is describable.
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Yes, because Reality is all that is.
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(…not to be confused with physical reality or describable reality, for which I don’t capitalize “reality”.)
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I translate that as “physical beings”.
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Of course. Our ordinary language often distinguishes events without animal-agency, and events with animal-agency (events that happened due to a choice made by an animal).
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You can use, for that distinction, terms that aren’t in ordinary popular usage, and I have no objection to that.
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Bretano would have to be a bit more specific. Most likely he isn’t saying anything that I’d disagree with if I knew what he meant. But he might be saying something about a distinction of his that I don’t make, &/or he might be talking about some issue that I haven’t talked about. In either of those cases, I still don’t disagree with him.
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In philosophy, of course it’s possible for different academic philosophers to be using new terms of theirs to talk about things that others of us, including other academic philosophers, aren’t talking about. …possible for different philosophers to be talking about different things that might have nothing to do with what others are talking about.
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Of course academic philosophers make use of that technique to the hilt. (You know, “Publish Or Perish”)
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Of course I don’t disagree with such statements.
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Michael Ossipoff
9/29/18
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First two premises that we all agree on:
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1. We find ourselves in the experience of a life in which we’re physical animals in a physical universe.
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2. Uncontroversially, there are abstract implications, in the sense that we can speak of and refer to them.
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I claim no other “reality” or “existence” for them.
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By “implication”, I mean the implying of one proposition by another. By “abstract implication”, I mean the implication of one hypothetical proposition by another hypothetical proposition.
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So there are also infinitely-many complex systems of inter-referring abstract implications about hypothetical propositions about hypothetical things, with the many consistent configurations of mutually-consistent hypothetical truth-values for those hypothetical propositions.
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Among that infinity of complex hypothetical logical systems, there’s one that, with suitable naming of its things and propositions, fits the description of your experience in this life.
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I call that your “hypothetical life-experience-story”. As a hypothetical logical system, it timelessly is/was there, in the limited sense that I said that there are abstract implications.
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There’s no reason to believe that your life and experience are other than that hypothetical logical system that I call your hypothetical life-experience-story.
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Just as I claim no “existence” or “reality” for abstract implications, so I claim no “existence” or “reality” for the complex systems of them, including your hypothetical life-experience-story.
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Each of the infinitely-many complex systems of inter-referring abstract implications about hypothetical propositions about hypothetical things is quite entirely separate, independent and isolated from anything else in the describable realm, including the other such logical systems.
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Each neither has nor needs any reality or existence in any context other than its own local inter-referring context.
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Any “fact” in this physical world implies and corresponds to an implication.
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“There’s a traffic-roundabout at the intersection of 34th & Vine.”
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“If you go to 34th & Vine, you’ll encounter, there, a traffic-roundabout.”
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Every “fact” in this physical world can be regarded as a proposition that is at least part of the antecedent of some implications, and is the consequent of other implications.
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For example:
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A set of hypothetical physical quantity-values, and a hypothetical relation among them (called a “physical hypothesis, theory or law) together comprise the antecedent of a hypothetical implication.
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…except that one of those hypothetical physical quantity-values can be taken as the consequent of that implication.
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A true mathematical theorem is an implication whose antecedent includes at least a set of mathematical axioms.
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Instead of one world of “Is”…
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…infinitely-many worlds of “If”.
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We’re used to declarative, indicative, grammar because it’s convenient. But conditional grammar adequately describes our physical world. We tend to unduly believe our grammar.
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You, as the protagonist of your hypothetical life-experience-story, are complementary with your experiences and surroundings in that story. You and they comprise the two complementary parts of that hypothetical story.
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By definition that story is about your experience. It’s for you, and you’re central to it. It wouldn’t be an experience-story without you. So I suggest that Consciousness is primary in the describable realm, or at least in its own part(s) of it.
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That’s why I say that you’re the reason why you’re in a life. It has nothing to do with your parents, who were only part of the overall physical mechanism in the context of this physical world. Of course consistency in your story requires that there be evidence of a physical mechanism for the origin of the physical animal that you are.
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Among the infinity of hypothetical life-experience-stories, there timelessly is one with you as protagonist. That protagonist, with his inclinations and predispositions, his “Will to Life”, is why you’re in a life.
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The requirement for an experience-story is that it be consistent. …because there are no such things as inconsistent facts, even abstract ones.
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Obviously a person’s experience isn’t just about logic and mathematics. But your story’s requirement for consistency requires that the physical events and things in the physical world that you experience are consistent. That inevitably brings logic into your story.
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And of course, if you closely examine the physical world and is workings, then the mathematical relations in the physical world will be part of your experience. …as they also are when you read about what physicists have found by such close examinations of sthe physical world and its workings.
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There have been times when new physical observations seemed inconsistent with existing physical laws. Again and again, newly discovered physical laws showed a consistent system of which the previously seemingly-inconsistent observations are part. But of course there remain physical observations that still aren’t explained by currently-known physical law. Previous experience suggests that those observations, too, at least potentially, will be encompassed by new physics.
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Likely, physical explanations consisting of physical things and laws that, themselves, will later be explained by newly-discovered physical things and laws, will be an endless open-ended process…at least until such time as, maybe, further examination will be thwarted by inaccessibly small regions, large regions, or high energies. …even though that open-ended explanation is there in principle.
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Question time:
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1. If you think that this physical world is other than, or more than, what I’ve described it as—If you believe that this physical universe is “objectively existent” or “objectively real” or “actual” or “substantial” or “substantive” in a way that the physical world as I’ve described it…
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…(as the setting of your hypothetical life-experience story, which is a complex system of inter-referring abstract implications about hypothetical propositions about hypothetical things, with one of the many consistent configurations of mutually-consistent hypothetical truth-values for those hypothetical propositions)…
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…isnt, then what do you mean by “”objectively existent”, “objectively real”, “actual”, “substantial”, or “substantive”?
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2. In what context, other than its own, or the context of our lives, do you want or believe this physical universe to be real &/or existent?
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These discussions always end with the other person not answering these questions.
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Michael Ossipoff
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It is not relevant to our present discussion, but by "spiritual" here I mean a reality with no intrinsic dependence on matter.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
All I am saying is that many things can be real (and natural) without being measurable. Qualia, intentions and the laws of nature are a few examples God is a special case. God is inseparable from nature, but not part of nature because nature is ontologically finite, and God is not. So, God is operative in nature, and natural in that sense, but not natural in the sense of being part of nature. Abstractions are human thoughts and so quite natural, though immaterial.
Please note that I am not a materialist. I think that there are intrinsically immaterial realities, such as God, with no dependence on material reality.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Just to be clear, I distinguish faith and reason, and see philosophy as dealing with what can be known by reason independently of faith.
At the same time, I think faith is real, have reflected a great deal about, it, grace, inspiration and related topics. While I would be glad to share my thoughts on these matters, I consider these reflections part of Sacred (as opposed to Natural) Theology and not part of philosophy. So, yes, I think that we can be aware of the presence of God within, but I don't think that is grist for the philosophical mill.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I see no reason to forget about nature and the natural world. While they are not the whole of reality, they are certainly an important part of it. If one is interested in knowing God, much can be learned from studying his handiwork.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
No. That is not it as all. Think about how inference works. It does not create new information. It makes new connections between old information. So, If the object's existence was not already immanent in my experience, no amount of inference could inform me it exists. The very fact that the object is acting to inform me shows that it exists. How it informs me is a partial revelation of what it is -- a thing that can inform me in this way.
Experiencing is entering into a subject-object relation. Without an object, such a relation is impossible. I, as subject, bring awareness to the table. The object brings an intelligibility that will become the contents of my consciousness when I am aware of it. My being informed by the object is identically the object informing me. This Identity prevents any separation of subject and object. So there is no need to bridge a gap by some inference.
There may be incidental inference. I may decide that this object is like others I've experienced and infer properties I'm not experiencing, but filling-in gaps is not the subject-object relation of experience. It is a separate, second movement of thought.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Every line of argument needs unproven premises; however, "unproven" does not have to mean "unknown." As I have just explained, there is no separation between me being informed by the object, and the object informing me. Experience provides us with our known, but unproven premises. The analysis of experience does not prove it, but it does remove rational grounds for doubt. The lack of dynamical separation between object informing and the subject being informed removes any need for mediation or inference.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
There is no hypothesis. Hypotheses bridge ignorance. I have no need for such a bridge when apples act to inform me whenever I encounter them.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
This argument is inconsistent with your worldview. How can you know that we are animals in need of food except by experience? It is perfectly self-consistent to be a being without need of food.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
My point is not terminological, but epistemological. Saying that we only know our ideas is simply wrong -- and wrong precisely because it confuses signs that must be known in themselves before they can signify with ideas that have no reality beyond signifying.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Actually, I have a doctorate in theoretical physics and continue to work on its foundations -- specifically the foundations of quantum theory.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I know it is objective in all contexts.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
There is no reason to think the quaterback's choice does not modify the laws of nature and many reasons to think it does.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Thank you for sharing your faith in physics. Do you have an argument to back it up?
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Agreed.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I could not possibly be a theist and a materialist. As It happens, I am not a substance dualist either. I am a moderate realist who thinks that there are physical and and intentional acts by substances that are ostensible unities.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Certainly God is not.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
We are physical and intentional beings.
What about infinite degrees of freedom, or treating a photon as an observer? Do you subscribe to MWI or believe the wavefunction collapses?
I have not heard of treating a photon as an observer.
No, I think the MWI is based on an error (thinking the bulk matter of the brain is subject to linear dynamics, just like quanta in isolation).
Yes, I think the wave function collapses because detectors are made of bulk matter and buk matter has nonlinear dynamics that cannot support super positions.
I think this requires argument. You need to say why some propositions only are hypothetical, and what it is to be true. If you refuse to specify what you mean by truth, then how can anyone know if they agree or disagree with you?
Also, why do you refrain from saying what experience exists? What do you man by "existing"?
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
More fundamentally, it corresponds to a possible human experience. I only "encounter" the roundabout because I experience it. This makes experience fundamental.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
What if the axioms are false? How would we know they are true or false?
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Why should I waste my time on worlds that do not exist?
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
We use such grammar because it expresses what we actually think. Your conjecture that life is hypothetical is not what most people actually think. So, the burden is on you to convince us that what we think is wrong.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
How would you describe consciousness? (I do not mean the contents of consciousness, but that which makes us aware of those contents.)
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I think it would be consistent, but false, to say I had no parents. It is only because we know what is true from experience that we know (not hypothesize) that we have parents.
I am happy to answer your questions.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
By existent, I mean able to act in any way. Objects (potentially or actually) are one pole of the subject- object relation we call knowing. To be an object is to be able to inform a subject -- in other words, to be intelligible. To be a subject is to be able to be aware of intelligibility.
A substance is an ostensible unity. As such, it has various notes of intelligibility that we can predicate of it.
Actual means operative -- able to act at the present time. It is opposed to potential, which means immanent, but not yet operative. It is also opposed to fictional, which means that the corresponding idea has a sense or meaning, but no operative referent.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
It is not a matter of my wanting or believing that the physical universe is operative. I am directly aware that it operates on me to inform me that it is and what it is -- whether I want it to or not, and whether I choose to believe it or not. So, its reality is not context dependent.
(This is just a brief preliminary reply. I'll be replying to both of your recent posts}.
Quoting Dfpolis
When I say that our experience-stories consist of complex systems of inter-referring abstract implications about hypothetical propositions about hypothetical things, with one of the many consistent configurations of mutually-consistent hypothetical truth-values for those hypothetical propositions...
...I should add that there's no reason to believe that any of the antecedents of any particular ones of those implications are true.
You mean other than because you live in one?
You don't really have whole lot of choice in the matter right now.
Anyway, of course there isn't any time other than in the physical worlds.
(As I said, I'll be replying to your two recent posts today.)
Michael Ossipoff
This is not a complete sentence. You may wish to edit it.
I will note for the present that Godel has shown that claims of consistency for arithmetic. and systems that can be arithmetically represented, cannot be proven. So, you philosophy has a very shaky foundation if it is based on the assumption of self-consistency. By way of contrast, the consistency of realism is based on the fact that one cannot instantiate a contradiction. So, as long as we abstract our principles from reality, they are guaranteed to be self-consistent.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I live in a world that is actual, not hypothetical. I know it is actual because it acts to inform me. By way of contrast, I am the one informing hypothetical worlds.
I look forward to your fuller response.
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Well, I don’t know what it means to say that God isn’t natural, but we can agree to disagree about that.
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But of course it’s just that we don’t mean the same thing by “natural”. I don’t know what you mean by it. But, as I said, there’s no need to use Materialist (“Naturalist”) terminology. You aren’t a “Naturalist”, are you?
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“Natural”, “natural world” and “nature” have big definitional ambiguity. That’s why I don’t use, or recommend the use of, those words. But of course they’re really popular with Materialists.
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Agreed.
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Yes, I don’t regard it as a matter of assertion, argument, debate or proof.
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I merely suggest that words like “nature” and “the natural world” aren’t clearly defined. It would be better say “this physical universe”, if that’s what you mean.
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Your use of Materialist language is why I thought you were a Materialist.
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Right, your inference is about the nature of what you experience. …an inference that this physical world that you experience has objective existence (whatever that would mean).
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…in the context of your life, your life-experience story. Of course.
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You, an experiencer, a protagonist, and your surroundings that you experience, are a complementary pair, in your hypothetical life-experience story, a complex logical system.
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The physical world is as it was taught to us in pre-secondary-school science-courses.
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…including what I said about our being biologically-originated purposefully-responsive devices.
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I meant no disparagement of what we are, when I described us in that way. It’s just that the physical world, including us animals, is basically as it was taught to us.
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But, along with the Materialists, you want to make a metaphysics of that. You want to make this physical universe a metaphysical brute-fact.
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There’s a metaphysics that doesn’t have or need a brute-fact. I’ve been describing and proposing it in these forums.
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I recognize that intuition rebels against a suggestion that all that’s describable is just hypothetical. But there’s no physics-experiment that can establish otherwise. There’s no reason to believe that your experience isn’t a hypothetical story.
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You comment on that metaphysics in your subsequent post, and I’ll reply to it after posting this reply.
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You encounter them in your experience-story. You aren’t a Materialist, but, like the Materialists, you want to believe in the solid fundamental objective existence of this physical world, whatever that would mean.
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I emphasize that I, as a Theist, don’t have any quarrel with a Theist. My quarrel is with Materialists and aggressive Atheists. We don’t agree on describable metaphysics, but, because you’re a Theist, I don’t have a significant quarrel with you.
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The fundamentally, objectively, existent physical world that you claim, amounts to positing a brute-fact.
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Just as the formation of the galaxies and this solar-system, and of the Earth, and the evolution of our species, didn’t need contravention of physical law, so likewise, I don’t think that God needed the use of a brute-fact to make there be the describable metaphysical world, or this physical universe, which is part of it.
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In fact:
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It’s my impression, largely from metaphysics, that Reality, what-is, is good. …and that there’s good intent behind what-is. …and that Reality is benevolence itself.
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But that doesn’t necessarily mean that God is responsible for there being the describable metaphysical world. That sounds like an oversimplification of something unknowable. I don’t claim to know the relation between Reality as a whole, and the describable metaphysical world of hypothetical propositions and abstract implications.
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The Good Intent regarding what there is could be taken to imply that that Benevolence made there be the describable world of abstract implications, but that sounds to me like an oversimplification of a matter that I don’t claim to know about.
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Couldn’t the abstract logical systems, including the one that’s an experience-story with you as protagonist, just inevitably spontaneously be (in whatever sense they are), even though Reality is Good Intent?
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Because you’re the protagonist of your hypothetical life-experience-story, it can be said that you’re spontaneously in a life because of yourself. … though Benevolence is the character and nature of Reality, and, in fact, is Reality itself.
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(I don’t say all this in the aggressive-Atheists’ argument -threads, because, there, it would amount to arguing about a matter that I don’t regard as a matter for assertion, argument, debate, or proof.)
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You aren’t an anti-evolutionist, are you?
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How could there be animals that wouldn’t need food? Even if they got their energy as solar energy, where would they get the material that is needed for growth and reproduction? Material taken in and used by animals is called “food”.
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How would such an animal grow and reproduce without taking-in material?
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I said that our experience is the basis of what we know about our surroundings. You’re making inferences, assumptions, about the nature of your surroundings.
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I don’t know the meaning of that terminology. I haven’t read the author that you’ve referred to.
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…such as…?
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Name one.
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Each of us, as an animal in this physical world, is part of this physical world, and thereby inevitably influences it. Each of us influences this physical world. …but not by changing its physical laws.
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You’re welcome.
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There have observations that were contrary to physical understanding at the time of the observations, but, typically, new physics encompassed those observations.
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The relation between the energy and wavelength of black-body radiation; the result of the Michaelson-Morely experiment; the seemingly anomalous component of the rotation-of-apsides of the orbit of the planet Mercury are a few examples. Those seeming anomalies were explained by subsequent physics. Now there’s the acceleration of the recessional speed of distant galaxies that calls for explanation. The progress of physics has been like that.
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When there’s a seeming contravention of physical law, it’s likely due to the incompleteness of current physics.
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See above. I don’t know what there is to “back up” about physics, other than that it’s been useful in describing the relations among the things and events of the physical world.
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Next I’ll reply to your subsequent post.
(...after a brief reply to something that you've just now posted.)
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Michael Ossipoff
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Of course not. That’s why it ends in an ellipsis (“…”) instead of in a period.
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But:
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“When I say that our experience-stories consist of complex systems of inter-referring abstract implications about hypothetical propositions about hypothetical things, with one of the many consistent configurations of mutually-consistent hypothetical truth-values for those hypothetical propositions...
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...I should add that there's no reason to believe that any of the antecedents of any particular ones of those implications are true.”
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…is a complete sentence.
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Jamming those clauses together wouldn’t have helped clarity.
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Godel showed that, in any logical system complex enough to have arithmetic, there are true propositions that can’t be proven.
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He didn’t show that there are mutually-inconsistent, mutually-contradictory, facts; or that there are propositions that are both true and false.
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See above. Your life-experience story is self-consistent because there are no mutually-inconsistent facts, or propositions that are both true and false.
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I didn’t say that Realism is inconsistent. But your experience is subjective, and is described by a subjective experience-story, and not by an objective world-story.
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Not only can one not physically instantiate a contradiction, but there can’t even be mutually-contradictory facts. It would be meaningless, tautologically self-contradictory, to speak of them.
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Say it how you want, but logic is only part of Reality.
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But I think we agree that your experience can’t be inconsistent.
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Of course, if we use the following useful definition of “actual”:
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“Consisting of, or part of, the physical world in which the speaker resides.”
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If you mean something else by “actual”, then I invite you to say what else you mean by it.
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You say that, and it’s the prevailing belief. But, as I’ve been saying, there’s no physics-experiment that can establish, or even imply or suggest, that this physical world is other than the setting for your hypothetical life-exeperience-story, consisting of a complex system of inter-referring abstract facts about hypothetical propositions about hypothetical things.
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That’s why, in 1840, physicist Michael Faraday pointed out that there’s no reason to believe that this physical world consists of other than a system of mathematical and logical structural-relation. …with the Materialists’ objectively-existent “stuff “ being no more real or necessary than phlogiston.
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Of course…in your experience-story.
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Next, I’ll reply to your posting in which you comment on my metaphysics (the posting that immediately preceded the posting that I’m replying to now).
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Michael Ossipoff
It means that God, while operative in nature, transcends nature, and so is not a part of nature.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
By "nature" I mean all physically observable existents and their dynamics -- and as I said before, by an "existent," I mean anything that can act in any way. By "dynamics" I mean the principles guiding observable change.
While I am not a naturalist, I see no need to avoid an well-defined terminology. It is a type of genetic fallacy because it may have originated with some group with whom we may disagree. Nonetheless, I do not thnk that most of the language I use with respect to physical reality so originates.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I have said what it means to exist -- it is the ability to act in any way. So, whatever exists with respect to anything, exists simpliciter. I think we have exhausted the topic of "inferring" reality. You have not responded to the points I have made, so there is no point in my repeating them.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Exactly, and truth is the adequacy of what we think to what is. Case closed.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I don't even know why you are saying this. I see the physical universe as contingent at every point of space-time and so in need of a concurrent explanation. Further, I see the line of concurrent explanation terminating in a necessary, self-explaining being, commonly called God. So, I see no brute facts, and consider the very concept of a brute fact antithetical to science. Please do not persist in giving a false account of my position.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I didn't think you were a logical positivist or a physicalist. We both know that physics is not the only approach to truth. I have explained why there is no dynamic separation between subjects and their objects and how experience links them by a partial identity. You have chosen not to dispute my analysis.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I am happy to agree with you here.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I accept the science of evolution while rejecting the naturalist spin on evolution as an example of order emerging from mindless randomness. That is not the point. Evolution is known by reflecting on our experience of reality. As you think experience does not give us reality, you have no reason to believe that we are animals, let alone evolved animals.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
How do you know any of this, except by experience? Besides, if your life is one hypothetical story, and mine quite another, there is no reason for us to have any common experience or share any common knowledge or beliefs. What makes it possible for us to communicate is that we share the same objective reality. Absent that, why should we have any common ground?
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Of course I am, but their existence and their capacity to inform me are not among my inferences.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
That is why I explained the difference to you. Ideas do not need to be know before they can signify. Other kinds of signs do. Since we do not first know we have an idea of x, we can't infer the existence of x from "I have an idea of x." Instead it works the other way. We know x (by experience) and then infer that to know x I must have an idea of x. If you want a reference, look at Henry Veatch, Intentional Logic.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
In the context of the lived world, science, philosophy, theology, human relations, morality, etc, etc."
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
1. Physical acts are consequent on intentional commitments. If physics applied invariantly, what we thought could not result in physical effects.
2. The causal invariant in intentional actions is the goal (which is intentional) not a physical trajectory. When I decide to go to the store, I may envision a path, but if the preplanned path is blocked, I will find another to attain my goal. Mechanism is backward looking, teleology forward looking. So, my goal rather than my physical trajectory determines by motion.
3. It has been experimentally confirmed, beyond a statistical doubt, that human intentional can modify "random" physical processes.
4. On the other side, as I have argued in many posts on this forum, the fundamental abstraction of physics limits is realm of application to purely physical objects -- excluding any operations of the intending subject. So, we have no reason to expect that human acts of will are adequately described by physics.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
This is self-contradictory. If the laws are unmodified by human action, the state of the world before we are conceived, together with the laws of nature, determine all future states. If future states are fully determined before we exist, we can have no influence on them
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
What needs justification is the application of physics outside of its verified realm of application, viz. its application to human intentionality. Physics has nothing to say about meaning or intent because they are not part of its ontology. (By the ontology of physics I mean the things it deals with such as space, time, mass, fields and dynamical laws.)
I still do not know what you mean by "describable" in "describable metaphysics."
Then there is no point in proceeding, as I am engaged in the search for truth. I have no interest in hypotheticals that explain posits that might not even be true to begin with.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
He showed many things. The inability to prove consistency is one of them. It ended Hilbert's program of deriving math from logic. The inability to prove consistency means that there is no justification for assuming your hypothetical life stories are consistent. If they can be inconsistent, why should I give them any credence?
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Wy point is this is an unjustified faith claim. Perhaps part of my Hypothetical Life Story (HLS) assumes I did something that violates the laws of physics (which you think is impossible). For example, in my HLS, I may have made a decision which I think was free and you think is precluded by the laws of physics. Wouldn't that be an implicit contradiction for you? Or in my HLS I visit a glacier that should not have existed given how global warming works in my HLS. You see, contradictions need not be blatant, they can be subtle. So, it is important to have some justification for thinking that a HLS is self-consistent. As a result of Godel's work there can be none.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
My point is not that realism is consistent, but that there is an ontological justification for its consistency, while there is none for your HLSs.
As for subjectivity, all knowledge is both subjective and objective. There is no knowing without both a knowing subject and a known object. I am happy to agree that experience is subjective because that is not an argument against it also being objective.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Good. But, why do you think this? I think it's consistent because I see it as an experience of being. What do you think is the reason for its consistency?
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Or if we say that something is actual if it can act in any way. In either case, I do not live in a world that does not exist -- as you suggested.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Faraday was a great physicist, but that did not qualify him as a philosopher. Mathematics is an abstraction that cannot be applied unless there is something beyond itself to apply it to. It is what the abstract relations describe (that in which they are instantiated) that Faraday forgot.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I do not disown my experience, but I'm making two additional points (1) In acting to inform me, objects act and so meet the condition to exist simpliciter, (2) if we did not share common experiences, we could not communicate.
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Well, when I say that there’s no reason to believe something, then the burden is on someone who disagrees, to produce a reason to believe it.
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The hypothetical propositions that I speak of when describing my metaphysics are hypothetical because they’re about hypothetical things (…with no reason to believe that any of those things exist or are real). Also, the propositions are hypothetical because I make no claim that any of them are true. In fact, I suggest that none of them are true. The things are hypothetical because I make no claim that any of them exist or are real (...whatever that would mean).
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If none of the propositions are true, and none of the things that the propositions are about are real or existent, then what is true about the logical system that I describe? The abstract implications are true. The truth of an implication doesn’t require that its antecedent or consequent proposition be true.
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(But actually, it’s a bit sloppy and circular for me to speak of an implication (an implying of one proposition by another, and a fact, by virtue of being a state-of-affairs or a relation among things) as true, because I define truth value as a property of propositions, not of facts. By my definition of “proposition”, a proposition is true if and only if it’s a fact.)
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An implication says only that if one proposition were true, the other would be true. That doesn’t say anything about whether any of them really are true.
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I mean what we all mean by “true”. Here’s a way to say it: A proposition is true if it’s a fact—a state-of-affairs or a relation among things.
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Truth is the property of having a truth value of “True”.
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Things are what are describable and can be referred to.
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A fact is a state-of-affairs or a relation among things.
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A proposition is a thing that has a property called a truth-value (which can consist of True or False), and has a truth-value of True if and only if it is a fact.
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(You could call it a “false proposition”, a proposition with a truth-value of “False,” if it purports to be, but isn’t a fact, as defined above.)
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I never meant to imply that my meaning for “truth” or “true” was any different from how others here mean those words.
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If I’d been using a nonstandard meaning, I’d have said so.
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See directly below:
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I don’t mean anything by it. The only time I use the word “exist” or “real” is when I say that I don’t claim that abstract implications are real or existent.
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I say that there are abstract implications only in the limited sense that we can mention and refer to them.
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I make no claim that anything in the describable realm is real or existent.
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(What’s the describable realm? It’s the set of all that can be described. That includes this physical world.)
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That’s right. Exactly. Experience is what’s fundamental in these stories. Your HLES (Hypothetical Life Experience-Story) is about your experience. It’s for you. The only way logic enters into it is via the fact that your HLES must be consistent, because there are no such things as mutually-inconsistent facts, or propositions that are both true and false.
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But yes, as you said, experience is what it’s about.
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Exactly.
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The theorems using them are valid whether the axioms are true or not, just as the abstract implications that I refer to are genuine facts whether or not any of their antecedents are true. What does it mean for a mathematical axiom to be true? Only that it makes useful to us, whatever kind of mathematics it’s about (arithmetic of real numbers or positive-integers, or practical plane-geometry, or some operation on some group, etc.)…only that it makes that kind of mathematics useful to represent or describe what we want it to represent or describe.
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In that sense, we could call an axiom “false” if the use of it results in a mathematics that doesn’t represent or describe what we want it to represent or describe.
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I answered that in my “brief preliminary reply”. You’re in a life in this physical world, and so right now you don’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter.
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And people at this forum are here because they’re interested in philosophy.
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Yes, I recognize that. I’m suggesting that the metaphysical basis for our life and physical surroundings is a lot more tenuous than most people at these forums think.
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But no, it isn’t a conjecture. I merely stated that the uncontroversial fact that there are those abstract implications (in the sense that we can mention and refer to them), and complex systems of inter-referring abstract implications about hypothetical propositions about hypothetical things, and that one such system inevitably, with suitable naming of its propositions and things, has the same description as the physical world of your experience--and that there’s no reason to believe that this physical world is more than or other than the setting for your hypothetical life-experience story. For example, there’s no physics experiment that can prove, establish, imply or suggest that.
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Declarative, indicative grammar is undeniably useful in communication. As I said, there’s a tendency to too readily believe our grammar.
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Well, as I’ve said, if I say that there’s no reason to believe something, and someone else says there is, then the burden is on him, to produce a reason to believe it.
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My way of trying to convince you is by asking you questions about what you mean, when you express disbelief, or advocate a different metaphysics.
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But, even if I can’t convince people, I’m interested in how they answer the questions.
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By it, I’m referring to the experiencer, the protagonist, of a hypothetical life experience story (HLES). We’re central and primary to our HLES.
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Yes, our parents are part of the physical mechanism that our experience-story must include evidence of, in order to be consistent with our own presence in this physical universe.
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…in keeping with the HLES’s only requirement: Consistency.
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Alright, then the physical world, even as I describe it, as the setting of your hypothetical experience-story, is existent by your definition, because it acts, in your experience-story.
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That sounds similar to what I said, when I said that you and your physical surroundings are the two complementary parts of your experience-story.
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Then the physical world as I describe it, as the setting of your hypothetical experience-story, is actual by your definition, because it operates, in your experience-story.
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And so existence and actuality don’t distinguish your physical world from the hypothetical one that I describe.
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But now maybe you’re saying that your physical world is different from what I describe, by your physical world being not-merely-potential, and not-fictional.
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But then you’ve just substituted those terms for “actual”, and I again ask you what you mean by them.
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What does it mean to say that this physical world, as you believe it to be, is more-than-potential and not-fictional?
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As for “fictional”, the abstract implications that I spoke of aren’t fictional. As I said, there are those, in the sense that they can be mentioned and referred to.
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You seem to be saying that your physical world is more than the one that I describe, by being more than the one that I describe.
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Of course. It does all that in your experience-story. None of that is inconsistent with it being the setting of your experience-story, and none of that says anything about the objective reality or existence (whatever that would mean) of that system.
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What you said directly above amounts to saying that you experience this physical world. Of course you do, but that’s consistent with it being the setting for your experience-story. But its objective reality or existence (reality or existence in a larger context that bestows objective existence or reality), or else its status as the ultimate-reality, you have yet to establish or specify.
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And, as is becoming evident now, “reality” and “existence” aren’t really so easy to define.
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I emphasize that, as I said, few here agree that life and the physical world have the tenuous metaphysical basis that I describe. I don’t say that you should agree. I don’t mean to badger you about it or criticize you if you don’t agree. I’m merely answering questions about my position.
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(Actually, a participant here called Litewave has said things that agree with the metaphysics that I describe.)
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Michael Ossipoff
This is just a brief preliminary reply that I'd like to post now, before I answer the rest of this post (I'm answering your posts in chronological order, roughly one per day>
Quoting Dfpolis
No, Faraday was well aware of that assumption. He pointed out that it is without evidentiary support.
Michael Ossipoff
Sorry. I didn't mean that.
I didn't mean to say that you believe that this physical universe is a brute-fact. I just meant that you're saying that, as seen from within the describable world, it looks like a brute-fact. In other words, you're saying that this physical universe, an object in the describable realm, has no explanation within the describable realm, and can only be explained from outside the describable realm.
I claim that the describable realm is, with respect to its own terms, self-explanatory. Just as physics explains the relations among physical things, so likewise, describable metaphysics explains the describable realm. The whole describable realm is self-explanatory and self-consistent. It's about itself.
Yes, the describable realm isn't all of Reality. I've suggested that Reality is Benevolence itself. The describable realm is obviously part of Reality, and I think we'd agree that it's something of a lower subset of Reality.
But it's a subset that, as property of what it is and how it works, is self-generating as seen from within it (as a hypothetical experience-story, governed by a requirement for self-consistence, whch implies abstract implications and complex systems of them).. That isn't inconsistent with my suggestion that Reality is Benevolence.
It goes without saying that I don't claim to know the "how" of that Benevolence, or what or how is the influence of Reality on us in the describable realm. That it isn't explainable or knowable. It's meaningless to speak of the "how" of influence other than within the describable realm. Reality just isn't knowable.
To be continued...
Michael Ossipoff
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I’ve answered them, but maybe I haven’t answered them clearly enough. So let me make another try:
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Your life-experience-story is the story of the experiences in your life. In that experience-story, you experience things that act. You experience things that act on you and inform you. That’s the nature of your experience-story.
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The fact that you experience those things doesn’t mean that they have some kind of intrinsic independent reality or existence (whatever that would mean) other than in the context of your life-experience-story.
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This was the topic about which I answered in my “brief preliminary reply”.
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…because I’ve agreed with it. What you’re saying sounds like what I say, when I say that, your experience-story consists of two mutually-complementary parts: You the protagonist and experiencer, and your surroundings that you experience.
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”If there hadn’t been apples, it would have been something else edible, because we animals couldn’t live without edible things” — Michael Ossipoff
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This argument is inconsistent with your worldview. How can you know that we are animals in need of food except by experience?
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You’re right—Only by experience.
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Undeniably. And our experience must be consistent. Maybe you could devise a consistent physical world in which animals can grow without taking in material, and act without receiving energy. But for us to be able to do those things would not be consistent with the other physics that our physicists have reported observing.
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In other words, our experience is not of, and would be inconsistent with, our not needing to take in any sort of material from our environment.
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It sounds like there isn’t any disagreement there.
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There’s no reason to believe that the physical world that we experience has its own intrinsic, objective, absolute reality (whatever that would mean). But of course there’s the reality ( with lower-case “r”) of our experience and our physical world. Our life and world are quite real in their own contexts.
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In our experience-story, of course we are. All the evidence in that consistent story indicates that.
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How would such an animal grow and reproduce without taking-in material? — Michael Ossipoff
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Not so.
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Your being in this physical world requires for, consistency, that there be a physical mechanism for your physical origination. That mechanism consists of there being a species on this planet, of which you’re a member. …implying that there will be other members of that species on the planet. So there’s no reason to be surprised that there are other people, basically similar to you, and sharing your world.
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That’s right. Your inference is from the ability of things in your experience story to inform you. …something not at all inconsistent with an experience-story.
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I don’t know about ideas knowing and signifying, or about inferring x from an idea of x. On such matters, I’ll defer to Henry Veatch.
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But, as I said, consistency is the requirement for your experience-story, because there can be no such things as mutually inconsistent facts. In the story, something comes into our experience. Subsequent experience won’t prove inconsistent with it, do that one requirement of an experience-story.
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I don’t disagree with what Veatch is saying, at least that I’m aware of.
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What we choose to do is the result of our preferences and our surroundings. The same can be said of a Roomba, if you substitute “programming” for “preferences”.
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We’re physical animals, purposefully-responsive devices, with built-in purposes and inclinations, and acquired purposes resulting from those built-in purposes and inclinations and our experiences of our surroundings. Our choices result from those purposes and inclinations, and from our surroundings.
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You don’t have “free will”. Your choices are made for you by your preferences and your surroundings. Your job is merely to judge what choice will best serve those preferences, based on your surroundings.
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But you can and do affect this physical world, by virtue of being part of it.
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..and that doesn’t entail any violation of, or changing of, physical laws.
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No, because of QM’s indeterminacy.
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But that’s beside the point. My answer to your objection is as written directly above in this post.
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But yes, our choices are determined by our preferences and our surroundings, as I described directly above.
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Humans are animals, physical, biologically-originated, purposefully-responsive devices.
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…which apply to the things and events in this physical world, including animals and other purposefully-responsive devices.
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I’m not saying that physics can tell us what kind of candy-bar you’re going to buy tomorrow. Not in practice, at least. But it’s known (and we all knew it when taught it in pre-secondary-school, though many philosophers seem to have forgotten it) that the operation of animals, as purposefully-responsive devices, is physically-explained.
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Nothing exotic or surprising. Just “able to be described”.
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We’ve agreed that not all is describable. Surely we agree that some things are, such as this physical world and the relations among its things and events.
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When I say “metaphysics”, I mean the metaphysics of things that are describable. Some people want “metaphysics” to have a much broader, much more ambitious meaning. I feel that that’s overambitious for philosophy. But, because some people want “metaphysics” to have that broader meaning, not limited to what’s describable, so I speak of “describable metaphysics”, or “the metaphysics of the describable.”
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Michael Ossipoff
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But I suggest that an intrinsically, independently existent physical world is fiction, not truth.
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Then what’s true about this physical world, and the describable realm in general? The abstract-implications are facts. That’s something factual. If labeled as propositions, they’d be true propositions. That’s where there’s objective metaphysical truth in the describable realm.
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I’m not picking on you or singling you out. The Materialists, too, want to believe in an objective, intrinsic, independent “existence” and “reality” (whatever that would mean) for this physical world. I suggest that this physical world’s metaphysical basis is much more tenuous. …different from what we traditionally have been taught to assume.
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This isn’t physics. It’s metaphysics. Don’t expect or assume concrete, objective, intrinsic, independent “existence” and “reality” for the things of the physical world, just because, as animals, we’re designed to deal with the physical world rather than investigate metaphysics. We still have to deal with it, of course, but we don’t have to believe the traditional notion of it.
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Even in physics, there have been times when fact is drastically different from previous assumption (relativity & QM, for example). Why expect metaphysics to be more tradition-adhering?
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Consistency doesn’t even need proving. It’s a tautology, a truism.
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“A proposition can’t be both true and false” can be worded as:
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“A proposition isn’t be true if it’s not true.”
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That’s a tautology.
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I don’t know what Godel proved, other than that any logical system complex enough to have arithmetic has true but unprovable propositions. But he certainly didn’t prove that consistency is unprovable (except maybe in the sense that tautologies don’t need any proof).
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Obviously it can’t be proven that future physics observations will be consistent with today’s known physics. In fact it’s pretty much a sure thing that it won’t.
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Is that the kind of consistency that he was referring? …or just the possible existence of true but unprovable propositions in any logical system complex enough to have arithmetic?
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In any case, whether or not you agree that logical systems have to be consistent, you’ll agree that they have to be at least as consistent as a person’s life-experience has to be. And, if so, even if you’re right about consistency being unprovable, that doesn’t count against Ontic Structural Subjective Idealism.
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If there’s a seeming violation of the laws of physics, if there’s a violation of today’s laws of physics, then they aren’t laws of physics anymore. Usually, when that happens, subsequent physics will explain and encompass those previously seemingly anomalous observations.
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For example, that was the case with the relation between black-body radiations wavelength and energy; the result of the Michaelson-Morely experiment; an the seemingly anomalous component of the rotation-of-apsides of the orbit of the planet Mercury.
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No, I don’t know of decisions that are precluded by the laws of physics. …unless you’re talking about a decision that required information not available to you. Say you found out via clairavoyance that there’s a 20-dollar bill on your roof, and so you decide to go up and retrieve it. If there’s no bill there, there certainly was no violation of laws of physics. If there’s a bill there, but your clairavoyant believe that it was there was entirely coincidental with its being there, then that, too isn’t a violation of laws of physics.
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If that happened, no one can prove that your accurate clairavoyance wasn’t a coincidence, so no one can prove that laws of physics weren’t violated.
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Now, suppose that you proved that you can reliably tell what number someone has written on a paper that you haven’t been shown, or that you can reliably predict every Lotto number?
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That would be more convincing, especially as your uninterrupted series of successes increases.
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Does that prove that the laws of physics have been violated? No, not even then. It just means that the laws of physics weren’t what physicists thought that they were, and that they need updating, as has so often been the case in the past.
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No, for the above-stated reasons.
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Several possible explanations:
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1. A climate-theory needs revision. That would be very unlikely to require revision of a law of physics. (Of course you could conceivably observe something that would require revision of a physical law.)
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2. Your memory of that experience is mistaken. It’s known that memory isn’t entirely reliable. Ask crime-witnesses.
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3. You hallucinated.
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4. There was some sort of mirage.
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I and some other people saw a tall white cliff, across a bay. …where there is no cliff. We were observing a superior-mirage of the white beach, caused by a temperature-inversion.
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The justification is that “A proposition that’s not true isn’t true” is a tautology, and needs no proof.
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See above.
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There’s the logical justification that I’ve describe above.
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There’s nothing about experience that would be inconstant with the objects of your physical experience not having an intrinsic, independent objective concrete “existence”, whatever that would mean (I try to always qualify my use of “existence” in that way.).
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Faraday, Tippler and Tegmark said the same thing.
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Of course. Your experience of the objects in your experience isn’t at all inconsistent with it all being a hypothetical experience-story, such as I’ve described.
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Of course it isn’t. Parsimony is an argument against an independently, intrinsically, objectively and concretely existent physical world.
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We’ve discussed how I don’t claim that you postulate a brute-fact, but your metaphysics says that there can be an apparent brute-fact in the describable realm…something in the describable realm (like a physical universe) that has no explanation or reason within the describable realm.
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But there’s a metaphysics that doesn’t require such a thing.
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I asked you some questions about what you mean by “real”, “existent”, etc. If you’re sure that you’re satisfied with your answers, then alright.
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Because “There can’t be a true and false proposition” means:
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“A proposition that’s not true isn’t true”
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…and that’s a tautology, and, as such, doesn’t need any proof.
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See above.
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Of course. That’s a truism, by the way I define “actual”:
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“ Part of, or consisting of, the physical universe in which the speaker resides.”
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If you mean something else by “actual”, then of course my question is ‘What do you mean by “actual”.
If you’ve already answered that question, and if you’re really sure that you’re satisfied with your answer, then alright.
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Sure, and, by that definition, everything you experience is actual, because, in your HLEF, it acts on you in some way.
It all comes down to the matter of parsimony that I discussed above, and the matter of whether you’re completely sure that you’re satisfied with your answers to my questions.
I’ve been emphasizing that I can’t prove that the universe in which we reside isn’t your independently, intrinsically, objectively existent physical universe. I merely point out that it’s a metaphysical brute-fact in the sense that you’re positing something that can’t be explained within describable metaphysiscs. (I realize that what you posit isn’t a true brute-fact, without any explanation at all. –just not within describable metaphysics.
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I don’t make assertions using the word “exist”.
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I merely assert that there’s no reason to believe that this physical world has “existence” different from that of abstract-implications. There’s no physics experiment that can prove, establish, suggest or imply that it does.
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You can say that this physical universe exists, because it can act on you and inform you (which it would be able to do, as part of your hypothetical experience-story), but that’s an unsupported theory, and an unparsimonious one.
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As I answered in my “brief preliminary reply”, Faraday was well aware of that assumption, and he pointed out that there’s no reason to believe it.
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I didn’t mean to suggest that you should. It’s valid, as experience.
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Of course, and objects in your dream act on you in a dream, and, in the dream one often believes in the objective realtywhat seems to be happening, and the intrinsic, independent objective existence of the objects in the dream.
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I don’t deny that objects of this physical world act on you in your experience-story. And yes, of course they exist in the context of that story.
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Of course your experience of being in a physical world requires, for consistency, some mechanism for your physical origination in that physical world. In this case, that’s achieved by parents. …and, more broadly,by there being a species to which you belong. Of course there must be other members of that species, and of course they experience the same physical world that you experience, since they, like you, are part of that world.
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Among the infinity of HLEFs, there’s inevitably one for every one of the characters in your HLEF. But you don’t experience or directly-know their experience, of course. They’re there because, the consistency of your experience-story requires other members of your species to inhabit the planet on which you reside.
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Michael Ossipoff
Despite the negative phrasing, you are claiming "your life and experience are ... your hypothetical life-experience-story." By refusing to provide an argument in support of this peculiar view, you leave the impression that you have none.
On the realist side, I have provided a number of arguments that you have chosen not to respond to. So, There is no point in continuing to discuss a position that has no support with a person who will not respond to counter arguments.
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…only as wording for describing the metaphysics. I repeatedly emphasize that I can’t prove that it isn’t as Dfopolis says, or as Materialists say.
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I avoid claims or assertions that can’t be proved.
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That’s why merely I said “There’s no reason to believe [otherwise]”. That’s why I’ve repeated, so many, many times, that I can’t prove that Dfopolis’s objectively, intrinsically existent universe doesn’t exist, whatever that would mean. ...but that, if it did, it would be a fact in the describable-realm that isn’t explainable within the describable realm. …something that my metaphysics doesn’t posit.
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I’ve cited parsimony.
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But I’ve repeatedly admitted that I can’t prove that it isn’t the way that Dfopolis or the Materialists say it is.
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On the contrary, I’ve replied inline, point-by-point, to every word that Dfopolis has said in this discussion. I’ve patiently continued replying to various of his arguments when they’ve been endlessly-repeated.
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See above. I’ve patiently replied point-by-point to everything Dfopolis has being saying, and have patiently replied to much of it every time Dfopolis repeated it.
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But, very well, this conversation is concluded, with genuine finality, by agreement.
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…though I’ll finish replying to Dfopolis’s comments that I haven’t answered yet.
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I’m sorry that Dfopolis is so defensive and anger-filled.
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Michael Ossipoff