The Non-Physical
My concept of the non-physical is phenomena that cannot be detected by our senses and the scientific extensions of our senses and which cannot be explained by existing scientific paradigms. The non-physical is associated with our current state of scientific knowledge. For example, prior to the work of Maxwell and Hertz, electromagnetic radiation was non-physical, but became physical as a result of the knowledge that they generated. At the present time, self-aware consciousness is non-physical.
What is your concept of the non-physical?
What is your concept of the non-physical?
Comments (486)
A problem with using a definition based on spatiotemporal locations is that the wave function of quantum mechanics does not have a spatiotemporal location, so we then get embroiled in a common debate within QM about whether the wave function is 'physical'. This becomes even more stressed when we consider non-local interpretations of QM such as Bohm's with its pilot wave.
Another thing I like about the epistemological definition is that it makes it possible for everybody - materialists and supernaturalists alike - to agree that there are probably non-physical things.
You're describing something that possibly doesn't even exist. How does one provide evidence for things that our senses and scientific instruments can't get at? To ponder the existence of such things would be a waste of time.
Quoting johnpetrovic
This is related to the "supernatural" as science provided natural explanations for environmental phenomenon, the supernatural explanations were eventually abandoned.
This kind of description of "non-physical" is arbitrary and meaningless. By whose standards of scientific explanations are we measuring - 21st century humans? 15th century humans? Humans from 5,0000 BC? or aliens? If aliens have explained consciousness, doesn't that mean that consciousness is physical and we are simply ignorant - just as we were when we had our "supernatural" explanations?
I would have thought if a materialist agreed there were non-physical things then they would be abandoning materialism, wouldn’t they? Materialism means ‘there are no non-physical things’.
I would be very surprised if any of those kinds of philosophers accepted the reality of abstract objects. But I’m willing to be shown I am wrong.
Regarding conscience, it seems to be the physical thing that make possible the existence of non-physical things.
If I ever encounter a materialist, I refer them to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Then they are forced to join the physicalists.
I have never encountered the claim that the scientists working on e.m. radiation thought they were trying to understand something non-physical before. I just doesn't make sense.
I don't think I am misrepresenting physicalism too much by describing it as the metaphysical assertion that everything that is instantiated in Reality is physical. This includes everything we have discovered, and everything we have yet to discover.
There are actually more examples of entities that were once thought of as physical, but were discovered not to exist - the ether, flogiston, elan vital ...
Non-physical things we have discovered so far, are objects that only exist in symbolic form, such as the objects and necessary truths of mathematics.
As for the mathematical truths not yet discovered, then I am forced to conclude, by my preferred epistemology, that they already exist.
Unless you expand on what you mean by "physical" that description is unilluminatingly circular.
There is no question of physicalism
You are probably right, but I feel compelled to draw the distinction. Materialism seems to indicate that not only is everything constituted of mater interactions, but that is all there is.
Physicalism seems to admit, in accordance with the 2nd Law, that pattern is real, causal, and as fundamental as matter.
I think that is right. I was enrolled as an undergrad at UniSyd when he was head of ‘Traditional and Modern’ - in those days, the Philosophy department was split between that school [roughly, OxBridge positivism] and General [marxist and Pomo.] I was in the no-man’s land trying to understand enlightenment. I fairly soon as absconded to Comparative Religion which was far more congenial to my outlook [although I was always treated with utmost courtesy by everyone I learned from at that Department, and have very happy memories of it.]
Anyway, I never really studied Armstrong as I was of the view that ‘materialist theory of mind’ wouldn’t contain anything of interest. I have briefly perused some of the SEP entries on him in the years since, and see no reason to revise that opinion. [it is interesting that many of the prominent materialist philosophers are or were Australian; I suppose it might be connected with the generally secular and irreligious attitude of Australian society.]
That paper looks interesting, will look at it later.
Quoting tom
My view is that science doesn’t explain itself; the natural laws and regularities which science assumes and relies on, are not themselves explained by science. That is the sense in which they transcend science - they are the basis of scientific explanation, but are not themselves explained by science. It’s a bit of an Indian rope trick - the rope extends up to the clouds, we can’t really see what supports it, but, damn it, there it is.
Science doesn't assume or rely on any such inductive principle.
Bernard Williams once made a "joke" that whilst Australia wasn't the only place where materialist theories of mind were believed, it was the only place where they were true.
Science doesn't use induction or any other mythical principle.
I refer you to Logic of Scientific Discovery, by Karl Popper.
Quoting tom
Sorry, I think you may be confusing the 2nd Law with dialectical materialism.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
:lol: I studied near David Chalmers and asked him to come onto the old PF forums, but I can assure you that this is no joke.
That's quite funny. You, of course are completely confident in the definition of "metaphysical" or even "instantiated".
Try reading all of the post.
I'm quite familiar with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. It might be informative if you could use an inductive principle to derive it, though? I don't think dialectical materialism will help in this case.
I did try, and here's something else wrong with it:
You don't seem to understand how electromagnetic radiation was discovered. Maxwell gave us electromagnetic radiation as a new theoretical concept, Hertz gave us its empirical confirmation. Prior to Maxwell, physicists working in electricity and magnetism worked - like Maxwell - on electromagnetic fields. Maxwell brought together the previous work of those other physicists into "his" four field equations. It turned out that those equations have a solution which describes the wavelike propagation of electric and magnetic energy in a vacuum at the speed of light. After Maxwell's theoretical discovery/invention of electromagnetic radiation, that radiation became an object for physical research, and most famously Hertz's which culminated in confirmation of Maxwell's theory.
That's entirely consistent with the OP's suggestion that electromagnetic radiation is non-physical right up to the point where Maxwell's conceptual apparatus suggested its existence.
But in the end, Newton was right.
Some theories of mind claim that space-time only exists as a mental construction to help us make sense of the world. In this sense, the mind would be the only thing that gives rise to a spatiotemporal location. In this sense, the mind would be physical and everything else non-physical.
To say that what is physical vs. non-physical is what is explained vs. what isn't is just referring to our own ignorance. There are physical things that have been explained and physical things that haven't been. To use these terms is just making things more confusing because it is a false dichotomy.
Not really. Newton's corpuscular theory of light failed (and still fails) to account for the diffraction phenomena that Huygen's wave theory adequately explains. However, if all you mean is that Newton was right insofar as light exhibits particle-like behaviour in certain circumstances, fine, but then so was Huygens if you simply read him as claiming that light exhibits wavelike properties in many circumstances. Typically, in undergraduate physics courses in electromagnetism, it is the wavelike aspects that are focussed on.
Making a distinction between P and non-P as what is explained vs. what is not is anthropomorphic and subjective. At what point during the explaining process does something go from non-physical to physical? What if the explanation isn't complete or completely proven? What if aliens explained EM energy 1000s of years before humans did?
You have strongly held opinions. Where does mathematics and its objects figure in your view of things? Physical and causal? Non-causal, non-physical and pointless to ponder?
This betrays a very deep misunderstanding of what idealism is (in all its varieties).
Even Berkeley's pretty brute idealism insists on a distinction between thoughts and the objects of thoughts. Kantian transcendental idealism is even more insistent on the division.
The laws of physics don't seem to mention causality, anywhere.
If that is the case, then how can quantum entanglement be discovered in the theory, 50 years before technology was capable of testing, or observing that prediction?
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
Both quantum mechanics and general relativity are deterministic theories. Deterministic physical theories, being time-invariant, render causality meaningless.
When I said that:
Quoting Wayfarer
Aren't 'natural laws and regularities' among the very 'patterns' you're referring to here, but which you then proceed to dismiss as 'inductive principles' which are 'not scientific'?
Quoting tom
The problem with this is that including 'everything we have yet to discover' makes it so open-ended as to be meaningless. If you simply re-define the term 'physical' to include 'anything that might be discovered', then it can mean anything; and a term that includes everything, means nothing. Something can only be defined by saying what it is, which implicitly also says what it isn't.
[quote=Bas Van Fraasen]If you press a materialist, you quickly find that the most important constraint on the meaning of the [materialist] Thesis is that it should be compatible with science, whatever science comes up with. This is contrary to what some of them say. If, they say, certain phenomena could not be explained purely in terms of material factors, then the scientific thing to do would be to give up materialism. But, holding the Thesis, they make the bold conjecture that this will never happen. That what would never happen?
If that question cannot be answered with a precise and independent account of what material factors are, there is still one option. That is to nail a completeness claim to science, or to a specific science such as physics. The instructive example here is J.J.C. Smart [another Australian!], who begins his essay "Materialism" with an offer to explain what he means:
By 'materialism' I mean the theory that there is nothing in the world over and above those entities which are postulated by physics (or, or course, those entities which will be postulated by future and more adequate physical theories).
He quickly discusses some older and more recent postulations in actual physics, which make that 'theory' look substantive. But of course the parenthetical qualification makes that discussion completely irrelevant!
Smart may believe, or think that he believes, the 'theory' here formulated; but if he does, he certainly does not know what he believes. For, of course, he has no more idea than you or I of what physics will postulate in the future. It is a truly courageous faith, that believes in an 'I know not what' -- isn't it?
Indeed, in believing this, Smart cannot be certain that he believes anything at all. Suppose science goes on forever, and every theory is eventually succeeded by a better one. That has certainly been the case so far, and always some accepted successor has implied that the previously postulated entities (known, after all, only by description) do not exist. If that is also how it will continue, world without end, then Smart's so-called theory -- as formulated above -- entails that there is nothing.[/quote]
Science, Materialism, and False Consciousness.
I'm not sure what you are asking. What mathematical "objects"? Do you mean numbers? Do numbers cause you to do things? Sure they do. You behave differently when you add or subtract numbers and get values that apply to real life things. Is not the sum the effect of adding numbers together, and the difference the effect of subtracting numbers? This means that numbers are physical.
Quoting jkg20
I think idealists are the ones that haven't thought things through. What are objects of thought and how are they related to thoughts? Any idealists want to answer that? What are thoughts without objects? What is the substance of thought if not sensory impressions?
Quoting tom
Science implies causality in its explanations. This reaction happens as a result of this combination of chemicals, while using these chemicals causes that reaction. Natural selection is a causal process of organisms evolving over time from previous ancestors, etc.
I don't see the relevance. The fact that in most cases science models causal relations doesn't entail that it always does, nor that it cannot, on the basis of those models, predict as yet unobserved phenomena. After all that is precisely what Maxwell's equations did, and those were very definitely the result of modelling events that were taken to be causally related.
What notion of determinism are you working with here? One very typical one connects it explicity to the idea that each state of a system is ineluctably caused by the previous states of the system, so I don't see how a determinisitc theory in that sense is able to render causality meaningless. You could try stripping out the explicit reference to causation and say that a system is deterministic if (and only if?) the state of that system at time t allows for precisely one next state of the system. The direction of time, though, is embedded into the idea of next state and so if by time-invariant you mean to include the idea of equivalence under time-reversal, it cannot be that sense of determinism in which you take the two theories you are talking about to be deterministic.
But perhaps you have a different notion of determinism that I've yet to be introduced to?
I see. You claim that science merely models causal relations, but somehow manages to model unknown, unexpected, surprising causal relations, even when those relations, as in the case of quantum entanglement, are explicitly not causal?
That makes no sense.
There is actually an impressive list of features of Reality that were discovered theoretically long before technology became advanced enough to test these discoveries:
Quantum Entanglement - 50 years.
Higgs Boson - 50 years.
Gravitational Waves - 100 years.
Cosmic Microwave Background - Can't remember, but maybe 30 years.
Quantum Computer - Discovered in 1980s, still haven't got one.
...
But you claim not to see the relevance.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
The laws of physics are time-invariant. The past no more causes the future than the future causes the past.
How can natural selection cause anything in a deterministic universe?
The laws of physics that we have discovered do not depend on any inductive principle, and their discovery has nothing to do with the mythical principle of inductive inference.
The laws of physics stand on their own merit.
Quoting Wayfarer
So, you have no problem with my use of the words "metaphysical" and "instantiated", but great difficulty with the word "physical"? You think "physical" is meaningless, but "metaphysical" is not?
Please explain how extinction events happen without implying causation. Explain how physical traits arise and are propagated or filtered out of a gene pool without implying causation.
Anything that is not within the defintion of the physical, irrelevant to how you define the physical.
Perhaps "what is the most usefull definition of the physical?" would have been a more usefull question to ask.
Then let me clarify it for you. When you model what you take to be causal relations using mathematical tools, you end up - if you are successful - with a set of equations. Often enough these equations are differential in form, and differential equations can have different solutions. This is precisely the case for Maxwell's equations, developed after years of modelling the causal effects of electricity and magnetism. One of the solutions to those equations was the surprising prediction of electromagnetic radiation, which was subsequently discovered by Hertz several years later. All of the scientists involved with this discovery were modelling nature causally. The same goes for the General Theory of relativity - the prediction of graviational waves falls out of a solution to the field equations for massive binary systems - the waves are caused by the interaction of those masses. Einstein's Special and General Theories are both of them causal models of the universe.
Scientists outside of QM (which is not all of science, just a part of it) continue to model nature causally.
I'm still waiting for your definition of determinism.
The initial conditions at the big-bang determine, through the laws of physics, the universal wavefunction for all times.
And "all times" means the universe is a static block, the past and future exist.
An alternative formulation would be, the final state of the universe determines, through the laws of physics, the universal wavefunction for all times. And if you play determinism backwards, you get surprising spontaneous creation events.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Don't make an ass of yourself.
The problem is we learn science, after the science has become manifest in reality. We don't really teach the creative process, behind the invention, when the ideas exist only in as a hunch in mind. We don't teach about the idea, before it was proved according to the philosophy of science. As the abstraction, it does not yet come under the philosophy of science. However, this starting point is the place all new ideas begin. The current educational approach creates a misunderstanding in the student's mind, where it appears all science starts out tangible and there is only tangible.
I am good at what may be. I used to be good at what already was. Metaphysical has a connection to a future not yet solidified physically in the present. Time is messed up between the two. Therefore, metaphysical appears to have a connection to time potential; potential to exist in the future.
Differential equations you say? You mean the type of equations, that given the state of the system at any time, the states for all other times may be calculated? You mean the very equations by which you may retrodict the future and predict the past?
Bingo!
Could this be the very reason that Russell and others have concluded that the laws of physics do NOT express causal relations?
Yet you still believe that science is about modeling known causal relations mathematically, and thus miraculously capturing unknown causal and acausal relations, without being aware of what you are doing.
Play determinism backwards? Surprising spontaneous creation events? What are you talking about?
Quoting tomHow about you answer the questions that show you know what you are talking about instead of engaging in ad hominem attacks?
Sure, I
Quoting Harry Hindu
Says the ass and the hypocrite.
Darwin wrote about this very issue in his most important work. Perhaps he obviously also did not understand the basic concept of natural selection?
Indeed. I said nothing about 'inductive inference'. What I said was:
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting tom
Questions about the nature of scientific laws, and the nature of numbers, and whether number is real, and, if so, in what sense, are metaphysical questions. And as such, they're not the kinds of questions which physics can provide an answer to even in principle.
I'm still waiting on your explanations.
Science does not rely on any inductive principle, particularly as such a principle has never been successfully formulated.
Read Darwin.
Actually, it does, and secondly, it has nothing to do with what I'm saying, but long experience tells me this is the end of the discussion.
No, I mean simply equations that relate functions to their derivatives (of any order): i.e. the mathematical definition of a differential equation. It would perhaps help the discussion if you were aware of some basic mathematical terminology.
And once I again I have to ask the question I posed: what is your definition of determinism lying behind your claim that modern science is deterministic and so eliminates the notion of causality.
Some science very definitely is involved in modelling supposed causal relations, I never made the claim that all science is about modelling causal relations.
When the ignorant impute ignorance, it is never pretty, is it?
Now, because I am "unaware of basic mathematical terminology", perhaps you could find, using your deep knowledge and expertise in mathematics, one of these "differential equations" pertaining to a physical system, that does not determine the past and the future given initial conditions at any time?
Now that I have met your challenge, how about responding to my question (for the third time of asking): what conception of determinism are you working with that frees it from the notion of causality?
So, you cannot find a single case where a physical system, whose time-evolution is determined by laws of motion, expressed in differential equation form, is not set for all times given a set of initial conditions.
And you have the temerity to accuse me of being "unaware of basic mathematical terminology"!
Now, as for the 2nd law, are you seriously suggesting it cannot be used to calculate the entropy in the past?
You asked about differential equations for physical systems in general, not laws of motion in specific, so the example I gave concerned thermodynamics, not dynamics. But even so, on a general point about the use of differential equations given initial conditions, the differential equations will allow you to calculate the future changes of the system, I've not denied that at any point, but they will not allow you to calculate how the system arrived in that state, so you cannot use the laws of motion with just initial conditions to calculate how things were in the past. Why? Amongst other things, for the simple reason that there is no representation within the differential equations of dynamics or thermodynamics of system for the amount of time for which the system has been in that initial state.
Of course, given an initial conditionand a terminating condition, the equations of dynamics and thermodynamics will allow you to get from one to the other in either direction by making appropriate reversals to the time-dependent variables and their derivatives, but that was not the question you asked.
Now, will you please provide us with some precision on what you take determinism to be?
So either everything is physical or nothing is. I lean towards nothing.
You are exhibiting the stratospheric level of cluelessness frequently encountered in those who impute ignorance to others.
Nope, you only need initial conditions, which can be given at any time. Differential equations are by their very nature time-symmetric, deterministic. The laws of nature, expressed as differential equations, are of low order, and the most important one is even linear.
So, come out from under your impression into the light.
Oh dear!
The conditions at any time give you the future, and the past. You seem confused what these are. Acceleration is not one of them.
Something we can freely speculate about until we develop a method for observing the phenomenon.
The "acceleration" is captured by the Hamiltonian, not the initial conditions.
As a matter of fact, yes.
Equilibrium thermodynamics does not model how entropy changes in time because entropy is by definition a state function that is only defined...at equilibrium. Modern thermodynamics, or non-equilibrium thermodynamics, handles how entropy can change in time, but there the definition of entropy is a bit more controversial.
Differential equations are usually deterministic (ordinary) or stochastic. The Schrodinger equation is an example of a deterministic equation: it tells you the future value of the wavefunction for all time once you have a potential energy source and initial conditions. The Langevin equation is an example of a stochastic differential equation. It looks a bit like this:
Langevin = Some average drift term + Some (usually) Gaussian diffusion term that models uncertainty and interactions
Stochastic equations like this one have either strong or weak solutions. The strong solutions are guaranteed to be unique for a given set of initial conditions, as famously proved by Ito. But the weak solutions only have to satisfy the constraints of a special probability space, so they are not "unique" in the traditional sense we know from ordinary differential equations. This can lead to the amazing result that the same initial conditions do not yield the same final answer using intensive computational algorithms (numerical solutions).
Newton's second law is one formalism that specifies the dynamics of a classical system. It is a second-order differential equation. To solve it you need the position and velocity of a system at some given time t. You do not have to specify acceleration to solve the second law.
I don't mean to suggest anything about what "the state of reality is like" when I say all this. I'm staying out of the metaphysical debate. Just wanted to mention these points for your consideration.
The Hamiltonian is just the total energy of the system, good old T + V.
You think there is a fundamental difference?
In Newtonian mechanics, the "accelleration" is captured by the "Hamiltonian" as well - the forces acting in other words, it is not an initial condition.
What time evolves the initial canonical coordinates?
So acceleration is not one of the initial conditions, and is captured in the Hamiltonian or whatever you like to call the force and potential terms that evolve the state of the system with time.
Between Newtonian and Hamiltonian mechanics? Depends what you mean by fundamental. But in any case there is a difference in the tools they provide to solve problems. But all of that is irrelevant to the dispute about time-reversal symmetry.
The purport of time-reversal symmetry is that it does not matter from which of two given time-separated physical states you begin, you can calculate the transition to the other state using precisely the same physical laws because those laws are invariant under the reversal of sign of the temporal parameters. This requires that the two states are distinct and indentifiable in such a way that the necessary values to plug into the physical laws are available. One of the states you can define as "initial conditions" - it does not matter which - the other "terminating conditions". Time-reversal symmetry says nothing about what you can predict about the past just given a physical description of a system at one given moment.
F = m ( dx^2 / dt^2 ) - k dx/dt
Clearly F is not the same if I take t to -t. This matters at a macroscopic level because we do have friction, collisions, vibrations, and other dissipative phenomena, which are collectively responsible for the irreversibility of macroscopic events and interactions. Dissipation can be related to entropy since all irreversible phenomena generate some useless heat and increase the combined entropy of the system and the surroundings.
However, now you've raised the point (although it's a little off topic) is there not a way to model the friction/dissipation (in Hamiltonian mechanics perhaps) such that invariance under reversal of sign of the time parameters is preserved? It's a genuine question - I don't know the answer, but I assume there is one, and perhaps you do.
Before I get to that, let me address this issue of initial conditions. One thing that confuses me about this debate is the idea that you need any kind of "condition" on a differential equation for the solution to exhibit time-reversal symmetry. Suppose I have a simple differential equation:
dy/dt = t
The solution is y(t) = (t^2 / 2) + C, where C is a constant of integration. If a physical system is described by this equation, then it exhibits time-reversal symmetry even without me specifying anything about initial conditions. The main reason why you would specify an initial condition is to get a unique solution. So if I told you that y(0) = 1, then we would conclude right away that C = 1 (just plug t = 0 in the equation for y). So maybe I'm just slow today but I don't really get what this debate is about: whether an equation is invariant under time-reversal depends on the terms of the equation, not on the initial or boundary conditions associated with the equation.
The fundamental reason why we care about time-reversal symmetry in physics is because it's associated with equilibrium conditions and the conservation of energy. There is a beautiful result in classical physics by Emmy Noether, called Noether's theorem, which states that any continuous symmetry is associated with a corresponding conserved quantity. So if an equation for a physical system exhibits time-reversal symmetry, then the energy of the system is conserved. If it exhibits translational symmetry, linear momentum is conserved. Rotational symmetry means angular momentum is conserved. Gauge symmetry in electrodynamics implies that charge is conserved. This fundamental idea has also been extended to quantum systems in different ways, so the basic idea is not just a classical result. Whether these relationships represent something bizarre and fundamental about nature or whether they are just amazing mathematical connections is still up for debate.
What do physicists do with these results? One thing they do is use experiments to find systems where these quantities are conserved or not, and then they write down an equation that preserves or violates the underlying symmetries. If a system violates a symmetry, that's associated with cool things happening: perhaps the system starts interacting with other systems and loses or gains energy through those interactions. The boring equilibrium conditions give way to something more dynamic. In these kinds of symmetry-breaking Hamiltonians, there is usually a term in the Hamiltonian which acts to break the symmetry under some reversal. So if a system's Hamiltonian changes under time-reversal, then the Hamiltonian is not conserved, which is physically interpreted as the system interacting and forming correlations with other systems. The integer quantum Hall effect is a famous example of a system that breaks time-reversal symmetry. By contrast, the invariance of the Hamiltonian under some transformation is often seen as a sign that a system can be capable of preserving some really interesting feature.
These methods are so powerful in condensed matter physics that entirely new states of matter have been predicted just from writing down an ingenious equation that either preserves or violates a symmetry. Then the experimentalists go and look to find the corresponding system, under the energetic or dynamical constraints implied by the equation.
MetaphysicsNow asked tom to explain what conception he had of determinism that was free of the notion of causality (most usual notions of determinism being very closely tied to causality). Tom still hasn't answered that question. Then the dispute becomes about time-reversal and differential equations and it loses me a little, but what does seem clear is that tom believes that given merely the initial description of a physical system, the laws of physics allow you to calculate backwards as well as forwards in time, i.e allow you to calculate how the system actually arrived in that state in the first place. As far as I can see, that is just false, and MetaphysicsNow gave a pretty convincing reason why - there are indefinitely many physical possibilities regarding how that physical state came to be, and since they are physical possibilities, the laws of physics and the initial conditions will not provide you with the means to select just one of those possibilities. I think perhaps this links to your idea that the course of the universe has always involved symmetry breaking and not boring equilibrium, and given merely the initial conditions, we cannot say exactly how the symettry was broken to arrive at them.
Anyway, that's my take on it.
However, such accomplishments appear to me to be examples of what Kant categorised as 'synthetic a priori reasoning' - in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject—i.e., synthetic—and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience—i.e., a priori. In general the truth or falsity of synthetic statements is proved only by whether or not they conform to the way the world is, and not by virtue of the meaning of the words they contain. So such statements are validated, or falsified, against the physical evidence - but I can't see how they themselves can be understood to be physical. And if they're not physical, then they provide an example of something that is not physical.
Mathematical ideas are mental constructs in the brain. They are physical mental states. How do I know? The last 100 years of neuroscience and all that jazz. Where did the mathematical ideas come from? From the interaction of the brain with the external world. Why do they have predictive power? Sometimes they have predictive power because they do a good job of approximating the real interactions of the physical world. Other times certain math systems may do a poor job of approximating reality. Then human brains interacting with the external world and other brains come up with new math ideas (ie. develop new mental states that can better process the information they're getting from the world). Outside a series of organized mental states, math statements can also exist in symbolic expressions on a particular medium (like an equation written on a t-shirt). Bla bla bla we already played this game and you lost.
It's all physical.
A ‘physical mental state’ is a contradiction in terms.
You’ve simply adopted a belief as a consequence of the culture in which you’re situated. This belief is that science replaces religion, in part, although if you go back and study the exact sequence of developments that have occurred, which resulted in the particular mythos that you subscribe to, it is quite complex and would take a long post to unpack. And I know it’s pointless to try and persuade you, as what you actually subscribe to is a religious ideology masquerading as a scientific theory, but it’s worth calling it out from time to time, if only for the benefit of other readers.
I contend that number, logical laws, and scientific principles are real, but not physical. They comprise the relations of ideas, and their practical usefulness arises from being able to compare them with observations, predictions and measurements (hence the computer on which this is being written, among other things).
But such faculties are not simply subjective or internal to the act of thought, however, because they are predictive with respect to natural phenomena - hence the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.
Scientific reason depends on these faculties, but, contrary to widespread popular myth, it still doesn't actually comprehend, much less explain, them. This is shown by the fact that philosophy of maths and philosophy of science are still controversial subjects (among other things).
It is currently accepted by many people that neuroscience and/or evolutionary biology can in principle account for rational ability, but this is a consequence of the role that science has now occupied in secular culture in replacing the traditional 'creation mythology' of yore with what is thought to be a more scientific attitude (for which, see Michael Ruse, Is Evolution a Secular Religion?). But if you actually drill down into the subject-matter, it is still highly contentious and contested, as evolutionary biology itself was never intended as an account of the nature of reason as such, but simply as an account of the origin of species; so to extrapolate it to such questions (aside from whatever legitimate basis it has in actual biological science) amounts to pop philosophy, which has now thoroughly taken root in the imagination of the secular intelligentsia.
And for at least two connected reasons:
1) There are differential equations used in physics which are not invariant under time reversal, and so symmetry gets broken
2) Because of this there is no way to tell just given intitial conditions what exact symmetry breaking occured in order for the initial conditions to obtain.
I expect MetaphysicsNow will be along to gloat at some point.
I contend that the predictive capacities of logic and math are entirely explainable by seeing them as emergent properties of human cognition. Some fundamental work has already been done along these lines by neuroscientists like Anil Seth, Karl Friston, and Giulio Tononi, among many others. Anil Seth's predictive theory of consciousness addresses the major points that you raised. He literally sees the brain as a biochemical prediction machine. Now I don't claim that these theories are finished or that the puzzle of conscious experience has been solved, but there has been enough fundamental progress to at least begin to understand these issues and to see how they concretely relate to each other.
You mentioned the limits of evolutionary biology. That's funny, because hundreds of years ago people thought that the explanation of life required a soul or an 'animating' force beyond the body that was in control of our motion. Then biology, chemistry, and physics had their say and no one (who should be taken seriously) believes that anymore. The useless effort to stall the progress of neuroscience now is very much reminiscent of that: there is this deeply held belief that people just cannot possibly be physical systems subject to energetic constraints! The thought alone to some is horrifying. And yet, that's exactly what we are. To me that's worth celebrating: it shows that we too are a part of this big beautiful family called nature.
You are obviously a fan of the history of philosophy, in a morbid kind of way that holds a tragic nostalgia for what has been lost. But cheer up, not everyone back then was totally clueless. Here is good old Lucretius in the Nature of Things:
Impressive realizations for someone writing so long ago. Now he got many things wrong too in the poem, but the things he got basically right are just astounding. And just for kicks since I have the book open:
Is a physical mental state a contradiction? To truly argue that, you would need to provide your understanding of the word "physical." Have you automatically defined "physical" as everything that exists outside the mind or the brain? If so, then it's a contradiction just by definition, which doesn't bother me in the slightest, because that definition is nonsense and no one with a few brain cells should use it.
Here's an actual contradiction:
How do you address the epistemological problem of Benacerraf? How does the transcendent Platonic realm communicate with the human mind? How does the mind gain access to the rational treasures of the "world beyond" if not through physical causation?
I do think it's necessary and important for science to use some level of metaphysics in its analysis of the world. Otherwise the world just doesn't make sense. To me metaphysical ideas are useful mental constructs that help organize and process information about reality, which would otherwise be too complicated to barely grasp. Scientists who think they can do without metaphysics are misguided. They do metaphysics without even realizing it. After all, no car driving down the road has a shiny yellow vector pointing out the front! Vectors are useful mathematical abstractions, a way for the mind to organize concepts like speed and direction.
On the other hand, metaphysics has often flirted with becoming totally detached from empirical reality, depending on who was using it. And that's when you start getting things like angels, Platonic realms, and Jedis. So I think philosophers also need to be careful in how they use metaphysics. But I get that the main problem now is the stereotypical ignoramus, like a Lawrence Krauss, who does not seem to understand the fundamental value of philosophy.
If so, mental would be a type of physical (just as inorganic and organic). I don't have a problem with that in principle. But can science demonstrate that nothing except physical things exist, or that nothing is real?
I do have a problem with reducing mental to corporeal (e.g., the brain) in the absence of empirical evidence establishing causation ("we already played this game and you lost").
Brains don't do anything but send and receive neural signals. And minds don't do anything but experience the conditions (e.g., consciousness, affect, personality, mood, and emotion) and exercise the functions (e.g., processing semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics) which produce human (not brain, not mind) behaviour.
Perhaps, but I don't think that a physical-mental (i.e., physical and mental) state is a contradiction in terms. The above list of conditions are in fact mind-body states.
Sure. And I'm very much interested in examining the Free-Energy Principle mentioned by Wellwisher and yourself in the New Dualism thread. But disappointed to read that it is "based upon Helmholtz's observations on unconscious inference". Because, according to Bennett & Hacker, that is a "misconception of perceptions as conclusions of inferences".
I have not read it entirely, but I am familiar with the gist of the argument. If everything is just physical causes, then humans cannot have intentions and desires. But the statements about mechanisms are themselves expressions of intent, hence contradiction.
I also don't know if you are aware that this argument has been mercilessly refuted by now, to the point that later on Malcolm himself had to drop it in favor of other fantasies about why the mind cannot be physical. Charles Taylor had a brilliant takedown in 1985. He argued that it is not the goal of neuroscience to provide an a priori explanation for wants and desires separate from the organisms to which these conditions apply, which is the kind of linguistic game Malcolm was engaged in. The goal of neuroscience, in the context of our debate, is to explain the physical relations between brain states, bodily states, and the external world. As Taylor writes:
Once you have those relations, then you can apply conceptual metaphysics like, "Johny wants to eat an apple." And you can take that to mean: the world has produced physical configurations where Johny is thinking very hard about an apple. Maybe even a configuration where Johny is hungry, the apple is the only thing around, etc. Maybe one where Johny saw something, recalled a childhood memory stored in the brain, then started thinking of an apple. You get the idea.
By "them" do you mean logic and mathematics themselves of their predictive capacties?
If the latter, then it seems pretty clear that the predictive uses to which human beings put logic and mathematics is a result of human cognitive activity - but that almost sounds trivial. It would also leave unaddressed the question of what the subject matter of logical and mathematical statements actually is. Wayfarer, as far as I understand him, is claiming that their subject matter is non-physical (numbers/sets/relations between them etc).
On the other hand, if by "them" you actually mean logic and mathematics themselves, so that they aren their subject matter are emergent properties of human cognition, that's a bold claim - not a particularly recent one though, it goes by the name of psychologism. I think J.S.Mill is the usual point of reference for that kind of view, although perhaps it is to be found in certain kinds of pragmatist as well. It faces a number of serious difficulties (I'm not saying that they are insurmountable) - Frege and Husserl had a range of arguments against the position. One key difficulty is that psychologism might lead to relativism about truth.
It lives on under other guises - most attempts to refute philosophical arguments end up being refuted themselves.
I think your opening question is the most important one: can science demonstrate in principle that only physical things exist?
No I don't think it can and I don't think it should try to, nor should that be the standard by which someone can reasonably believe that naturalism is, broadly speaking, the most accurate description of reality. I think a combination of sound theoretical arguments and the "weight of the empirical evidence" is good enough for believing that naturalistic explanations are sufficient to describe what we see, notice, and measure.
I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the canonical versions of the argument from reason, as proposed by Lewis, have been completely refuted. Sure bad arguments resurface in all kinds of different ways. They will never go away entirely. The ontological argument is still going strong in certain theological circles.
Who refuted it? I know Anscombe went to town on the first version of the argument Lewis presented, but Lewis revised the argument in light of her criticisms. Peter van Inwagen had a crack at the second formulation a few years ago, and as far as I remember claims that Lewis didn't do enough to establish the idea that mechanistic explanations for beliefs exclude rational explanations for them, but I'd be astonished if his was the last word on the subject.
Naturalism Undefeated: A Refutation of the Argument from Reason
As you implied yourself, there is never a "last word" on any philosophical subject. By "refuted" I mean both that the argument has been shown to be faulty and that its implications are rejected or not accepted by a substantial majority of professional philosophers. This widely cited survey from Chalmers showed that 57% were physicalists about the mind. That number will probably go up as neuroscience makes additional breakthroughs. Granted the survey had methodological problems, but the years spent studying this issue do not give me the impression that the argument holds much currency among professional philosophers.
That is a good paper - but here is why I wouldn't agree that it amounts to a refutation. At issue is the fact that all of the arguments in such a paper rely on the very faculty which they're trying to rationalise, or to declare as being within the scope of naturalism. Whenever a judgement is made about what is objectively the case, what a neural phenomenon means, and so on, the very faculty which is the subject of the analysis is being utilised to make the case. To provide a completely objective and indeed physical account of the operations of reason, you would have to treat reason from a point that is outside of it; put it aside, so to speak, and then demonstrate that it is inherent in the object of analysis, or located in the objective domain, without appealing to it - otherwise, you're essentially appealing to the thing which needs to be explained, or begging the question. But that, you cannot do.
So I am saying you can't 'get outside' of reason, or treat it as an entirely objective process (which is the subject of a chapter in Nagel's book The Last Word). Indeed I claim that reason is required to determine what is objective, so reason is ontologically prior to objectivity. That is why, as Maritain says, in humans, the sensory faculties are 'permeated with reason'. Even to define naturalism or make such arguments as those in the paper, relies on the very 'ground-consequent relations' which the paper is trying to argue can be explained or understood in naturalistic terms. Every time a conclusion is argued, that Y must be the case because of X and Z, then you're engaging in ground-consequent arguments or syllogisms, which by definition comprise the relationship of ideas.
So, the very fact that we're able to arrive at the generalisations required to frame such arguments, relies on the capacity of abstraction, which in turn relies on the grasp of meaning. And that is epistemologically prior to even defining what 'physicalism' or 'naturalism' comprises.
Lloyd Gerson, Platonism vs Naturalism. (Emphasis added.)
Quoting Uber
The definition of the word 'physical' is the domain of the discipline of physics. And as you're no doubt well aware, there are enormous philosophical issues surrounding this very question, many of which arise from the 'nature of the probability wave'.
But, leaving that aside, I have a much more quotidian argument for the distinction of matter and meaning (as this is what is basically at stake). This is based on a form of the multiple realisability argument, although one original to me, as far as I can tell. It is the fact that the same information/proposition/idea can be represented in any number of languages or physical media. I can write out the recipe for chocolate cake, or the specifications for building a box-girder bridge, in any number of languages or codes. I could even invent a completely novel system for representing numbers, provided I made the key available to others. But in both cases, the thing being described, and the outcome of the operation, is identical; you end up with a chocolate cake, or a bridge.
So, the material representation is completely different, but the information is the same. So how can the information be the same as the material representation?
This is where I tend towards dualism. But the crucial caveat is, that mind is *not* a 'substance' in the sense that it is now universally misunderstood. It never appears as an object, but is always that to which everything appears. The profound error of modern philosophy is to reify or objectify mind and then ask what kind of thing it could be. It is simply 'that which grasps meaning', and in that sense the ground of meaning itself. I think from my sketchy knowledge of philosophy generally, the philosopher that I'm nearest to in this regard is Husserl.
Quoting Uber
The problem with this is that it looses sight of the fundamental concerns of philosophy, as distinct from science. Philosophy is concerned with the human condition and questions of meaning and value; science is a method of analysis of objects and forces. (Incidentally, this does not at all deprecate science, I am an absolute believer in the application of science in its proper domain.) The problem is that philosophical materialists mistake the axiom of methodological naturalism, for a conclusion or an hypothesis - which it is not. This shows up in the 'is/ought problem' which is a constant undercurrent of debates on ethics here.
Quoting Uber
No - it is detached from 'the empirical domain', but if you look at the Platonists, they always attempt to ground such arguments in reason (although it's true that some neoplatonism got pretty far out). But that rationalist element is what distinguished Greek philosophy from mysticism pure and simple (although it does have its mystical side.)
Again, the 'realm of natural numbers' is real but it is emphatically *not* an aspect of the empirical domain. But to equate it then with Star Wars does indeed betoken the deep cultural confusion that arises as one of the cultural consequences of empiricism.
People often insist that science is 'rational' - which it is. But it's more than that - it is 'empirico-rational', in that it insists that whatever it is to investigate is knowable in the third person, quantifiable, and demonstrable in public. Empiricist rationalism is to declare that only what is tangible and measurable is real: not what might be rationally compelling, but what can be detected by senses or by instrument. This is the sense in which scientific empiricism is essentially anthropocentric: because it declares the human sensory faculties the yardstick of what is real. As far as the scientist is concerned, he or she is the only detectable intelligence or intentional agent in the Universe (although if you were to believe Dennett even that is questionable.)
Quoting Uber
I got a high distinction for my essay on Lucretius, back in the day (Philosophy of Matter, under Keith Campbell.)
I'm probably more sympathetic to your position than I am to Uber's - the psychologism that seems to be implied by it gives me pause for one thing - but this remark of yours bothers me a little. Why do you have to operate outside of reason in order to show that reason is amenable to a naturalistic treatment? There seems to be no obvious contradiction in supposing that we can use the tools of reason to investigate what reason is and how it surfaced. I've not seen an argument to say that the only approach to understanding reason is the Kantian one of attempting to delimit its bounds. You might be inclined to think that naturalists are trying to go (surreptitiously) transcendental with reason, but that would take some serious argument.
I suppose there is an issue about burden of proof here. The anti-naturalist seems to think that it is for the naturalist to show that his/her position is not self-refuting in some way, whilst the naturalist seems to think that it is for the anti-naturalist to show that it is self-refuting. I've not seen an argument to show who really has the burden of proof here.
That reasonis a tool that we can use to investigate that reason is a natural phenomenon, presumably.
Well, of course naturalists are assuming this to be the case, but what is wrong with making that assumption as a working hypothesis? It is not as if the opposite claim: reasonis not a tool we can use to investigate that reason is a natural phenomenon, is obviously true.
You might want to argue that if you do make that hypothesis then if you are right and reason is a natural process, it cannot be used to investigate that it is a natural process. But that seems contentious to say the least - the entailment from one to the other would require an argument wouldn't it?
2) Reason is a tool that can be used to investigate all natural phenomena.
These two propositions are supposed, by the antinaturalist (of a certain kind) to be contradictory in some way I presume, but certainly their surface logical form shows no such contradiction.
Sorry, babbling on a bit here, but I'm trying to get clear exactly what's at stake with this kind of argument against naturalism.
I very much like Gerson's notion of the incommensurability of form and matter, but I find your use of the term "representation" to be equivocal, and your use of the term "information" to be confused.
Because I associate "mental representation" with semantics, and "material representation" with physical signs, I would re-phrase your conclusion as follows:
The signs (in this case, recipes and specifications encoded in different languages, i.e., physical information) are completely different, but their associated semantic information is the same.
Some of my current relevant working definitions:
1) Signs are empirical (i.e., physical and/or mental) objects (actualities) associated with semantic information.
2) Data (Form): asymmetries.
3) Pure Data (General, Platonic, Form): idea asymmetries.
a) Transcendental Data (General Form): transcendental asymmetries.
b) Universal Data (General Form): universal asymmetries.
4) Empirical Data (Particular, Aristotelian, Form): object asymmetries.
a) Physical Data (Particular Form): physical asymmetries.
b) Mental Data (Particular Form): mental asymmetries.
5) Information (Process Asymmetries): communicated data (form).
And so on, down to semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic data/information as types of mental data/information.
So, your question ("So how can the information be the same as the material representation?") doesn't make sense to me.
I think Gerson is talking about the incommensurability of pure data/information (i.e., universals) which is intelligible, and empirical data/information (i.e., "particular elements") which is matter.
To further confuse things (or not) my current working definition of communication is: pure data (general form) discovery and reaction(s), or empirical data (particular form) production, encoding, transmission, conveyance, reception, decoding, and reaction(s).
So, dualism in terms of separating physical and mental? I don't think so. But dualism in terms of separating reality and existence? Definitely. Maybe it's better to call the latter Platonism?
If I define "object" as "actuality", can noumena be called mental objects? I agree that "mind" per se, does not exist, however; as a mass noun, it is the label we attach to the set of conditions experienced, and functions exercised, by an organism which produce its behaviour. So, calling it simply 'that which grasps meaning' is a gross oversimplification (which we can explore in greater detail if you like).
It might not be a contradiction, but it probably is a mistake. There appears to be no sense in which any particular physical state is necessarily associated with any particular, or indeed any mental state. We know this because all computationally universal devices are equivalent, thus there is no correlation between physical and computational states.
Let's be clear about the subject of the debate. The subject of the debate is whether the argument from reason is sound and logically valid. The argument states that naturalism is self-refuting because it pretends to be a rational belief about the world but then suggests that everything comes down to irrational causes, including the formation of beliefs themselves. Thus naturalism implies that belief in naturalism is irrational. This is the short version, obviously, but it's good to remember what we are actually discussing, and not what you think we are discussing. So the conclusion at stake is: naturalism is a self-defeating belief. Everything outside of that is all premises, and that's where the real debate lies.
If you follow your own argument closely, you will find that it's a total mess. You tell us that reason has to be what we use to determine objectivity. Reason is prior to any objective process. So then: how do we know that reason is prior to objectivity? Did you not use an objective process to determine that reason is prior to objectivity? If you didn't, then how is your conclusion objective? This seems to imply that reason is totally different from objectivity. In other words, naturalism is not a reasonable belief, but it can still be an objective one! Maybe you should concretely define these terms if you want this argument to actually make sense. That includes terms like "capacity for abstraction." You have basically thrown out a million different phrases in this post that all just amount to, "the capabilities of the brain." This point matters because you seem to be making the same mistake as Lewis, using a kind of theoretical (read: BS) definition of reason that does not apply to how human beings actually think.
Interesting tidbit to remember here: even if you fully accept the argument from reason, it does not mean that naturalism is false. It just means that it's not a rational belief. But it could still be true for other reasons. Plenty of irrational and unjustified beliefs can be true, and often are.
How can the information be the same while the material representation differs?
By not mixing up terms and equivocating. The information is stored as neural memory in the brain. The information is not the same thing as its material representation. The reason why we know you are talking about a bridge when you write "bridge" or a cake when you show us a picture of a cake is because prior experiences have primed our brains to make certain associations between symbols and physical objects. Take your recipe for a chocolate cake. Write it on a piece of paper using a language we both know. Write it on a stone tablet using symbols we know. Write it on a ship using sketch figures we both know. In all cases, the way I know you are talking about a chocolate cake is because presumably we got together beforehand and discussed what these symbols mean, and how or where they will be written. That information is then stored in our neural memories and every time you send me a chocolate recipe in a different medium I immediately know what you mean...because the sight of the recipe activates the relevant parts of my memory. Suppose you're the only one involved in this scenario, and you write down the recipe in three different codes, each on a different medium. Nothing fundamentally changes. Now the information only exists in your particular brain, but it's still physical.
This extends to logic and math as well. On a structuralist account, logical and mathematical objects make sense in relation to their larger structures. What are the structures and where do they exist? Ontologically, they are organized memory states in the brain. So when a mathematician needs to use ZFC set theory for something, he or she can recall the axioms just like that, because they are deeply embedded in the brain (presumably really well after years of neural networks related to math forming and growing). "But Uber, if logic exists in the brain, how can it be universally true?" Again, depends on your theory of truth! Under the correspondence theory, logical statements are said to capture something intrinsic about material reality, and that's what makes them true. But it does not follow that logical statements exist everywhere like causal danglers, with no one to think of them, make sense of them, or write them down. Is this psychologism? No because I am arguing that mathematical and logical objects do have objective value in relation to their wider systems. And these relations are useful because they can correspond to physical interactions in material reality. Indeed, the relations themselves emerged out of our examination of and interaction with material reality.
One can provide a sensible definition of physical things without worrying about the wavefunction and the measurement problem. Here is one candidate: a physical thing is any system subject to energetic constraints. These constraints could be conservation interactions for macroscopic systems, uncertainty principles for quantum systems (which covers any and all scenarios, regardless of whether the wavefunction actually exists or whether it's a mathematical construct), or any other constraint on how much energy a system can have or share with other systems. What is energy? They teach the kids that it's the ability to do mechanical work, but that ignores all other kinds of energy (heat, radiation, etc). The simplest and yet most universal definition of energy is this: different states of motion. This is the fundamental feature of all that exists. Over 90% of the mass-energy of a proton is fluctuating quantum fields; the rest is in the gluons, also furiously moving around. Thus a physical thing is anything that has constrained states of motion. Particles? Check? Fields? Check. Consciousness? Absolutely check. Try starving yourself and see how much rational thinking you can pull off.
Questions you might have:
1) Where do the constraints come from?
In the quantum case we don't always know, but it doesn't affect the reliability of my definition. All we need to be sure of is that these constraints are empirically valid, and the uncertainty principle most certainly is! Thank you 1000 experiments in quantum physics.
2) What is doing the moving?
If energy is motion, then we should want to know what's doing the moving. But having this knowledge also doesn't affect the definition. Let's say it's a car. Is the motion of the car somehow constrained? Absolutely yes. Let's say it's the sequence of thoughts inside your brain as you're reading this. Is the motion of the neurons in your brain constrained? Absolutely yes. The emergent consious states in your brain? Absolutely yes. If you seriously believe your ability to think has no constraints whatsoever, then see above. Or try to compute 3473.262427 x 2728292.9263 instantly without a calculator. Or try to think of fifty different and fully formed sentences in two seconds (fully formed and different, not vague notions or the same thing repeated!).
Thus I've done what few people in this forum seemed to have any interest in doing: provide a general definition of physical stuff that at the same time demarcates naturalism from supernaturalism. Clearly God should not be energetically constrained! And the soul can apparently survive for eternity after death. So, very much a reasonable dividing line between the two realms.
Science and philosophy have more overlap than you believe. I reject the subtle implication that philosophy only cares about the human condition. That narrows philosophy too much. As a matter of practice, philosophers also study the wider state of the world and try to make sense of it.
Your admission that science is rational contradicts your line of reasoning above. For how can science be rational when it tries to search for irrational causes? That would imply that all scientific beliefs are irrational. Suppose I tried to understand a disease in natural terms or tried to explain a weird sound in natural terms. My belief that the sound has a natural cause should be irrational, because it was produced by irrational causes. Same for the disease. On this silly argument, all of science is irrational, not just ontological naturalism.
This is interesting. Have you read Hart's The Engines of the Soul? He supports Cartesian dualism and does so along with the incorporation of the idea that the relation between mind and body is to be modelled in terms of energy transference and (by implication) constraint. So, if Hart is right (and of course I'm not saying he is) energy conservation won't demarcate the material from the mental. I suppose it might still allow for some sense of demarcating the physical, but from what? The abstract maybe, but we can do that with just the idea that the physical is whatever has spatiotemporal location can't we?
You don't need necessary connections. The basic idea behind most of cognitive neuroscience these days is the functionalist one that what a mental state is can be defined in terms of what typically causes it and what it typically causes. We then make the assumption that that particular, abstractly defined causal role is, as a matter of contingent fact, performed by the brain (or the brain + other parts of the body and even, if you want to go externalist, + parts of the environment). What I see Anil Seth and his ilk as doing is working in the context of that kind of view of the mind - they are just using technological advances to push the investigation further on from the general handwaving you used to get in functionalist theories of mind.
I have no problem saying that brain states and conscious states have different physical properties. That's the central message of modern condensed matter theory: reality has different physical orders, phases, etc. But if they are energetically constrained, they are physical by definition.
Absolutely. Monism doesn't preclude the possibility of a spiritual realm.
But since we know that completely different and unrelated physical states give rise to identical mental states, then cataloging human physical states cannot take us anywhere to solving the hard problem.
Not sure there are any viable theories of an emergent space.
That might be a less grandiose project than Seth and co claim they are engaged in, but as far as I can tell that is the most that they can be engaged in or as scientists would want to be engaged in.
Yep, but if or when there are, they will be physical and treat of physical events which are not spatiotemporal, so @Uber is right that his idea of the physical in terms of energy constraints is more inclusive than mine in terms of spatiotemporal locations. Of course, if one day physics drops the notion of energy, seeing even energy as an emergent feature of something else then things become more complicated. Of course, I'm probably making a mistake there in even treating energy as a kind of stuff, I've heard some physicists compare it to an accounting device that just has to turn out to be balanced when calculations are made.
Well, the total energy of the Universe is zero. So much for energy constraints
Physics does not make any sense unless energy is subject to constraints. This is more of an issue for the philosophers to debate. As in, what are constraints? Where do they come from? And so on.
Because of the 'postulate of objectivity' that is basic in natural philosophy. This says something like that knowledge can only be obtained of mind-independent objects - by the analysis of what is objectively existent or real. It falls out of the paradigm of naturalism generally - the distinction, or the 'split', between observer and observed, the scientist and the thing being analysed. From the beginning of modern science, 'reason' is presumed to be something internal to the workings of the mind. And where is 'mind' in the modern scientific view? It's an epiphenomenon, or emergent phenomenon, of the (physical) brain. The mind is therefore generally is regarded as an aspect of the subjective order.
So in order to investigate how reason arises in the brain, we have to examine the workings of the brain; understanding the mechanism of reason, turns out to require an immense knowledge of the massive complexities of neuroscience. But, I'm saying that even to do neuroscience, we're constantly invoking and relying on the very thing we're wanting to explain, because whenever we assert that 'this data means that...' then we're already employing the tools of rational inference. And then when you do that, ask yourself whether what has been demonstrated with respect to the 'nature of reason' resides in the data, or is it inferred in the mind of the observing scientist (and yourself, when you understand what it means?) In order to 'see the nature of reason' you yourself must be a rational being; you can't see it from some point outside of it.
This is why I'm saying that reason can't be understood as a physical (or neuro-physiological) process. And this is basically one of the transcendental arguments, descended from Kant - that reason transcends natural science, because the natural sciences presume and are required to use reason to even frame the question or investigate anything whatever. But, the way modern science developed, from the early modern period, the constructive role of reason in the formulation of hypotheses is forgotten or neglected. That is one of the main points of the CPR as I understand it ('things conforming to thoughts'.)
As I quoted from Jacques Maritain previously, the sense are 'permeated by reason'. So you can't put reason aside and study it from the outside as a natural phenomena - it is always assumed by the act of rational analysis. (This is also the basic approach of Husserl's critique of Naturalism. If you can get hold of Dermot Moran's Routledge Reader in Phenomenology, it's laid out succinctly.) As someone else recently quoted here, 'facts' are like ships in bottles -carefully constructed so as to appear that nobody put them there.
Quoting Galuchat
Right - I'd go along with that. It still enables me to make the point that the signs and what they convey are of a different order. Whenever we read anything, we're interpolating, interpreting, inferring - that alone is the capability of the rational mind. (Of course we can now build instruments that do likewise, but they're creations of, and extensions of, that same mind.)
Quoting Galuchat
I would have thought any monism would preclude the possibility of separate realms.
Quoting Uber
'Materialist predicts eventual success of materialism'.
Quoting Uber
No, because the postulates of pure mathematics are true prior to any objective validation. It only becomes a matter for empirical validation when it's applied to the sensory domain. But we know the truths of reason intuitively and without reference to anything whatever. When we know a concept, that knowledge is not reliant on sensory experience, or any experience.
Of course, knowledge proceeds step-wise, creating postulates, making predictions, testing them out, going back and re-thinking. Nothing I've said undermines that. What I'm saying is that, science itself relies on reasoning, some component of which is always implicit, internal to thought, pre-conscious etc. This is one of the main findings of philosophy of science, Kuhn, Polanyi, and the like.
Quoting Uber
Naturalism isn't necessarily false - what is at issue is whether naturalism explains the nature of reason, if the faculty of reason is within scope for naturalism and natural sciences. My argument is simply that reason precedes science, in the sense that, for there to be a natural philosophy or science at all, then from the very outset, principles have to be elucidated, axioms discovered, inferences made. So reason is epistemologically prior to naturalism, in the sense that it already must be operating for naturalism to get out of bed. But that has been lost sight of, or forgotten.
That is why, every such argument ultimately appeals to neo-darwinian materialism. It thinks that it has an 'in-principle' account of how the brain evolved which underlies the various forms of naturalised epistemology and physicalist theories of mind. And that is what is being called to question: because I don't accept that the nature of reason is ultimately a matter of biology. That is not to say that evolutionary biology can't study the stages by which h. sapiens evolved to the point of being able to use reason and language; but I take issue with the idea that these faculties can therefore be understood through the lens of biology or even modern science, insofar as it holds to a materialist paradigm.
Quoting Uber
But it's not established. That all relies on the 'computational' model of consciousness, which is itself subject to much dispute. As I replied to MN above, even to determine the sense in which information is 'in' the brain, involves an equivocation between form, structure and meaning.
Quoting Uber
This point matters, because it indicates that you haven't understood the argument, and of course have no real interest in so doing, any more than I would have an interest in a materialist philosophy of mind.
And the quotation I provided from Lloyd Gerson argues that, if materialism were true, you couldn't think. I wonder if you see the point of that argument?
Quoting Uber
Not 'philosophy only cares'; 'only philosophy cares'. I said the difference between science and philosophy is that the latter is concerned with qualitative questions, with the domain of meaning and value - precisely those qualities materialists never tire of informing us are completely absent from the 'real universe' (as if this amounts to a triumph of secular humanism.)
That is as nice a summary as any.
But to build on that, I would generalise it to "constraints on instability or uncertainty" so as to better pick up an information theoretic perspective on the physics, as well as make a clearer connection to the science of life and mind.
The problem with materialism was that it reduced an Aristotelian naturalism - the full four causes kind - to just bottom-up construction. Nature became a cause and effect tale of material/efficient causation. The physical was defined by what was atomistic, mechanical, local, deterministic, monadic, etc.
But a full four causes physicalism would include the idea of causation via top-down constraints. That is, formal and final cause as well. And a constraints-based metaphysics indeed goes further in making constraints primary. The structure is what produces the material contents. The constraints are the global limits that produce the locally individuated features - the particles, the events, the excitations, the degrees of freedom, or however else we are currently conceiving of the material/efficient causes of Being.
Even Newtonian physics depended on global constraints in the form of laws, global symmetries or boundary conditions. And now - through the information theoretic turn of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics - constraints are being explicitly modelled as "material objects" like event horizons or holographic bounds. There are exact mathematical relations emerging between spatiotemporal extent and the number of local degrees of freedom that such a volume can contain.
So spacetime as a container, and states of motion or action as the contents, have a constant balance. They are two faces of the same coin. And we see all that coming together nicely now in a general shift to an entropy-based accounting system that unifies all our descriptions of nature.
The best general theories of brain function are the ones that emphasise a global minimisation of system uncertainty. The brain is a "machine" that learns to predict the future by minimising its uncertainty about what is likely to be the case.
And the cosmos is also a "machine" that has constructed itself by thermalising away its quantum uncertainty as much as possible. At its Heat Death, its states of motion will be as minimal as could be imagined. All that will be left is a homogenous sizzle of blackbody radiation emitted by cosmological event horizons.
So in dealing with the OP, I am saying that physicalism has been through its arch-materialist phase and is coming back around to a grander constraints-based physics that incorporates an appropriate understanding of top-down formal/final causation. We are cashing out naturalism as it was originally envisaged. Reality is the emergent thing of an intelligible structure imposed on brute uncertainty.
Which makes it as much mind-like as matter-like in our physicalist descriptions.
I'll try again. Take 'some item of information' - I gave two examples. That information can be reproduced exactly, down to the last detail, in completely different physical forms. It can be represented in binary code, carved in stone, written on paper. Every representation is different. But the information that it represents is identical. So - what is different, and what stays the same? Of course, because you and I are capable of learning languages and codes, then it seems a pretty trivial question, but I think it says something interesting.
Quoting Galuchat
The reason I wanted to say mind is what 'grasps meaning' is so as to stress its non-objective nature. I'm not saying that it's all there is to it, or that it can't be elaborated - but to differentiate it from the sense of 'res cogitans' as a 'thinking thing'.
Note how you are privileging perception over action. You are defining the dichotomy of subjective~objective in terms of an observer standing apart from the observable. So there is a representational paradigm at work here. And that is where the anti-naturalistic dualism stems from - this built-in sense that the mind stands apart from the world.
So your language assumes its premises.
Pragmatism and semiotics were the effort to naturalise "the mind" by switching to an embodied and enactive description of the essential relation. Meaning becomes use, as they say. We don't just grasp meaning. We exist as useful habits of interpretation. We know what to do when faced with a world composed of marks or signs.
You are thinking always from the point of view of the observer who stands outside nature. Your ontology is based on a transcending disconnect between the perceiving self and the actual world.
But a proper naturalist sees consciousness in terms of habits of interpretance, embodied actions. The self and its world (or umwelt) emerge as triadic relation. That is the way to bridge a dualistic disconnect.
I would say there is no burden of proof because there simply is no proof either way. Naturalism and ant-naturalism are just the dialectical poles that present two possible, or imaginable, perspectives. They involve entirely different presuppositions, and when one tries to refute the other they always seem to do so tendentiously, that is, using their own, instead of their opponent's, presuppositions, to impute a purported contradiction in the other's position.
These kinds of arguments that endlessly talk past one another are unproductive and boring
Or instead, dialectics is itself dichotomous in a fashion that sometimes you have a unitary dichotomy - one in which the two poles are simply opposite ways of saying the same essential thing - and sometimes they are the "other" thing of two actually opposing generalisations.
Once a generality is itself made particular in this fashion - a choice of two generalities - then the either/or of the LEM does apply. So supernaturalists can be wrong in arguing transcendence over immanence, duality over unity. :)
I don't think it can ever be absolutely definitive, but I think this approach can at least put to rest the interminable controversy over whether ontological priority belongs to mind or to matter, and it leaves the way open for more interesting investigations.
True, but in a like sense naturalists could also be wrong in arguing immanence over transcendence or unity over duality (or plurality), since just as there is no transcendence without immanence and no plurality without unity, there is no immanence without transcendence or unity without plurality.
So...Hegelian sublation?
Not in the least. The mind doesn't ultimately stand apart from the world - the mind and the world are not finally able to be separated. We receive a constant flux of sensations and impressions (as per empiricism) but these are continually organised by the interpretive and synthetic activities of the mind (per Kant). But together, this all comprises the 'umwelt' or 'lebenwelt' - as you say further down. My criticism is directed at the view that 'the mind' is able to be understood as a process that is inherent (for example) the brain - I am trying to articulate the role of 'objectification' in naturalising epistemology.
I am saying that reason is always involved in this activity as a constituent of the process of cognition. How could it not be? That is how discursive thinking operates. So it can't be understood solely in neurobiological terms, as it 'transcends objectification'. That is why I am saying that Uber's response must always be question-begging i.e. assuming what it needs to prove in such statements as:
Quoting Uber
Quoting Uber
And the way I'm trying to do that, is by arguing that abstractions, numbers, the rules of logic, and so forth, cannot be understood as physical - that they are solely intelligible, i.e. exist only as objects of thought, but are real. And that, hence, there are real things, that are not physical (using the words 'things' and 'objects of thought' as analogies, as they're not actually 'things' or 'objects'.)
Quoting apokrisis
I am saying that the naive scientific attitude is that there is an observer apart from the thing observed. Is that not the case? And isn't it the case that it was the 'observer problem' that came up in the early twentieth century that challenged that understanding?
Quoting apokrisis
Well, what you're describing as 'a proper naturalism' might not be the mainstream view, which I think is considerably more 'mechanistic' than yours.
But is 'bridging the dualistic disconnect' a matter for naturalism at all? Where does that fit into the picture of natural science?
Quoting apokrisis
You keep saying this, but what does it mean, in practice? Where does intention or intentionality enter the picture? Is that part of the schema at the outset, or does it only arise at the point where there are conscious agents?
This is a contradiction: if a belief is "true for reasons" then it is (potentially at least, even if those 'reasons' are unknown at present) a rational belief.
I can't see anything in what you say here that would support a non-prejudicial conclusion that reason is, in any way, either prior to, or separate from, material existence. Perhaps I missed it: if you could summarize...?
Either it presents "evidence" (like the existence of miracles), or it argues from "reason" (the need for a first cause, a prime mover), or it argues from one of the supposed failures of naturalism (an inability to explain freewill, goodness, whatever).
So the dichotomy there is that naturalists expect empirical validation, supernaturalists show they aren't that bothered.
Quoting Janus
So are we agreeing that a semiotic naturalism has the advantage of being triadic and so able to include both matter and mind in its one scheme?
Quoting Janus
Peircean semiosis is better as it resolves itself into a hierarchical relation - global constraints of local freedoms.
So an Aristotelian/Peircean naturalist could not be wrong as they are arguing for a transcendence that is "merely" the kind of transcendence that is a development of hierarchical complexity. And with complexity comes a greater degree of locally meaningful individuation or plurality.
So immanence goes with emergence. A system that is closed for causation and yet also capable of open-ended complexification ... at least up until the time it runs out of sustaining resources. (ie: It is, in the end, a system closed for causation.)
Transcendence generally tries to deny that thesis so it presents a genuinely opposed ontology. Although of course - like Hegel, like NaturPhilosophie, or even Peirce in his cranky old age - theism can try to work its way back to an immanent ontology, one where the divine is self-causing.
But still, equivocation has to be in operation. My brand of naturalism says that "the mind" is a complex particular rather than a simple general. That is why it sits within the world as modelled by physicalism. Physicalism can understand what that means.
A naturalism that wants to embrace the supernatural elements of the "spiritual" or the "divine" have to talk about those as simple generals - basic universal essences or substances. So in that way, a (super)naturalism could be distinguished still from a physicalist naturalism based on semiotics, pragmatism, information theory and complexity theory.
Immanence is the claim that reality is self-organising or bootstrapping. And science is cashing that out in terms of models that work.
Theists can also be attracted to immanence as the rationally best ontological story in being a causally closed ontological story. But then the other half of that - the empirical evidence - is at best equivocated. Well also, the theoretical half is equivocal as it lacks the necessary mathematical framing. There aren't the definite ideas to be definitely tested.
Your definition of "physical" is missing something, Uber. It is missing a clear definition or explanation of "constraint". It relies on "constraint" as a crucial term, but what "constraint" means is left vague. If the physical is that which is constrained, then a "constraint" in the context of your definition, must be non-physical. Does that make sense to you, that a constraint could be non-physical? The instances of constraints which I come across in my life, other than the exertion of will power, which is more properly called "restraint", all seem to be physical constraints. So how does it makes sense to class "constraint" as non-physical?
Quoting Uber
See, look here, you talk about the uncertainty "principle" as if it were a constraint. But a principle does not act to constrain. Isn't a "constraint" supposed to constrain something?
Well induction or generalisation may be fundamental to all animal cognition, but deduction would seem to be something secondary that it rather special to linguistically and culturally constrained cognition. It is a further habit that us humans learn to apply and so not fundamental to the mind, or consciousness, itself.
It is an attribute of humans being language-using socialised creatures living in a modern world, post the Ancient Greek development as rationalisation as a general population skill. It is part of the brain's evolutionary wiring only in the sense that the brain has become more hierarchically organised in a fashion that action and behaviour can be constrained in a "deductive" way. The higher brain can form the general goals and leave it to a cascade of increasingly more specified habits to execute the particular actions need to achieve those goals.
But running a hierarchy of control from the top-down - reversing inductive learning to produce retroductive sensorimotor predictions - is still different from the brain implementing the laws of thought. Those are the product of cultural learning.
And that is important to any notion of subjectivity. Culture and language are the constraints that produce that kind of human psychology - the one with a private sense of self. Humans learn to feel like perceiving essences standing apart from an objective world as part of what it means to be a (modern) human.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree there. That was what reductionism was about.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again true. I'm not mainstream I guess. :)
Quoting Wayfarer
Naturalism would recognise finality as something that is itself dichotomised. There is the most general kind of finality - the kind of universal tendency encoded in the second law of thermodynamics in particular. And then there is the highly complex kind of finality which it the intentional and autonomous type of being enjoyed by humans as linguist/social creatures.
So for the project of naturalism to be successful, it would have to be able to see how these two poles of finality are essentially the same while also being essentially different.
A tendency and a purpose are the same in that a system has to be guided by an idea that works. Given a presumption that chance, chaos or instability is fundamental, Being can only persist if it is functional, or tellic. It has to be a structure "wanting" to rebuild itself continually.
But a tendency and a purpose are different - as different as they can be - in that the Cosmos could only reflect the most generic of all purposes (to exist by encoding whatever tendency leads to persistence), and the Mind would be an expression of the most subjective or self-interested kind of goals and purposes (as they are the levels of goal or purpose that subserve the persistence of a complex and individual selfhood).
There is no such thing as the 'principle of objectivity' in naturalism. This is another one of your fantasies that you've created to attack a strawman version of naturalism. You mention that, under naturalism, knowledge of the external world only arises from the "analysis" of what is objectively real, but you do not say what you mean by "analysis," which is a key concept that decides whether this argument succeeds or fails. If I open my eyes and see, I have gained visual knowledge and information about the world, but I did not need any rational analysis to do so. To the extent that the external world is knowable to the brain, it's only because the latter is dynamically coupled to that world. The brain continuously interacts with the world through the exchange of energy and the processing of sensory data. It is through this dynamical interaction that brain activity comes to better understand and approximate the properties of material reality, both by learning and inventing new symbols, ideas, "abstractions," which reside in the brain itself, and by developing a perceptual and predictive apparatus.
I asked you to provide a concrete definition of reason and you didn't, but it's no longer necessary at this point. It's clear you think reason is the mystical power that gives the mind its amazing abilities, and as such cannot possibly be understood within the realm of science. You have artificially constructed reason in a way that it can never be explained. I understand your futile argument perfectly well. The intellectual methods of science being used to explain reason rely on that very reason in order to do the explanation, so they can't ever really explain reason. What actually deflates your bubble is that I fundamentally disagree with this nonsense. Your conception of reason bears no relation to reality. In reality, reason is a feature of human thought, and it arises in dramatically different ways under different conditions.
When using ground-consequent relations, it may emerge as a series of steps and calculations in neural memory that combine to reach a particular conclusion. As David Johnson pointed out in the article, these steps are themselves the products of subconscious mental states that operate in the background, only for the conscious mind to later come along and say, "look how smart I was all along." When it's Magnus Carlsen making a chess move, the conclusion may come to him instantly in an easy position, without the use of any intermediary steps or logical relations. In chess this phenomenon is known as chunking, a way the brain organizes information about a similar class of positions. After you've played thousands of games, the brain has learned both to instantly recognize certain positions and how to respond to them. When asked to recall the answer to an easy trivia question, the brain can almost instantly search its memory bank and yield the answer. This is how reason works in reality. Most of the time brain activity does not even bother going through ground-consequent relations. Of course you will say these are just specific inferences, not acts of reason. But only because you have an unfounded conception of what reason represents. And we haven't even gotten to the times when humans are irrational, when they totally flout logical relations and careful thinking. You know, like the way you're doing in this debate, eminently proving how reason is lacking in some more than others.
Here you go again with the postulates of mathematics. We live in a world where mathematical claims cannot all be reduced to pure logic, which is why mathematicians often fight about what fundamental axioms can be used and which ones should be tossed aside. I'm sorry, does that sound like objective validation impinging on the heavenly perfection of pure math? The horror! You may be further horrified to know that mathematicians throughout history have relied on objective inference to decide which axioms and assumptions are logically fundamental. The axiom of infinity had to be included in axiomatic set theory because they needed a way to justify the infinities of calculus and previously existing branches of mathematics. But wait there's more: the very introduction of infinity into calculus came as a result of trying to accurately solve and model problems in classical mechanics. Now that's objective inference leading the development of logic and reason!
Saying reason is required for naturalism to "get out of bed" is tantamount to saying, "our mental faculties need to function well in order for us to investigate the world." But what determines whether they function well is precisely their interaction with the world. Yeah, lots of things are being lost sight of in this debate.
Stating that information, in the context of your examples, resides in the memory systems of the brain is just stating an objective fact. So in every case you can imagine, the way we know what you "mean" is through our brain recalling a shared system of communication. Thus information is both physical stuff in the brain and physical stuff in the way we represent it on each and every medium.
Philosophy is concerned about many different profound concepts. Truth, meaning, value, knowledge, and existence, to name a few. Do you understand that at least some of these can overlap with science? Or are you repeating with philosophy what you have already done with reason: defining it in a ridiculous way that fits your preconceptions of the world?
By the way, I am still waiting for the dualists to address the epistemological problem. The silence is deafening.
I don't have much sympathy for supernaturalism, or the notion of absolute transcendence. But I also don't define nature entirely in terms of the observable. I'm open to the numinous, but I draw no conclusions about its metaphysical import.
Quoting apokrisis
I make no judgement about whether the system (nature) as we know it is "causally closed". If there are dimensions of nature inaccessible to the senses I can't see how they would count as "supernatural", though.
All great points. I identified some of these problems myself when I asked where do constraints come from and mentioned how in many cases we don't know. In some cases, certain constraints can be explained in terms of other constraints. For example, a limited version of the conservation of energy can be derived from Newton's third law. More general versions in classical physics can be derived through Noether's theorem, which relates continuous symmetries to conservation laws. But I admit that the idea needs more work and would be happy if you offered some suggestions to improve it.
In a general sense, I guess what I'm trying to do is put motion front and center, and then explain that things in the world can't just exist in any state of motion they like. The very concept is a bit tough for me to put into words. When I talk about actual constraints in physics, I can easily express them as equations or something to that effect. But I would want to avoid saying something like physical things are subject to equations that constrain energy, for the reasons you highlighted.
I could make things very metaphysically lean by saying something like this: physical things are just finite states of motion (ie. basically finite energy). And then when asked to explain what this means in the context of physics, I could delve into equations of constraint and things like that. Thoughts?
And I would like everyone to remember the obvious (something often lost in philosophical debate): we are in a thread called the "non-physical." There's no way to even begin making sense of that unless we make some sort of sense of what's physical. And if the ultimate answer is "there's no way in hell to make sense of either one," then we are in a pretty terrible situation where hardly anything meaningful can be said about pretty much everything that is currently under discussion. It would all be a bunch of random people on the Internet talking past each other. It should be our group project to first come up with a good definition of physical. Doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough.
I can see no issue with defining as physical, everything that is subject to the laws of physics. And no, that isn't circular, because we know what the laws of physics are, to very high accuracy.
Non-physical things then have to be those entities that are not subject to the laws of physics. These will include such things as the necessary truths of mathematics and logic.
Slightly murkier ground might be things such as information, which I'm going to suggest is non-physical. While the medium in which the information is instantiated is subject to the laws of physics, the information itself is not. Information can easily be copied from one medium to another, using a variety of encodings. The physical instantiation can be quite different, but the information is still the same. Also, let's not forget that information is defined counter-factually.
If information is non-physical, then algorithms must be, and by extension, the running of these algorithms on a computer. This seems wrong, because the computation consumes resources, and we are all too familiar with the heat noise and light emitted by computers, and the electricity bill. Even so, I think we are making the mistake of identifying the instantiation with the abstraction. Abstractions are non-physical.
What are counted as the laws of physics have changed and continue to undergo development, so you are okay that what counts as physical changes? Also, what about other special sciences such as chemistry, biology and so on - are they studies of non-physical things? Or did you mean by "laws of physics" "laws of science", in which case, why don't you class mathematics and logic as sciences and (therefore, by the new definition) their objects as physical?
So far Uber's idea of linking the physical to energy conservation constraints seems the most promising.
By tying down the physical to motion, don't we tie it down to the spatiotemporal at the same time? I was under the impression that you were trying to avoid that particular criterion for the reason that spacetime might be emergent.
But perhaps I haven't understood what you mean by motion.
Remind me, when was the last time the Schrödinger equation changed?
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
You think chemicals don't obey the laws of physics?
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
Because they aren't.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
How do you check for energy conservation?
Irrelevant. The point is that if you tie "laws of physics" to "current laws of physics" you rule out any further development. If you just mean "whatever becomes a law of physics" your original claim is vacuous because who knows what will be subsumed under future laws of physics in that sense.
I think the laws of that cover chemical reactions do not reduce to the laws of physics - if by laws of physics you are specifically talking about the laws covering the so-called four fundamental forces. Certainly nobody has ever reduced them - the claim that they are so reducible is just that, a claim, and a pretty empty one at that. So, by your definition of physical, that would rule out chemical reactions as being physical. Unless, of course, you extend the scope of "physical law" to include laws of chemistry, and then I refer you to my previous post.
So tom says that P entails that P?
I imagine it would depend on the circumstances - why, what's your point?
I think that the use of "phenomena" in the question entails its physical -despite incomplete- modeling. That is, we can experience the phenomena because it is modeled within a existing theory. New theories permit us to observe new phenomena, which sometimes require another new theories (or extensions) to be more extensively accounted. But even when the physical account to a phenomena (such as black holes) is not complete, the knowledge of the existence of the phenomena it is possible only if there is a preexisting physical theory (about electromagnetic radiation, gravity, etc. that permit us at least to confirm its existence). A "non-physical" phenomena is in my view a contradiction in terms.
In my opinion, the non-physical refers to the knowledge that is not obtained by physics methods.That is, the referred to logic and mathematics, together the worlds of fantasy (mythology, films, literature, etc.). The non-physical is only a product of our imagination.
Then, the physical entails the non-physical only in a specific sense: physics uses mathematics objects to modeling reality.
What we have discovered about reality cannot be undone by future knowledge. Quantum mechanics will always work as well as it does, and nothing it has revealed to us about reality can be forgotten.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
You're not joking are you? I hope you are because the alternative is quite worrying.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
How do you use the principle of conservation of energy, to check for the conservation of energy? Give it a try.
Show a little philosophical sophistication please, this is a philosophy forum after all. The fact that QM is useful and always will be does not entail it tells us anything about reality.
Your:
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
Is a keeper though, you know whenever I want a laugh.
Oh, and by the way, QM has told us a great deal about the structure of reality, but I don't think I'll bother going into that right now.
And you keep ducking the conservation of energy question, why?
Take the chemical laws of catalysis. Point me to the theoretical work that has reduced those to the laws of physics. If you are tempted to say "the laws of chemical analsys are laws of physics" then once again your argument that "the physical is what is the subject matter of physical laws" becomes "the physical is the subject matter of scientific laws", and then the question "Why aren't maths and logic sciences" remains one you have not addressed (other than to simply pronounce that they are not).
You don't use the principle of conservation of energy to check for the conservation of energy. You check for conservation of energy by measuring energy. I still don't see the point of this particular line of thought of yours. Uber's idea is that we identify something as physical because it is a process or object or whatnot the behaviour of which is bound by the laws of conservation of energy.
Says the master of the technique of going silent when proved wrong.
Yes, monism precludes the possibility of separate realms, but not the possibility of different realms (or domains).
For example, temperament (those aspects of personality considered to be innate, as opposed to learned) may be the result of differences in the natural frequencies and damping ratios of thalamocortical circuits. Robinson, D. L. (December 2008). Brain Function, Emotional Experience and Personality. Netherlands Journal of Psychology, Volume 64, Issue 4, pp.152–167).
Temperament (a mental condition) and thalamocortical circuit function (a neurophysiological process) are two different types of actualities (empirical data accessed at different levels of abstraction) which are inextricably linked. Yet, temperament behaviour is a unity.
So, isn't it possible that spirit (a different domain) is somehow part of the mind-body equation which determines the behaviour of a human organism (a neutral monist substance)?
OMFG!
Given the economic importance of chemical processes involving catalysis, do you not think that a great deal of time, effort and money has been put into understanding the various processes at a fundamental level. There are literally sections of libraries devoted to this.
You really should use google, but perhaps you have no idea even what to search for. Anyway, if you ever try to educate yourself on chemical reactions, stability of atoms, blah, blah, you will discover, underneath it all, is the Schrödinger equation. Only under rare circumstances are you forced into relativistic equations for the bulk of chemistry.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
Have you heard of the Criterion of Demarcation? Look it up.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
How do you measure energy to check that the Principle of Conservation of Energy holds?
Be a man of your word, and tell us how to measure energy.
Do you recognize the difference between a thing and the description of that thing? Laws such as the conservation of energy, and Newton's third law are descriptions, produced from inductive principles. If these laws refer to constraints, they are descriptions of constraints, not the constraints themselves.
Quoting Uber
But you are doing exactly that, what you say you are trying to avoid. You are talking about these laws, which are descriptions produced by human minds, and saying that they are constraints on the physical. This is no different from saying that physical things are subject to human equations, as if the human equations are somehow controlling "constraining" the physical things. We see this quite commonly in discussions of quantum mechanics when people reify fields and wave functions, as if these mathematical objects were interacting with the physical world rather than just representing, or describing it.
You seem to see the importance of keeping a clear separation between the world and the representation of it, so why does it appear like you are intentionally blurring this boundary, actually dissolving it into vagueness, when you speak about constraints?
Quoting Uber
I really don't think this would work. Do you not see that "motion" is itself a description? If there is motion, there is necessarily something which is moving. "Motion" is a descriptive term, refrring to the properties of a moving thing. Do you agree? "Motion" is a description of a thing which is moving, it is attributed to the thing, as a property of it.
In the old days, physicists talked about bodies, moving bodies, and "physical" was defined as "of the body". Motion is "of the body", so motion is physical, but it is not a physical "thing", it is a property of a physical thing. Attributes, properties, such as colour, size, motion, etc., when understood as things themselves, are non-physical things, they are things of the mind, concepts. The "physical thing" is the assumed body which is moving. Notice I say "assumed", because the existence of physical things, bodies, is a metaphysical assumption. We make this assumption to make sense of "change". If there is change, then something is changing, and we assume a physical body as the thing which is changing.
Quoting Uber
I tend to employ dualist principles, so you might call me dualist. But I haven't seen your expression of this "epistemological problem". The silence is us dualists waiting with bated breath for something to address.
Good point about motion. Now I never really said what I meant by motion, which is probably why you don't know what I meant! I suppose I wanted the "chain of explanation" to end somewhere, fully aware that any end will leave open certain questions, but also comfortable with that incomplete state of affairs as long as the idea has broad power, generality, and does not lead to absurd implications. Like I said I don't think there will be a perfect solution to this.
On to your very good question: how can motion not be a part of spacetime? Intuitively the very suggestion is ridiculous, I understand. We think of motion as being in space and time. And normally I would have no problem with this, but in the event that some of the quantum people are right, we have to think about motion in other ways too. We have to think about entangled states of motion that give rise to spacetime itself. These states of motion are also "constrained," which I know is not our favorite word right now. My way of thinking about things was meant to cover this scenario too, regardless of whether it's actually true. But on balance I am hoping that motion is such an intuitive thing, whether it's a car going down the street or a quantum field fluctuating, that it can cover many cases without inviting too much speculation about its "ultimate nature."
Like you I share the skepticism of saying that physical things are those things covered by the laws of physics. The measurement problem is the "classic" issue with this type of thinking. Is the wavefunction real or is it a useful mathematical construct in the Schrodinger equation? The SE itself cannot tell us what the answer is, but the implication of tom's view is that it is physical by virtue of being in the equation. So it trivially assumes as physical something that is very much controversial and contested in physics, where the Copenhagen interpretation is slowly dying out in favor of alternatives. But you don't need to be hung up on wavefunctions to see other flaws. For example are vectors physical? Some laws of classical mechanics (Newtonian mechanics) use them, but others prefer a scalar formalism, as in Lagrangian mechanics. There are a million other problems as well, some of which you and others have pointed out.
Firstly, on the "reduction" of chemical laws to physical laws, there has been a lot of research into looking into the quantum mechanical basis of catalytic behaviour. That's certainly true, and MN should take a look at it. However, although I admit not being right up to date with the latest research, my understanding is that there had been no straightforward mapping of a law such as the Bronsted Law of Catalysis to the Schrodinger Wave Equation. So in that sense of reduction (one-one mapping of laws from one domain to laws in another) there remain laws of chemistry which have not been reduced to laws of physics. That being so, there is certainly a sense of "laws of physics" whereby the chemical reactions of the type which are the subject of the Bronsted Law are not the subject of laws of physics, which would - under the proposed definition of physical - mean that those reactions are not physical. Of course,tom might have another conception of a law of physics, but if so he would need to make that clear (and obviously do so with just saying that they are laws that treat of physical things, because then we really are in a very unillumintaing circle if our search is for some criterion of what is to count as physical).
Secondly, although I have not come across the "Criterion of Demarcation" before, just looking it up very quickly shows that it is a disputable and disputed philosophical criterion for making a dividing line between the scientific and the non-scientific. I don't think any philosophical dispute is going to be settled by appealing to a disputed philosophical criterion.
Thirdly, this notion of measuring energy. We don't directly measure energy, it is calculated. For instance, you measure the mass of an object and its velocity - given a frame of reference of course - and you can calculate its kinetic energy relative to that frame. But in one sense of "measure" that would be enough to measure the kinetic energy of the object. After all, we talk about measuring the calorific energy content of a peanut, but to do so we set the peanut alight and measure the temperature by which that lighted peanut raises a known amount of water. But if by "measurement" tom means "direct measurement" then perhaps we never measure energy. On the other hand, if we push the notion of directness, perhaps we never directly measure any physical quantity.
Are you claiming that what is happening in a catalytic reaction does not obey quantum mechanics?
It's not a philosophical criterion, it's a methodological criterion, pertaining to the Scientific Method. Don't upset mathematicians or logicians by claiming what they do is science, or that they employ the scientific method.
Right, we can't calculate the amount of energy using the Principle of conservation of energy, because it does not tell us how to do this.
We need to employ the laws of physics to calculate the energy.
No, I'm suggesting that the phenomena modelled by the equations of a law such as the Bronsted Law of Catalysis have no currently settled quantum model. That's the way things were a few years ago anyway, perhaps there's been a break through that I'm not aware of. I know that the advances in the availability of computing power have been pushing things along, but there was still a way to go last time I looked. But don't get hung up on the chemistry angle, the same point MN is making could be made for other special sciences: there is no quantum mechanical model for natural selection of species for instance, but it's at least tempting to think that natural selection is a theory which concerns physical things and events.
Well, calculating the energy of a system is part and parcel of doing physics, for sure, but I don't see why that vitiates Uber's point that we can demarcate the physical from the non-physical in terms of constraints such as the conservation of energy. I think the point is that we are trying to find some stable principle to allow a dermacation of the phyiscal from the non-physical. Sure, the conservation of energy isa guiding principle of physics, but its a guiding principle of chemistry and biology as well - it is a fixed point across all sciences.
The definite article? You seriously believe that what scientific method is is not a philosophical issue? You learnt your philosophy in a physics lab perhaps?
I mentioned the epistemological problem in an earlier post in this thread. It is an argument against Platonic realism by Paul Benacerraf. Here it is in the SEP. The problem is famous in the philosophy of mathematics, and it pretty much single-handedly led to the turn away from Platonic realism and towards structuralism at the end of the 20th century. It boils down to a simple question, which can be asked in different ways: how can universals communicate their properties to the human mind if not through physical causation? And if they do so through the latter, how are they not physical? It's a variation of the same question Princess Elisabeth asked Descartes: how can an immaterial soul guide a material brain? It's a problem that comes up in different guises across several philosophical fields, including theism as well, as Quentin Smith comprehensively demonstrated in his attacks against the ontological and cosmological arguments. There is no successful refutation of this problem by dualists.
You seem to be obsessed with the ontological nature of constraints. But I have already acknowledged that I don't really know where they come from or "what they are like." To echo Newton, I feign no hypothesis. Maybe God set them there. Maybe they are eternal and fundamental conditions of reality. Perhaps the most basic ones did not come from anywhere; they are just the default states of reality. I am perfectly content not knowing their "ultimate nature," to the extent that a concept like this makes any sense. To me what matters most, although it's not the only thing that matters, is that these constraints are validated through rigorous empirical observations.
Obviously I do not actually believe that mathematical equations have any causal powers. It's not like the uncertainty principle in the form of an equation is doing any kind of constraining. I believe that equations can describe important empirical relations. I believe that the uncertainty principle describes something fundamental about how states of motion evolve (ie. in certain ways and not others). But as to what ultimately explains it, I don't know. I just know that it's true.
Platonic forms, necessary truths, laws of nature. None of them communicate with us. We gain knowledge of these things in the same way - conjecture and criticism, though our conjectures regarding the laws of nature are amenable to a particularly powerful method of criticism.
This is precisely why philosophers of math abandoned Platonic realism in droves after Benacerraf.
There is still a bit of "magic", we have no theory of the psychology of conjecture.
Putting that to one side, we have a fully developed method for dealing with conjectures, and this theory cannot work under postmodernism, deconstructionism, or structuralism, which claimthat theories are essentially arbitrary.
Contrast these ideas with falibilism - you can't be a fallible postmodernist or structuralist!
There are structuralists who believe in some kind of modified Platonism (you actually sound like one), but other intellectual varieties also exist. In general, structuralism does maintain that mathematical statements or objects can have objective truth values, and hence are definitely not arbitrary, when analyzed in relation to their larger structures and systems.
A big question in its own right. There are many possible responses, but the Mah?y?na Buddhist analysis is instructive in this regard. N?g?rjuna says there is but one domain, and that therefore 'Sa?s?ra and Nirv??a are not different' (i.e. non-dual, advaya). (For the traditional schools, this was regarded as heretical, although for Mah?y?na Buddhism it has become canonical.) But the rationale is that 'the world' is 'Sa?s?ra' (i.e. the endless round of birth and death) for those who cling to it, but that same world is Nirv??a for those who have renounced it. 'Sa?s?ra is Nirv??a grasped, Nirv??a is Sa?s?ra released' is an economical way of expressing it.
Quoting Uber
Permeates the rational operations of mind. Recall this is one of the key distinctions between h. sapiens and other hominids (and indeed species.)
Quoting Uber
According to correspondence theory, 'truth' consists in the agreement of our thought with reality. This view seems to conform closely to our ordinary common sense usage when we speak of truth. The flaws in the definition arise when we ask what is meant by "agreement" or "correspondence" of ideas and objects, beliefs and facts, thought and reality. In order to test the truth of an idea or belief we must presumably compare it with the reality in some sense.
But in order to make the comparison, we must know what it is that we are comparing, namely, the belief on the one hand and the reality on the other. But if we already know the reality, why do we need to make a comparison? And if we don't know the reality, how can we make a comparison?
Furthermore the making of the comparison is itself a fact about which we have a belief. We have to believe that the belief about the comparison is true. How do we know that our belief in this agreement is "true"? This leads to an infinite regress, leaving us with no assurance of true belief.
So you will need to have at least something that is self-evident or apodictic on which to anchor 'correspondence' - which is, for instance, exactly what Descartes sought in his Meditations. But notice again, that whatever it is that is sought, must necessarily be internal to reason itself. Ultimately it must depend on some judgement of meaning or equivalence.
Now, note that one consequence of Godel is that there must be something assumed, some axiom that is accepted, in any formal system.
Which leads to Benacereff. I noticed a rather quirky (in my view) article called the indispensability argument for mathematics, which originated in an article by Benacereff, which is, the same in the SEP article, that 'our best epistemic theories seem to debar any knowledge of mathematical objects.' And why is that? Because:
(I especially like the description of 'rationalists' - cut to David Attenborough, standing amongst rows of dusty tomes in University library, intoning 'here we see the natural habitat of the elusive and rare Rationalist Philosopher'....)
So here you have it. The Platonist view must be challenged, because it is incompatible with 'our best epistemic theories' and because the objects of mathematical reasoning are not tangible or physical - therefore, can't be real. And what are 'our best epistemic theories?' The article doesn't say, but you can bet they're based on evolutionary biology and the empirical theory of knowledge, for which anything like 'innate ideas', 'inherent reason', or 'telos' are anathema. So rather than follow the mathematical intuition where it leads, we'll devise any number of facile and tortuous arguments to rationalise our essential non-rationality.
Bolds added. Now, considering all of the tub-thumping and preaching from the bully pulpit of Modern Science that we're nowadays subjected to, I would have thought that this blatant rejection of 'appeal to rational insight' ought to give any actual philosopher pause for thought, considering how they continually blather about 'rational science'. So - what is the agenda here, really?
Recall that Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion opened with an appeal to Einstein as a 'very religious non-believer' (that being the name of the first chapter). But this same Einstein said in totally unequivocal terms:
[quote=Albert Einstein, from Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson] I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written these books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvellously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.[/quote]
But, having once posted to the Dawkins Forum, I know that any such statements are received there like chunks of bloodied meat thrown into the Piranha River. And the reason is simple: there can be nothing 'above' or 'higher than' so-called 'scientific reason'. If we can't define it in terms of evolutionary biology and empirical measurement, then it must be an archaic superstition.
Quoting Uber
It's important to get straight what the idea of 'final cause' actually consists of. It is more like the reason that something exists, which is very counter-intuitive in today's philosophy where all reasons are generally efficient and material, in other words, they precede their effects. But, for example, the 'final cause' of a match, is actually fire - in that 'to light a fire' is the reason that the match exists. Bear that analogy in mind for all manners of form. The forms of things express the end to which they are directed, their 'raison d'etre'.
And principles such as equilibrium can be understood as states towards which states of affairs will tend - and in that sense are 'telic'. But one of the dogmas of empiricism is precisely to reject 'reason' in that 'end-directed' sense. After all there's no final cause in Darwinian biology beyond passing on your sperm.
Quoting Uber
Which is why primarily only in Anglo-American analytic philosophy that physicalism or materialism are taken seriously (oh, apart from amongst evolutionary biologists). Physics itself has long since had to abandon it.
The simple answer is that constraints develop. They are the historical breaking of physical symmetries. The past gets fixed as the result of an accumulation of such constraints. A complex world arises as one breaking creates the ground for some further breaking in a hierarchically cascading fashion.
So to believe in a constraints-based ontology is to believe in existence as a product of development - the regulation of instabilty.
The ontology of constraints is not a great mystery. It is the ontology of a developmental, evolutionary or process view of metaphysics. That brand of naturalism, in other words.
So states of constraint become fixed in place in a historical fashion. The material organisation of the world instantiates them. The material world becomes a structure that is stable enough to remember its past and can enforce that as the persisting context which is shaping its remaining uncertainties or freedoms.
As an ontology, it contrasts with Platonism, Computationalism, and other essentially timeless views of the Cosmos. That is because constraints develop. Structure is that which emerges as a cascade of symmetry breakings.
And it contrasts with Atomism as well. Matter is regulated instability. So in the beginning, there was only instability or unregulated fluctuation. Atoms are the result of global historical contexts having developed and become relatively fixed.
So we exist because of the development of constraints. And to understand that history of symmetry-breakings, we have to melt the rather frozen block of constraints that now compose the structure of a Cosmos which is only a few fractions from its ultimate Heat Death.
Physics understands this is how it works as a practical matter. But oddly, the public metaphysics seems to have got stuck on the Platonism vs the Atomism.
We seem to have to make a choice of which team to follow - that of the timeless structures or the moving parts. Yet both are simply the complementary aspects of a Cosmos that has managed to lock in a complex state of self-regulation by growing so cold and large.
Modern Platonic realism is a form of idealism which does not, in itself, provided a good representation of dualism. Aristotle sufficiently refuted Pythagorean idealism, and the form of Platonic idealism which is basically the same as modern Platonic realism. This did not prevent the Neo-Platonists and Christian theologians from developing a form of dualism which was immune to such refutation. So we need more than just a refutation of Platonic realism to deal with dualism in general, because Platonic realism does not provide us with the principles which are fundamental to a more advanced and comprehensive dualism
Quoting Uber
The answer to this question is what we call "final cause". Final cause is non-physical causation. That this type of causation is non-physical is the reason why the will can be said to be free. "Final cause", as a concept, allows that the non-physical interacts with the physical, in a causal way.
Quoting Uber
Sorry to disappoint you, but Plato put forward the principles to solve this problem thousands of years ago with the points put forward in his Timaeus. This work provides the guidelines for understanding how that which is believed to be outside of time, eternal, the forms, which we now call "non-physical", may interact with material, or "physical" existence. It involves a unique understanding of the nature of time.
Quoting Uber
The point is that the position you put forward actually falls to the very "epistemological problem" which you cited. According to your definition of "physical", constraints are necessarily non-physical, as what constrains the physical. So how can the non-physical constraints act to constrain the physical, if not through physical causation? Do you accept the free will, and final causation as the solution to this problem?
Quoting Uber
Don't you find this to be contradictory? The things which you are calling "constraints", you are now saying don't actually do "any kind of constraining". What are the real "constraints" if not the things which you call "constraints"? What kind of non-physical thing does the real constraining, the will?
The correspondence of empirical claims with empirical reality is not made by comparing the claims to some absolute reality that we can somehow directly 'see' or 'know', but to an inferred reality that explains, and is thus assumed to provide the conditions for the possibility, and the actuality, of intersubjective agreement, as well as the agreement between subjective experience at any time with subjective experience at other times.
An independent reality is indicated, not directly known (which would be absurd, a contradiction). The irony is that we can only question the reality of that reality on the basis of data and theories which themselves presuppose that it is real; thus providing us with a nice performative contradiction.
Right! I mean, the idea that your statements 'correspond to reality' seems intuitively obvious, but when you actually consider what such 'correspondence' entails, then it gets interesting. What I'm saying is that even to assert , there is an implicit ability to grasp abstractions - 'this must mean that' - prior to an empirical claim.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Actually - and I know we've discussed this quite a few times - what I'm starting to understand through research, is that the 'hylomorphic' (matter~form) dualism of Aristotle is what was incorporated into Thomas Aquinas. Now, Lloyd Gerson, whom as you probably know of, says that in his view, despite their differences, Aristotle remained broadly speaking Platonist and that regardless of their differences, Aristotle is still broadly Platonist.
And the only real 'modern Platonic realists' I am familiar with are neo-Thomists (although there's probably very many that I don't know of). But all of them accept the reality of abstract objects. As for your 'Aristotle refuted Pythagorean Idealism' - that is based on one sentence in the Metaphysics which refers to 'the geometers'. So - let's not muddy the waters by getting into what an arcane sub-debate about what is/is not modern/traditional Platonism/not Platonism. At issue is wholly and solely the reality of abstracts, as far as I'm concerned, and that is where Platonists of whatever stripe have a case to make.
I think you've misunderstood: I was actually saying that it is the questioning of the reality of the shared world which is constitutes a performative contradiction.
Also, when you say "an implicit ability to grasp abstractions" it depends on what you mean to imply by that. At its least tendentious of course it just means that we have to know what we are saying when we make empirical claims; and that obviously just means that we know the meanings of the words we use to make the claim, that we know what those words refer to.
You say you accept a ‘four-causes’ cosmology - material, efficient, formal and final - but here the ‘ultimate Heat Death’ represents ‘the final cause’, in the sense of ‘that to which all things are directed’. Does it not?
//ps// After I wrote that, I thought ‘it looks awfully heavy’ - like, inquisitorial. I really didn’t mean it to come across like that. But I think it’s important in the context, just to orientate the discussion.//
Quoting Janus
Language, mathematics, and the other intellectual operations uniquely characteristic of h. Sapiens.
Right. My point is that mind-body dualism should be based on a scientific, not religious (or theological), argument; and that it would be proven to be unsound on that account.
Case in point: the re-definition of soul to mean mind instead of form, per Thomas Aquinas.
It is obvious what you were referring to by "grasping abstractions", it is regarding the implications of that ability that the controversy is in play.
Yes. I’ve said exactly that plenty of times surely? That is the most fundamental global cosmic tendency.
That doesn’t stop complexity arising along the way. But it is the final game that underlies all others.
Quoting Galuchat
To say that it must be a scientific matter, locates the issue in the phenomenal domain, which already presumes an implicit metaphysic.
I agree that Aristotle was, broadly speaking, Platonist. But through the terms of his dualism, matter and form, which are associated with "potential" and "actual" respectively, he manages to refute Pythagorean idealism, and what he refers to in my translation as "some Platonists". This can be found in book nine of the Metaphysics.
Plato himself turned against this form of idealism, commonly called Platonic realism today. I've seen it argued that he actually refutes this idealism (Pythagorean idealism, or Platonic realism) in the Parmenides. And, in the Timaeus, which is of his latest works, he offers a completely different form of idealism, which relies on a divine mind, similar to Berkeley.
The key problem which arises in Plato's extensive expose is the nature of the separation between the ideas which you and I have, and the proposed separate "Idea", which is represented by Parmenides as eternal unchanging truth. In his earlier works, such as the Symposium, you can find Plato describing and explaining the concept of "participation". We come to apprehend the reality of independent Ideas in this way. As individuals we form an idea of "beauty" (the example in The Symposium) from observing things which are said to be beautiful. But to validate this subjective notion of beauty we must assume that the things actually partake in an independent "Idea of Beauty" in order that there is any truth to saying that they are beautiful.
Notice the extremely subjective nature of the example, "beauty". This is intentional to expose the difficulties of the independent Idea. Since all ideas, concepts are essentially the same, the example holds right through to the most certain and "objective" of the mathematical ideas. So Plato uses an extremely subjective idea, to demonstrate that even the most objective ideas, such as the ones utilized in mathematics, receive their objectivity in the same way that an extremely subjective idea could receive objectivity. This is by means of the assumption of the independent "Idea". Mathematics receives its objectivity through the assumption of independent mathematical objects, "Ideas".
Having exposed this principle in his early works, Plato moves along to analyze the problems which develop from this assumption, the assumption of independent Ideas. The first logical consequent, which is already accepted by Parmenides and the Pythagoreans is that these ideas, independent from the changing human mind, must be eternal. If we remove the forces of change to the Idea, the human mind, the Idea cannot change.
This eternal uinchangingness becomes a very serious difficulty for Plato. It is basically the "epistemological problem" which Uber points to. These eternal Ideas are necessarily passive, being actively "participated in", or "partaken of" by the activities of material things. You can see that Plato gets a glimpse of this issue in The Republic with his introduction of "the good". "The good" can be understood as the inclination to act. What causes a person to act is a perceived "good". So "the good" becomes representative of the cause of activity, the cause of actuality. Now Plato has the principle whereby he can move "Ideas" from the category of eternally passive, to the category of active in causation. Under "the good", ideas are associated with the will to act, as having causal relevance. The problem of giving causal power to independent Ideas is resolved by allowing for an independent will. In theology this becomes the will of God. God created the material world because he saw that it was good.
You can see in the Parmenides that Plato is still trying to cling to the notion of participation, in which material things actively participate in the passive, independent Ideas, but it is not working out. Socrates gives a very heartfelt defence of the Parmenidean Ideas, arguing that the Idea is like the day. No matter how many different places partake of the day, it changes nothing of the day itself. But we can see through this, knowing that in reality the day is actively passing. So while the day appears to be passive, and partaken of, it is actually active, actively imparting itself to the places that partake.. And while it appears like the physical things are actively taking part in the passive day, and this constitutes the passing of the day, what is really occurring is that the passing of the day is the activity which imparts itself, as the cause of all the apparent activities of the passive things.
So this is the principle that is present in the Timaeus which is key to understanding dualism and getting beyond the objections of Aristotle, and the "epistemological problem". The independent Forms are active, as necessitated by the above discussion, and Aristotle's cosmological argument. It is the human misconception of "time" which renders the Forms as passive, non causal, outside of time, eternal. When our conception of time excludes the possibility that something non-physical (Forms), may be active (being impossible because the conception of time leaves them outside time, therefore inactive), then these Forms are necessarily eternal, therefore passive and non causal. This misconception of "time", as a premise, produces the conclusion that immaterial Forms are necessarily outside of time, therefore inactive and non-causal. This is Uber's epistemic problem. But the epistemic problem does not refute dualism as Uber claims, what it does is serve as evidence of the human misconception of time.
Quoting Wayfarer
The point then, in a nutshell (if the above is too rambling) is this. When we conceive of Forms, mathematical objects, laws of physics, and this type of constraint, as outside of time, eternal, our principles are subject to this "epistemic problem". "Outside of time", eternal, renders the Forms as inactive, passive, and necessarily non-causal. So we are forced to either reject the independent Forms as the materialists and physicalists choose to do, or reconceive the relationship between the Forms and time, such that the Forms may be active, as the theologians have done. If we choose the latter, then it becomes immediately evident that we cannot have a conception of time which is derived from the motions of material objects. This will place the activities of the immaterial Forms as outside of time, incomprehensible, unintelligible, contradictory, as time is required for activity.
To get a better sense of this philosophical sophistry, let's try to explain emotion. On the dualist explanation, emotion permeates the emotional states of the mind, and thus precedes all feelings. So instead of emotion being a general indicator for the various feelings that arise naturally in human beings, emotion instead becomes a transcendent realm onto itself, the foundational source and wellspring for actual human emotions in the real world. Naturalism would fail to describe anything here as well, because the use of emotional states to explain human emotion presupposes the existence of an external emotional source, which conveniently lies very much outside of natural explanation. But why stop at reason or emotion? There are a million arguments that can be made against naturalism just on this way of thinking. Take sensation. To explain any sensation, like sight or touch, requires the prior existence of sensation separate from human experience. But since all we have to work with are sensations in the realm of experience, none of these can be an explanation for sensation itself, which obviously precedes the senses.
They will argue that emotions and sensations very much require experience and cannot be thought of as a priori. But I would argue that experience can merely explain why people become sad or happy. It cannot explain the general feeling of sadness through material causation, and hence emotion too must exist on a magical Platonic realm, ready to "permeate our feelings" with meaning.
You see how easy it all is? To reach absurd conclusions when you totally detach metaphysics from empirical reality.
We already know what makes us more intelligent than other primates or hominids: 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex arranged in very special ways. That's the reason why we have language, abstract thoughts, and can waste time on silly philosophical debates online. We do not need to invent magical realms to help explain why humans are different. We know it's because we had a unique evolutionary history, which primed us to have certain traits and abilities but not others.
Your attempted argument against the correspondence theory fails, because it does not follow that a belief about reality is the same thing as having knowledge of reality. Your objection would also be laughable to a direct realist, who would turn this battle exclusively into a fight between philosophy vs. neuroscience. I won't go there myself, but you get my point. Nor does the correspondence theory need to stand alone, without other epistemic support. For example, one can believe in this theory and still be a kind of structuralist, where the truth value of logical and mathematical statements is understood by relation to the wider systems in which they exist. At the same time, one can also believe that those systems approximate important features of reality, even without fully approaching an absolute description.
Suppose I have the general belief that the mind exists independently from external reality. In other words, the existence of the mind and all of its operations do not require the existence of an external reality. One way to test this hypothesis is to permanently cut off our oxygen supply and see what happens to the conscious mind. Having seen the consequences, we have then moved on from belief to something more closely resembling knowledge. Our belief in this case acted as a kind of prediction about what could happen to the mind. The falsification of the prediction necessarily requires some kind of adjustment to the original belief. Thus our predictions can be updated in the face of empirical evidence. If they hold up well, we would say they correspond. Against correspondence theories, we have essentially a bunch of competitors where truth amounts to various versions of relativism.
Nothing written about the epistemological problem actually addressed the problem itself. You spend a few paragraphs whining and complaining about how neurobiology cannot explain mathematical reasoning. Of course that's false, because I just demonstrated in my last post how gradual acts of inference across different fields led to the development of foundational logic. You will then interpret this as a kind of rational miracle, the human mind discovering timeless truths after hundreds of thousands of years in the dark. You can indulge and decorate these fairy tales all you wish, but you did not explain how your magical realms inform our mathematical intuition. You just assume the existence of "innate ideas" and "intuition," but you yourself have no idea how they actually work or why they are required, without the usual fantasies that roam your mind.
Apart from the fact that our causal theories have moved on from Aristotle and we are no longer stuck in a philosophical time warp like certain people here, you yourself acknowledged that naturalism could allow for "final causes" when you mention the passing of genes. More broadly, here is a candidate final cause or physical objective for all life, not just humans: to avoid thermodynamic equilibrium with the rest of the natural environment by continuously dissipating away energy to that environment. The real issue for you isn't final or material or efficient causes. Those are just words that you use to fill space. It's that you don't like the specific causes being invoked to explain the world, because they do not require the prior existence of your magical realm.
The last paragraph is just false. The vast majority of physicists are naturalists, in the ontological sense of the word. Dualism is not taken seriously in any of the hard sciences, because it's inherently contradictory.
You sound like a broken record. I have already admitted that we don't always know what does the constraining. I certainly don't think it's a matter of writing down an equation. At best that can accurately describe what is being constrained, but cannot always conclude what did the constraining. Under certain theories of quantum gravity, entangled states give rise to space and time, and hence you can see these exotic motions as constraining the possibilities of emergent motions. But then you will ask what constrains the entangled states. The honest answer is I don't know. I could invent fairy tales like you and Wayfarer, but I have too much self-respect.
I kind of like the answer that apokrisis gave in the previous page, seeing constraints through an eternal cycle of development. I don't know if this view is right or even I fully agree with it, but there is opportunity through this line of thinking for metaphysical development of what constraints mean and where they come from.
Having said all that, it is abundantly clear to me that the definition I gave for physical stuff is at least empirically reliable, even though it has outstanding metaphysical questions...as any definition for anything would!
That's the idea, I keep harping away at inadequacies, contradictions and hypocrisy, until the professors of said inadequacies admit to the inadequacy. Do you admit that the principles you espouse fall victim to very same epistemic problem that you cite against dualism, as I described? If you do, then you should look into a true dualism, like the one I profess, which avoids this epistemic problem.
Nor does your attempted resolution of the epistemological problem above work for dualism. First because it assumes that "Forms" exist when there is no evidence for them. But more fundamentally, because you assume that any conception of time can exist separately from space, which is a categorical no in modern physics. So your fairy tales cannot simply be "active" in time and then go on vacation. They would have to exist in spacetime, meaning they should be located somewhere. That would make them physical in a fundamental sense, even if you don't accept my definition. Naturalism remains the correct position.
You keep harping and repeating your own delusions. If that sounds like an achievement to you, then you just might be a dualist.
Nothing I have read so far warrants throwing Platonism out with Dualism.
To clarify, on your view:
1) Forms (both General and Particular) are not physical, mental, or spiritual?
2) It is only information which may be intelligible (pure) or substance (empirical)?
3) How does your "true dualism" address the mind-body problem?
By your own definition of "physical" you have divided reality into multiple realms. You say that the physical is "any system subject to energetic constraints". By this definition you divide reality into the physical (that which is subject to constraints), and the constraints themselves.
Apokrisis does not provide a solution to this problem, as we've discussed this before. There is no logical way that the non-physical, the constraints, can emerge from the physical, that which is constrained. Emergence of constraints implies a time of no constraints prior to the existence of constraints. But it is illogical to think that that which is fundamentally unconstrained (prior to constraints) could produce its own constraints. If constraints have always existed, then the "fundamental states of motion" already had constraints, and "emergence" is denied as inapplicable to this situation. But this makes constraints prior to motion, as constraining all motions, and therefore eternal. Now we have the epistemological problem. How does something prior to time and motion (constraints) have causal efficacy in the physical world?
Quoting Uber
Your reliance on "empirical reality" is what is misleading. Empirical reality is based in sensation, and sensation is fallible. That's why we turn to logic, to lead us out of the mistaken assumptions of empirical reality. Our sense observation lead us astray because of the limited capacities of the senses, while reason and logic allow us to identify the mistakes which the senses lead us into, and rectify them. Ultimately the "logical reality" must be given priority over the "empirical reality", in order that the intellect can overcome the problems given to it by the senses. You, like apokrisis, appear to believe that we must depreciate our logical principles, because our senses give us an "empirical reality" of vagueness which logic cannot grasp. Logical principles must be adapted to empirical evidence even if the senses give us illogical confusion. Instead of realizing that this is a deficiency of our senses, you would insist that it is a deficiency of logic, suggesting as apokrisis does, that logical principles be degraded to allow that the confusion which the senses hand us is a real aspect of the universe rather than a deficiency of the human being's ability to apprehend. As you give priority to the "empirical reality" rather than the intelligible reality.
Quoting Uber
Have you read how I have addressed the epistemological problem. The same problem was really addressed thousands of years ago by Plato. Ancient dualist metaphysics has progressed far beyond that problem.
Quoting Uber
The evidence is logical. The active Forms are implicated by logical necessity. Their existence is demonstrated by logical necessity. Your reliance on "the empirical" misleads you into thinking that all evidence is sensual.
Quoting Uber
Quite obviously a conception of time which is different from that of modern physics is going to be a "categorical no in modern physics". That is tautological. But this does nothing to demonstrate that the conception of time employed by modern physics is better. And please, don't turn to your "empirical evidence". When dealing with the non-physical, as space and time clearly are, it is imperative that we rely on the intellect, and logic, for our understanding, not the senses.
Quoting Galuchat
What I suggest is throwing out Platonism, in its common, degraded representation, which is the presentation of its critics, in favour of an intelligibly formulated dualism.
Quoting Galuchat
I must be honest with you Galuchat, and tell you that I always have problems understanding your terminology. I will however address 3) above. The mind-body dualism of the human being is one instance of dualism. It is the example of dualism which is most evident to us because we have access to the non-physical within us. But we must extend dualism to cover all existence in the universe, as Aristotle does with his matter/form dualism. This is extremely difficult for us to do, because everything external to us is only evident to us through our senses. So we cannot immediately apprehend the non-physical aspect of all that is external to us because we only apprehend our surroundings with our senses. Only our intellects can demonstrate to us, through the means of logical argument, that the non-physical is real.
We apprehend the non-physical aspect of reality within ourselves, with our minds. We understand that it is real. But we cannot sense it in the rest of the universe, because it is not something which can be sensed, though it is just as real throughout the entirety of the universe as it is within each of us. It is the intellect, logical principles, and reasoning, which demonstrate to us the reality of the non-physical, not the senses.
Fair enough.
Thanks for your clarification. It should come as no surprise that I can't buy into it.
So let me get something straight: would you be ok with this definition if constraints were non-physical? If they lived in your magical realm with the Forms and Santa Claus? In other words, is your problem with the definition itself, or with the idea that constraints could never be physical? Or both? Because what then is your alternative to defining physical things?
The definition does not imply any division at all, and in any case I rephrased it a while back to state anything that only has finite amounts of energy, in response to your initial objection. So you keep attacking a strawman.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I did. You may be shocked to know that I did not find the semi-theological speculation about the will that convincing. You may also be shocked to know that I don't find a BS word like "active" to represent a causal explanation for anything. The basic problem is that your fundamental assumptions about the world are totally bonkers. So things don't look any more promising for the conclusions you have reached on top of these weak foundations.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What epic lunacy.
If 2+2 = 4, then unicorns exist.
2+2 = 4.
Therefore, unicorns exist.
Apparently I can bring anything into existence through logical necessity. This is why we should be careful with how we use logic!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Beautiful nonsense, some of the most beautiful nonsense I've yet seen on this forum. I think you easily win the prize. We are aware of eliminative materialism. This is eliminative metaphysicalism at play: nothing exists or matters except logical metaphysics. The way you probably live your life and your participation in this online forum is proof enough that you yourself do not believe this garbage.
And that's because such a conception is false. It comes from the mind's almost irresistible tendency to 'objectify' or re-ify. That is why so many will ask: where is this so-called 'domain of ideas'? The answer is that it is nowhere, it is not located in space and time. So, for empiricism, it can't be said to exist. So it is depicted as being 'frozen' or 'immobile' or 'unchanging' or some 'ghostly realm' as that is the only kind of imagery that empiricism is capable of conceiving of; all that exists is said to be 'out there somewhere'. But what number actually refer to, is, in part, the way that the mind itself organises its own cognitive operations (something which becomes explicit in Kant although I will be prepared to acknowledge that my depiction of it is idiosyncratic.)
To understand metaphysics requires meta-noia, a literal change in the way cognition operates; it requires insight into one's own mental operations. It requires the intelligence becoming aware of the way it 'constructs' the world. Naturalism doesn't deal with that, because it operates at the level where that construction is itself treated as reality with a taken-for-granted nature. Questioning that is the business of metaphysics.
Quoting apokrisis
I am having a hard time seeing how stasis, non-existence, the so-called ‘Heat Death’, comprises ‘a purpose’, any more than the purpose of an individual life is to be cremated. I think the problem is, 'the immanent' in terms of which we nowadays wish to see everything, isn't the domain of purpose, so we can't see any purpose in it, other than those purposes which we ourselves project onto it. But in the original semiotic view - which actually descended from Bonaventure, I have learned, the 'signs' were actually all symbols of a higher truth. Now that the 'higher truth' is no longer honoured, then what is 'signified'?
Quoting Galuchat
The mind is not an object of empirical analysis. Or rather, it is made the object of empirical analysis through cognitive science, which objectively analyses cognitive and intellectual functions. But there is another sense in which mind can't be an object - plainly, as it can't be seen or measured. Much of the modern 'mind-body' problem arises from the attempt to portray the mind as an object, namely, the 'res cogitans' of Descartes, and its descendants. And that has lead to the 'hard problem', eliminativism, neo-Darwinian materialism, and all the other problems that are stock in trade on this Forum.
I am suggesting a radically different approach drawing on aspects of traditional metaphysics, and also aspects of non-dualism.
Quoting Uber
Emotion has nothing whatever to do with the question at hand.
Quoting Uber
No, not utterly detached from it, that is not at all what I said. What I said (again) is that materialism doesn't explain reason, as reason is continually invoked in order to define such doctrines as 'materialism'. Actually Schopenhauer has a wonderful quotation on just this point:
That totally nails it. And the reason that number (etc) is real, is that it provides the means for those operations to disclose universally-applicable truths about the empirical domain.
Far from being a 'fantasy world', that actually is the very thing that makes scientific method possible. But it has become so thoroughly forgotten that it now appears to you as 'fantasy'.
Quoting Uber
Which ultimately comes down to utilitarianism and honing those skills which are required for enhancing survival. Which is all well and good, but if you actually look at the subject of philosophy, there are other layers and levels of meaning that it is concerned with.
Quoting Uber
Agree - what I am arguing is that the materialist paradigm has been seriously challenged, or even undermined by developments in modern physics. And, sure, most physicists are naturalists and natural scientists, but some are not, and there's plenty of debate going about idealism in physics, the ultimate nature of matter, and so on. Questions such as the nature of the reality of numbers and natural laws are still well and truly alive.
I'm not bringing up Aristotelian philosophy out of nostalgia. It is because the Greek tradition was already critical, was already highly sophisticated and insightful into very deep questions about the nature of things.
Yes this is the kind of nihilism which Nietzsche saw Christianity as inevitably leading to; the annihilation of all *merely* human meaning by an imposition of purported overarching transcendent meaning. Nietzsche was no nihilist; this in an egregious misunderstanding; he was opposed to the nihilism, the devaluation and destruction of human meaning which is an inherent in religions when they become established by power as dictatorial traditons.
Again, this is something I have replied on multiple times. The answer is the same. Life and mind - as natural systems - can be understood to have a purpose that is orthogonal to this baseline entropic tendency. It is all a point of view.
So the second law prevails in the cosmological long-run. It is the baked-in tendency. But shit happens along the way. The Big Bang "wanted" to be a simple spreading~cooling radiation bath, but then it cooled to a degree that massive gravitating particles condensed out of this general smooth flow. The breaking of the electroweak symmetry by the Higgs field created a sudden clutter of hydrogen and other simple atoms. The smooth entropification was interrupted by a sudden production of negentropic matter.
That led to planets and stars. Stars are one way all that negentropy is being fizzled back into radiation. But stars leave a heavy atom residue. So now we have the conditions where life and mind could arise as further re-entropifying systems. It is part of nature's global desire that if anything could accelerate the return of that residual negentropy to the general entropic flow, then that kind of dissipative structure must inevitably develop.
So it is completely reasonable that life and mind should conceive of their reason for existing as being some kind of cosmic necessity. The Universe needs us organisms to break down the negentropic lumps that have developed in its entropic flow.
Humans are the most amazing dissipative structures in known creation. We can heat up entire planets in about a century. Our second law awesomeness in this regard is easy to quantify.
So yes. You do look at humans and think we must be really special. But the reason we are so focused on our own personal negentropic development is because our resulting entropy production is so matchingly spectacular.
We have developed mythologies - cultural, political, economic - that enable us to pursue the Universe's central goal by apparently aiming our lives at the very opposite of what it is doing. It is entropifying, but we are negentropifying.
But look closer. All that negentropic structure is what is managing to burn the millennia of trapped fossil carbon that "fell out of the entropic flow" by getting buried under rock. We are doing an amazing job of eating up all the coal and petroleum.
Pay attention to what we are actually achieving. Don't get fooled by the mythologies we spin around the social structure and cultural attitudes needed to pursue the Cosmos's grand plan.
Metaphysical reason is never invoked to explain reason in the context of materialism. That's a red herring. You are the one invoking metaphysical reason to explain the rational operations the mind. Materialism recognizes that those operations are emergent properties of a special kind of brain (the human brain) dynamically coupled to an external world. So it absolutely does not need the made up form of reason you are pushing to explain the mental properties of the brain, the rational and the irrational ones! Curiously, you never talk about the latter. I wonder if insanity and irrationality are also hanging out there among the Forms, constantly imbuing humans with stupidity?
So then...you agree that naturalism can provide final causes? You are upset about what, that these causes lack the "layers of meaning" that you think philosophy should have?
I strongly disagree with your assertions on modern physics. I think most developments in modern physics have strongly reinforced naturalism, not undermined it. This is not just because of the predictive power of physics. It's also because modern physics has revealed nature to be so complex and dynamic, capable of doing things that people could have never fathomed before modern times. The discovery of things like black holes, topological insulators, quantum fields, and entanglement are a reminder of the great diversity of physical systems that comprise nature. And the ideas developed to describe them provide some deep unifying frameworks, which hold great explanatory power even though many of them are still under empirical and theoretical investigations.
There was no substance in your counter-arguments. Honestly and seriously. You're one of the better writers to join this forum, and you explain yourself well, and you are making me think through what I'm saying - but what I'm arguing is supported by my own research and with references and sources.
Furthermore, I perfectly understand that my philosophical project, the kinds of things that I argue, are counter to the majority view. I understand that what Nagel calls 'evolutionary materialism' is the consensus view in the secular West and I am taking issue with in on fundamental grounds - not with reference to any form of ID, but basically through a variety of transcendental arguments. When Thomas Nagel did likewise, in his 2012 book, he was hugely scorned by the secular intelligentsia.
But I think Nagel was correct overall.
So - your analogy of 'emotion' has no application whatever in this context. To explain why, consider the following:
[quote=Feser]As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, 'intellect' is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal).
Intellect is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images (such as a visual mental image of what your mother looks like, an auditory mental image of what your favorite song sounds like, a gustatory mental image of what pizza tastes like, and so forth); and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body (such as a visual experience of the computer in front of you, the auditory experience of the cars passing by on the street outside your window, the awareness you have of the position of your legs, etc.).
That intellectual activity -- "reasoning" in the formal sense of the term -- is irreducible to sensation and imagination [and to emotion!] is a thesis that unites Platonists, Aristotelians, and rationalists of either the ancient Parmenidean sort or the modern Cartesian sort. The thesis is either explicitly or implicitly denied by modern empiricists.[/quote]
So - you're explicitly denying it, but I don't think your showing a lot of understanding of what it is you're denying, and why.
Quoting Uber
I would question whether you can 'explain reason'. Reason is 'what explains'. We can't actually explain why 2 + 2 = 4; such expressions are metaphysical primitives (in Frege's terminology) which form the 'rules of thought' but are not, or cannot be, actually explained any further. Again, the nature of number is still a vexed question, but being able to reason numerically is obviously fundamental to science itself.
One of the presumptions of the evolutionary model is that reason is an adaption or an evolutionary development in the service of survival. But I say that doesn't explain reason at all - it sells it short. That's why you're saying 'you see how easy all this is?' You're saying it, because you don't really understand it. You've accepted the wisdom of the crowd, that Modern Science has it all worked out, we're just filling in the details. And I'm really not trying to be condescending or to troll you. It's a serious topic.
Quoting Uber
It doesn't recognize that - it is simply the claim of materialist philosophers. But non-materialist philosophers (who, I maintain, form the mainstream of the Western philosophical tradition) don't accept that view. Read this quote again, carefully:
[quote=Schopenhauer] ...materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself... Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this can leave nothing to be desired. But all this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space, and causality, by virtue of which it is first of all presented as extended in space and operating in time.[/quote]
(And whatever else Schopenhauer was, he was certainly no apologist for religion!)
Quoting Uber
Not 'upset'. Philosophy does have concerns which extend beyond naturalism. Modern culture has put a taboo on anything beyond the scope of naturalism - calling something 'supernatural' is a kiss of death. Calmly contemplate how vexed this debate already is, and ask yourself why. This is a matter of history, as much as philosophy.
Quoting Janus
[s]Shame about Nietzsche's sister giving all his copyright to the Nazis, eh?[/s]
How does that relate to what I had written?
Well - this is a whole other can of worms. But, right at the moment, there is an immense debate going on in the Physics community, about whether string theory, and the related concept of 'the multiverse', really does amount to a scientific theory at all.
In the 'nay' corner, are various scientists and commentators, including George Ellis, Joe Silk, Peter Woit, and Roger Penrose among many others. One of their fundamental criticisms is that string theory doesn't make testable predictions at all, and nor can the proposed multiverses or 'the landscape' ever be empirically demonstrated. So they are arguing that it doesn't pass muster as science.
In the 'yay' corner are Sean Carroll and others, who say that Popper's criterion of 'falsifiability' out to be retired as the scope of science has burst through the kind of notional limits of Popper's understanding. (I have read the term 'popperazi' in this connection, as it's become quite a spiteful argument.)
Then there's another issue in current cosmology - or two, actually - one being, the fact that there's a gap in the accounts of the mass-energy of the observable universe to the order of 96% of the totality now being thought to exist in some unknown form currently designated 'dark matter~energy'. Another is the so-called 'fine-tuning' and related 'naturalness' problem of the 'standard model', the former of which has generated vast controversy and many large and difficult books.
And none of those issues look like being resolved any time soon, if at all.
So, the nature of 'naturalism' is well and truly an open question. You can't sanguinely gesture at science as if we have it all worked out, we're just waiting for some additional details to flesh out the whole picture. We could well be on the cusp of a much greater revolution than the Copernican.
Quoting Uber
No, they've taken refuge in the White House.
According to the definition they are non-physical. That is implied necessarily by you definition of physical as that which is subject to constraints. You've created a separation between the physical, and that which constrains the physical. This must be non-physical. I'm not OK with it because it suffers the epistemological problem. As I said in my first reply, I find in my experience that constraints are physical, so I think you're way of the mark even using "constraints" as a defining term.
Quoting Uber
Good, as I said, we ought to leave "constraints" right out of this definition. How would you define "energy" here? Do you allow for potential energy? Suppose as a simple example, because I'm no physicist, that an object transfers energy to another object, through force, and this is explained by the means of a field, such that the potential energy is the property of the field. Would you say that the field is something physical because it has a finite amount of energy, even though that energy is just potential energy, and a "field" is just a mathematical construct?
Quoting Uber
I'll keep that in mind.
Quoting Uber
I'll keep that in mind as well as the following:
Quoting Uber
It appears like you have no constructive criticism, no interest in philosophy, and no means for discussing, let alone refuting, the points I made. At least you admit that my replies are beautiful. Yours are ugly.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree. This is why we proceed with logic as the fundamental principle of "construction" rather than the sense impressions of empiricism. Uber calls this "epic lunacy" to place logic as more reliable than the senses.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's an understatement. Look at Uber's replies to me. Bye now, I know when my time is being wasted.
Apo will have his own answer, probably quite different from mine, but I couldn't pass over this since it is so relevant to the point I made about nihilism as it was understood by Nietzsche. The thing is entropy is not an overarching purpose at all, except insofar it is conceived to be so by people. And the same goes for 'the salvation of the soul', 'the liberation of all beings', or, on a more immanent scale, ideological reifications such as the inevitability of proletarian revolution. None of these "master narratives" are real beyond the fact that they are believed by people.
This is the case with any "higher truth" whatsoever. Higher truths are real only insofar as people are committed to them, and they may be judged only by their fruits. I'm not saying people should not be committed to such ideals, if that is what they feel is right for them, but the fatal error consists in prescribing such things for others, even for all people.
So, to say that the only meaning is human meaning, whether individual or collective, does not constitute nihilism at all. The subtle imposition of meaning by the collective on the individual is what holds, at least for modernity, the seeds of nihilism, insofar as it forecloses on the possibility of any creative individual establishment of meaning. And the totalitarian imposition of meaning by the collective on the individual is nihilism full-blown, at least in those cultures where individual creative aspirations have begun, or continue, to exist.
What could it mean for all individuals to honour a "higher truth"? Whose "higher truth" would they be honouring? I can't see how it could be anything but a retrogressive return to life "under the aegis of tutelage"*; a capitulation, a loss of nerve, a cowardly going back to a life which the spirit of the Enlightenment rightly sought to put behind it.
* Hegel
So isn't there some irony here that string theory is good evidence that science is Platonistic enough to bend its own alleged empirical rules when the mathematics seems so reasonable that it must be true?
If string theory had a single calculational outcome, then it would be game over. But it turned out to have a "landscape" of possible solutions.
If you then look at most of the critics of string theory you cited, they are then pushing their own particular Platonistic barrows. They have some alternative "reasonable" mathematical model, like loop quantum gravity.
So a cynical reading of the situation is that you are hearing from the experimental physicists getting concerned that the theoretical physicists were getting to much attention for just doing mathematics. They need those guys to produce "testable models" - preferably models like the Higgs particle which are bang in the energy range of the next generation collider they want funded. And then the other critics were the various mathematical physics wanting oxygen for their own Platonistic theories.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, is this evidence that science is getting it wrong, or getting it right?
If you are wanting science - at the grand level of cosmological speculation - to be more Platonistic, well it is more Platonistic. It treats mathematical structure as being real.
And if you want science at that level to be less Materialistic, well it is that too. Atoms have dissolved into particles, which have dissolved into excitations, which have dissolved into informational degrees of freedom. The physicists don't believe in matter as the kind of substantial material stuff you criticise them for believing in.
So as the Platonic structure has become more real, the material stuff has become matchingly less real.
And that just happens to be exactly the kind of Naturalism you would find in the metaphysical tradition that connects Anaximander to Aristotle to Peirce.
But there, you fallen straight into subjectivism/relativism - something is true, because it's true for me.
Quoting Janus
I get that. You know the term 'samskara'? Well, I think there's a deep samskara in the Western mind-set against anything it deems 'religious'. A big underlying problem in modern culture generally, is that there's a kind of implicit threat contained in Western religion. It goes back to 'believe and be saved' - the converse being, don't believe and you're damned. 'Orthodoxy' means, after all, 'right belief' (from 'doxai', belief or opinion.)
The implicit threat is that you either believe as you're told, or else. When you look back to the history, in Western culture, there were massive conflicts and convulsions over all this - the Inquisition, the religious wars. Then Calvin - 'the ayatollah of Geneva', he has been described. 'Freedom' according to the European Enlightenment, was getting as far away from all this as possible. Liberation is liberation from that.
Now, I see this whenever this topic comes up. The least suggestion of higher truth is interpreted in terms of 'appeal to religious authority'. I think its the samskara of Western religion. It conditions a lot of what is said in philosophical debates especially, in a 'don't mention the War' kind of way.
That point I mentioned was from a podcast I listened to on Christian Platonism. It noted that St Bonaventura, a contemporary of Aquinas, was the forerunner to later semiotics, but in the context of interpreting nature as 'signs' of the Divine law (he was after all a medieval). But within that worldview, then the whole Cosmos was animated by purpose, of which things are 'signs'.
And I think even C S Peirce was open to something like that:
[quote=C S Peirce] The only end of science, as such, is to learn the lesson that the universe has to teach it. In Induction it simply surrenders itself to the force of facts. But it finds . . . that this is not enough. It is driven in desperation to call upon its inward sympathy with nature, its instinct for aid, just as we find Galileo at the dawn of modern science making his appeal to il lume naturale. . . . The value of Facts to science, lies only in this, that they belong to Nature; and Nature is something great, and beautiful, and sacred, and eternal, and real -- the object of its worship and its aspiration. ...
The soul's deeper parts can only be reached through its surface. In this way the eternal forms, that mathematics and philosophy and the other sciences make us acquainted with, will, by slow percolation, gradually reach the very core of one's being, and will come to influence our lives; and this they will do, not because they involve truths of merely vital importance, but because they [are] ideal and eternal verities. [/quote]
Reasoning and the Logic of Things, edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner, Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 112, quoted in Thomas Nagel Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.
Now tell me, how distant is that last paragraph is from the point I've been arguing in this (and many other) threads? Nagel himself says that he finds
And there it is again: you run into the 'fear of religion', which Nagel then goes on to spell out:
And here we all are!
In one sense, you're quite correct in saying that each of us has to find our own way, and that this results a plurality of forms and views. That is why I studied the question through comparative religion - so as to try and discern the outlines of the universal ideas about such matters that are depicted in the various philosophical traditions. The three that I have the most affinity with are Christian Platonism, Mahayana Buddhism, and Advaita. They're all different, and in some respects even radically at odds with each other. But in the context of a global culture and global communications, (and also global crisis) the perspectives they offer do provide an answer to that question. There is enough in common between all three of them to form the outline of a living philosophy, that's for sure.
What is actually being protested here, I would say, is the machine model of constraints where our individuality would be completely suppressed by the collective psyche.
But actual societies ought to be understood as organisms, not machines. They are evolving and adaptive systems. Semiotic. And so they are founded on a complementary dynamic - competition and co-operation, local part and global whole.
In that view, what is natural is the striking of some balance between individuals expressing creative freedoms and collectives expressing constraining norms. Each is an action that shapes its "other". So each is symbiotically necessary to the other's being.
The only issue is what kind of balance is optimal given the wider context of some environment. Should things be tilted towards the free individual - technically, the immature stage of an ecosystem's lifecycle - or towards the collective norming, which is technically the senescent or habit-bound stage.
Quoting Janus
So as individuals, we would see our position as part of that collective balance. We are not ruled by some monadic over-riding concern. We want to express both natural aspects of our being - competition and cooperation, creative freedom and mastered habit - in a way that "works best".
The sticky point then becomes the clarity with which we can envision the general goal that all this organismic activity is meant to lead us towards.
Our first imperative is to attend to our own organismic flourishing. Which in turn depends on that of our ... community, race, nation, planet, noosphere, cosmos ... whatever level of embodied organismic being we can rightfully claimed to have achieved. :)
So that is where things break down. As simpler language-less organisms, we didn't have much choice but to get by as best we could in hunter/gatherer fashion. We had no particular say over nature.
And now we haven't quite got our heads around the next step of our evolution - the path that rationality has opened up.
Are we simply just Homo entropicus, the burner of a short-lived fossil fuel bonanza? Are we the forerunner of something Singulatarian and cyber-organismic?
The old theistic myths - the wisdom suited to an agrarian stage of human development - are no help at all on these questions. And even Enlightenment humanism, with its Romantic response, are not much of a signpost to our future.
As things stand, we don't know how the human experiment is about to turn out in the next 50 years. And to the degree we haven't thought the realistic choices through, we don't even have choices.
So it is weird to be wasting too much time with the mythologies of a past that has gone when we need to have answers about future social myths it would be sensible to be motivated by.
We have our spaceship - Spaceship Earth - and we have to maintain it. We have to learn to live within our (planetary) means, to treat life as sacred, and to develop an economic culture based on something other than endless growth and meaningless consumption.
The fact that spiritual philosophy is seen as 'old' or 'archaic' or 'out-moded' is one of the entailments of materialism. The sublimated longing for 'the eternal' appears as the demand that everything be new, novel, previously unseen, something that has just been invented (just as the sublimated longing for Heaven appears as the fantasy of inter-stellar travel). But what is 'new' becomes old as soon as its acquired, and the cycle continues - leaving continent-size islands of garbage in the middle of the ocean.
Imagine a world where the primary and most highly-respected form of culture was indeed a spiritual philosophy - one which encouraged the traditional values of self-restraint, compassion to others, contentedness with minimal possessions, harmony with the environment, and the cultivation of inner peace. Rather than the stimulation of endless desires to distract the populace from the meaningless of endless consumption and line the pockets of the 1%.
That seems like the only kind of 'future myth' that has any prospect of working. And that's what I'm working on.
But, these are all immanent and eminent common-sense ethical and political values; as such, they don't need to be underpinned by "higher" teachings and superstitious beliefs or myths, or by any kind of dispensation 'from on high'.
I'll respond to some of your and apo's other points later when I have more available time.
That's fair enough, but I don't see how this is not still relativism, unless you are prescribing what you happen to have most affinity with for others; claiming that it is also what they should have most affinity with. And if you were doing that you would be promoting a form of totalitarianism.
The point is that for humans nothing is given to the collective "from on high" except what is given by higher authority, that is by entrenched power. It's fine if an individual has an experience that they feel was given from on high as long as they don't interpret that to mean they have thereby earned a right to be a spiritual authority for others.
Well, I did say "totalitarian imposition of meaning". Of course individuals are always influenced by the collective, in the sense that collective views become entrenched in cultures and are even taken for granted by the unreflective. And of course it seems inevitable that there will always be some cultural expressions that are 'out of bounds', whether that is desirable or not.
I also think it is undesirable that individuals should be coerced by collective institutions. There's no harm in trying to convince someone that a particular view is the right, or the best, one; but the convincing should always be done by sound argument, and evidence and always by appealing to the other's own lived experience, and never by appealing to fear or guilt. All viewpoints and perspectives should be up for open and transparent analysis and critique.
Or we can go extinct.
The issue here is that there may be a good reason why you are dreaming. Life is actually a manifestation of the second law and so humanity is responding to that thermal imperative.
So sure. I agree it would be nice if the world suddenly did go all eco. But arguing for the moral correctness of hippy values is pissing into the wind. There is a good reason why that is dreaming!
To have a choice, we would have to create a choice based on a realistic assessment of the human condition. That is why I would see it as indefensible to push cosy mythologies at this point in history.
Quoting Wayfarer
But if your foe of materialism has already out-moded itself so far as science is concerned, then you are merely tilting at the windmills of your youth.
I'm not proscribing, but describing. I genuinely do think there is a 'higher' and a 'lower' - otherwise, what basis for the discussion of the domain of value could there be?
Quoting Janus
That might be Hegel's expression, but he got it from the famous essay Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment? by Immanuel Kant, one of the foundation texts of 'the Enlightenment', where he says 'Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage'. And a great statement it is - as you well know, I am generally (although not unreservedly) a great admirer of Kant.
But the issue is still a very deep one. The very first passage in that famous essay addressed the causes of the lack of enlightenment and the preconditions necessary to make it possible for people to enlighten themselves. He held it necessary that all church and state paternalism be abolished and people be given the freedom to use their own intellect. And, I couldn't agree more - but under what guidance, what philosophy, what education? In our culture, 'intellect' is hardly understood; it is now reduced to the instrumental and the utilitarian. Western culture and understanding of our own intellectual heritage is continually deprecated and under threat. Science is the sole arbiter of truth - something you yourself frequently protest against - and yet, any attempt to articulate a 'philosophy of value' is then also dismissed by you as an 'appeal to authority'.
Quoting apokrisis
Meaning, we also need someone to build and maintain windmills.
It may well be a Utopian dream, but no one knows how it will all pan out.
I think the only proper basis for any discussion of value is subjective and intersubjective experience, personal and interpersonal feeling. People know every well what's right and wrong in relation to social harmony or disharmony. It's experience that counts; any set of imposed rules is simply not possible when it comes to morality and ethics.
Quoting Wayfarer
If you're talking about educating children; I would say they don't need to be taught about 'higher" and 'lower' or anything otherworldly (they'll just think it's bullshit anyway, most likely) but rather they should be encouraged to think for themselves about what promotes harmony and disharmony. It's really all about how to act in this world and it's actually not that hard.
But your language betrays the totalising framework that is in play for you. And that is what I would challenge.
You talk of coercion, institutions, fear and guilt as the things that any right-minded citizen among us (as near identical products of our moment in cultural history) would seek to be on the watch for when it came to what we collectively view to be clear signs of something that is wrong.
So you have already socially constructed the frame of discourse you expect me to operate under. That is where your open and transparent analysis and critique will take place.
My reply is that this is a very conventional and now rather dated frame. In sensitising you to the threat of social force, it blinds you to the essentiality of social constraint. I am not who I am - I am not an individual - except that I developed within my particular cultural context. There isn't even a "me" to speak of without the shaping "other" of the collective social order.
So my view would be that we are all rather good at doing the natural thing of arriving at an ongoing negotiation between our scope for creative free self expression and the complementary need to give a definite shape to our personal existence in terms of being rooted in the norms of some cultural context.
The problem of modernity is more the burden it places on many people. Too much individuality is expected of them. They are not allowed to feel comfortable living an "ordinary" life. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur shooting for the stars. And those that do think that is what they should want often seem not to be happy with that as a new cultural norm.
So I don't say things are perfect. Definitely not. But the diagnosis is not that we are seriously at risk of collective constraints in modern society. The existential threat has morphed into its opposite - the dread of having to be authentically unique in the manner that appears generally demanded.
That is why I prefer to start any philosophising from the solid basis of social psychology.
Yes, but the unhealthy side of Buddhism lies in its idealization and deification of Gautama; he was really just a fallible human like the rest of us. Buddhism has continued to exist because it has some valid things to say about the human condition and also because it has been entrenched by tradition in Eastern societies. I note that there are some promising 'secular Buddhist' trends now in the West.
LOL. The windmills were Don Quixote's imaginary foe. "Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants?"
So no. The need is for a decent pair of glasses to see what is actually there.
So why bother turning up here? What is there to discuss? There’s nothing that needs to be learned, right? It’s just empty verbiage, and a waste of time for all involved.
If you don't think we are seriously at risk of collective constraints in our modern society, I don't know what to say to you except: open your eyes.
Quoting apokrisis
For me, this is way too narrow a focus. You don't really even know what you are, or how you came to be that way, none of us do. I think it's safe to say that we are not exhaustively socially constructed beings. I don't expect you to agree, and you can have your theories, but there is no way to demonstrate who is right, or even what it would exactly mean to be nothing but a social construction.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, I don't think your "social psychology" is working very well for you if you think there is any general social demand to be "authentically unique". It's quite the opposite I would say; ever more people are being subtly coerced by social pressures into "doing what one does". The dramatic rise of social media has seen to that!
It's not that hard if you learn to think for yourself and there is nothing better than philosophy for learning that skill. Philosophy, not religion, should be taught in schools, There is all the more need to think if the answers are not given "from on high". You seem to have it backwards.
Also, is discussion not more fruitful if everyone ultimately relies on their own experience, and yet each is open to the possibility that others can convince them to change their minds if their appeals make real sense in the light of that owned experience? How else could it proceed? We talk to each other because we all acknowledge that we are alike, but nonetheless intelligent, individually unique, affective, perceptive and reflective beings and we want to hear about the other's experience.
You don't show a lot of interest in the subject yourself.
Quoting Janus
Thanks, I really enjoy your jibes.
Of course, I knew that. Your philosophy is not at all concerned with providing a kind of value system as such - it's about understanding the processes of living systems, for the purpose of analysis, modelling and prediction. You see nothing beyond that, and so you will say to anyone who tries to point at anything beyond that, that they're pointing at nothing. The alternative is, they're pointing at something you're not seeing. This is why, whenever I refer to idealist or Platonist elements in your purported philosophical source, C S Peirce, you will peremptorily dismiss them as being 'not essential'. I'm sure Peirce himself would have had a very different view of the matter, but then, he's not around.
Anyway - enough for the time being. Life goes on.
That, I do agree with. I would make a very good thread in its own right.
You might enjoy this Maritain essay I've been reading recently on the cultural impact of empiricism. It addresses this point in detail.
What sort of comment is that meant to be; it's certainly not an argument. It seems that, when challenged, you can do nought but resort to insult.
Quoting Wayfarer
It wasn't meant to be a "jibe" or an insult. I was pointing out that I think you are putting the cart, so-called 'higher truth', in it's intersubjective and/ or philosophical connection, before the horse, individual experience, feeling, intuition and knowledge. You say my argument for the priority of these personal criteria leads to subjectivity, or relativity, but what is anyone to rely upon apart from their own experience, feeling, intuition and knowledge? Authority?
If you want to say 'authority' then whose authority are they to rely upon? How are they to judge which authority, if they choose to believe one, if not from their own experience, feeling, intuition and knowledge? I've challenged you on this very same point many times and you always evade the issue, neglecting to answer, resort to insult or changing the subject; which makes it seem like you don't have a cogent answer to support your own standpoint.
I support the structuralism that is the essence of Peirce. He himself was dismissive of any aesthetic imperative - a good test of where he stood. And his idealism was of a general structural kind, not some claim about cosmic consciousness. That’s a really big difference.
I have read Schopenhauer's quote. I disagree with his definition of materialism, hence it will not shock you to know that I also disagree with his conclusions that follow from that original sin. Nothing has done more to take a full accounting of the self and the mind than modern neuroscience.
Janus was right. This debate is getting boring. And I was also right during our first round when I said we are unlikely to come to any agreement because our fundamental assumptions of the world are very different.
The debate about modern physics is more interesting, but will end the same way, no doubt. It seems clear that you are using the term "modern physics" to mean something like physics in the last 40 years, in contrast to the usual understanding of physics ever since relativity and quantum physics burst on the scene. It should be noted that beyond the theoretical impasse you cited, physicists have actually made some major experimental breakthroughs in this century, including the discovery of the Higgs and the discovery of gravitational waves.
As far as the controversies you highlighted, you may or may not be happy to know that I fall in the skeptical camp. I do not think string theory provides an accurate description of reality. The same can be said for M-theory and some versions of quantum gravity. However, I don't think pursuing these theories has been a waste of time. For two huge reasons. First, the theoretical breakthroughs in string theory and M-theory led to fundamental advancements in pure mathematics, especially in the areas of symplectic geometry and representation theory, which have both undergone revolutions because of work that physicists did, not mathematicians. This is just the latest example of research in physics pushing the frontiers of fundamental math. Second, the discovery of the AdS/CFT correspondence by Maldacena in 1997. That paper has been cited thousands of times by now, and its influence across theoretical physics is vast. It has led to major developments in fields not even remotely connected to quantum gravity, such as condensed matter physics. Some of these developments led to the discovery and descriptions of new states of matter. So, this side of the coin often gets overlooked when talking about string theory. People are so obsessed over its ontological accuracy and lack of testable predictions that they don't bother to notice all the great things that have come from research into string theory. String theory will have a whole other life beyond string theory.
I don't know where theoretical physics will go in the future. At this point I think people are waiting for nature to reveal another big secret through an experiment. We'll see. But I do know that the future community of theoretical physicists stands on much stronger ground for whatever research program they decide to pursue, thanks in large part to the work that has been done now.
Well if they've taken refuge in the White House, then we finally found some examples that are physical, and very orange haha!
Peirce wrote a number of essays for The Monist which are plainly idealist, in the Hegelian, Kantian and Berkeleyian sense and also heavily indebted to Emerson. The term ‘cosmic consciousness’ was coined in nineteen hundred and one by Canadian psychiatrist Richard M. Buckle - after Peirces’ day, I think, although it would have been interesting to see what he made of it. Again - you extract the concepts from Peirce that are useful for your particular project, which is all well and good, but any mention of the idealist content of his philosophy, you reject as examples of ‘what Peirce got wrong’, which is very convenient. I wish he were around to set the record straight.
Quoting Uber
But you lost me at ‘ridiculous’. The argument I’m developing has a perfectly respectable pedigree in philosophy, to which your only response so far as been, indeed, a combination of hyperbole and ridicule. The argument I introduced was simply this: that number is real, but not material. Therefore materialism cannot be complete, as the set of ‘real things that aren’t material’ has at least one member.
The traditionalist account of the sovereignty of reason was once the crown jewel of philosophy. The fact that you can only resort to ridicule speaks volumes.
Quoting Uber
Who does? I am not bagging physics. What I’m saying is that your assertion that ‘naturalism Is all fine and dandy’ is not supported by what is actually happening.
Do you know John Horgan?
I really do try and explain. Never seems to work, though. Funnily enough, I make a living as a tech writer, so I’m usually pretty good at explaining things, although apparently here, I’m hopeless.
These were theoretical discoveries made 50years and 100years respectively prior to a successful experiments. There were decades of quote experimental failure.
Quoting Uber
I hope not, because science doesn't work that way. Reality is always revealed through theory.
But I do not apologize for the general observation they expressed. Though not impossible, it's extremely difficult to have a rational discussion with someone who borrows theories of time from Plato and who believes that empirical reality is the subservient handmaiden to logical truth. At that point the problem is no longer dualism versus naturalism. It's the fundamental assumptions we make about the nature of the world.
Take the argument about the unicorns. Why do we all agree that it's ridiculous, even though it's a logically valid syllogism? Because we all know that the properties of addition have nothing to do with the existence of unicorns. And why do we know that? Because we have a deeply embedded sense of causality that has developed through empirical experience. Logic is meant to ensure that arguments have proper structure, that they're valid. But the way we determine if they're sound is primarily by examining empirical reality. Take that away and philosophy is pretty much meaningless.
This was the basis of my criticism for your explanation of the epistemological problem. It was a completely unsound argument. Using a word like "active" does not amount to a causal relation between Forms and real things in the world, and throwing out all of modern physics is not the best way to engage in discussion about the nature of reality.
Though not the only reason, I think my foundational assumptions of the world are largely accurate because of empirical evidence, the very thing you deny has any major importance. You think you can bring Forms into existence because of logical necessity, the very I think deny has any causal relevance in the actual world. There's no way to square that circle.
In the end, I do appreciate our discussion because it got me thinking harder about my definition of what physical stuff could be. So I don't regret this experience at all.
Do you understand that the status of naturalism does not hinge entirely on the latest hiccups in theoretical physics? The history of physics has featured plenty of terrible ideas, from the aether to caloric, and that's just in the last few centuries. Let's not even get started on Aristotle. And physics has faced impasses before, particularly in the late 19th century. None of this undermines naturalism; it just undermines bad physics. And as I showed in my last post, whether certain theories have failed or not depends on whether you want to ignore all the major discoveries they have produced in other fields, within physics and outside of it. Beyond physics, there have been major theoretical and experimental developments in biology in the last 50 years on abiogenesis, to the point where it looks like we may reach a unified theory on the origin of life before we get to a so-called theory of everything in physics. Likewise there have been huge advances in neuroscience. From this perspective, things look much more positive for naturalism, by which I mostly mean that the explanatory power of the natural sciences is growing rapidly.
I wasn't suggesting that science only works that way. Sometimes you're right it does take theory to illuminate the path of experimentation. Other times it's experimentation that leads to theoretical realizations. Both are important. What I was referring to, though I did not explicitly say it, is the hope that the LHC will produce some additional discoveries, like supersymmetric particles and other things. Yes, even though all of this stuff has been theoretically predicted a long time ago, the experimental results still matter, because the precise answers they give yield clues about which theories are accurate. For example, there were several different theories in the context of the Standard Model that guessed at the mass of the Higgs. Experiment showed it was about 126 billion ev, within the range of most of the theories. Likewise the fact that the LHC has not discovered a lot of things at certain energy ranges automatically indicates that certain supersymmetry theories are wrong. Others remain in the running because their predictions have not necessarily been refuted by results from the LHC.
How is this an error, to encourage people to work toward the same goal, the "higher truth", or whatever ideal it is that one may encourage others to work toward?
Quoting Janus
But don't you see that this "imposition of meaning by the collective on the individual", already requires the other. There is no "collective" without that other, which is what you call the "fatal error". That fatal error of encouraging others to adopt the same goal "higher truth" or whatever common goal is adopted, is what produces the collective. Without it, there is no collective, just individuals seeking to fulfill their own wants and needs.
It is common in modern philosophy to describe how the collective, society as a whole, shapes the individual, but the collective is often taken for granted. This collective cannot be taken for granted, it is a unity which is caused to exist, and it is subject to similar principles of generation and corruption as any contingent being is.
Thanks, I'll give it a look.
It's not a 'subservient handmaiden'. The argument is, empirical claims rest on rational foundations, not all of which are themselves explained by science - which amounts to saying that science is not all-knowing.
The fact that you reflexively deprecate 'theories from the time of Plato' simply indicates that you have little grasp of intellectual history. Plato is arguably the fore-father of the Western tradition. By that, I'm not at all saying that he's an authority - Plato himself would never accept that mantle. But this is actually a philosophy forum, and at least some people who 'lived 2,000 years ago' are still relevant. Particularly Plato. So please notice your ad hominems here about 'rational discussions' as you've joined a philosophy forum, and are debating someone who is defending Platonism. Perhaps it is time you took your spectacles off and looked at them, and not just through them.
Speaking of which - I did respond with a lot of detail to your mention of Benacereff's
anti-platonist position in this post. I thought I gave a pretty detailed and meaningful response and that it's a pretty knock-down argument in favour of the role of Platonist realism in the natural sciences. But you didn't even address it (or probably even notice it, or take it in). And then you complain that I'm not 'dealing with your objections'.
What you're calling 'red herrings' are actually cogent philosophical arguments that you're not familiar with. So you basically resort to: hey, ain't science grand! Of course science is grand.
Quoting Uber
Yep. Got it. But it also means that when you gesture towards the 'tremendous progress of naturalism', you're pointing at something which is in a state of fundamental flux. Old-school materialism is already dead, and the way it's going, 'naturalism' is being completely re-defined and might mean something totally different next month. So - what are you pointing at?
Quoting Uber
Calling nonsense on that one.
Quoting Uber
for which we can all be grateful. However, sign on the door says 'philosophy forum'.
Now, you seem to be trying to make it sound as though you have offered explanations, which I have failed to understand. I really don't believe that is the case. I believe I am a fair-minded reader with a good level of comprehension, but I do speak my mind, and invite questions and critique of what I say as well. Why not simply answer the question in plain language here and now, and then try not to be offended if I question or critique your answer, but answer any further questions honestly and to the best of your ability?
Right. So the question was:
Quoting Janus
I had tried to answer that Buddhism - for one example - stresses 'be a light unto yourself, work out your own salvation with diligence'. To which your response was that:
Quoting Janus
So, I have nothing further to add. If that is the case, then indeed, the whole idea of a 'higher knowledge' might indeed be nonsense, as you keep saying, which then circles back to the question, what the f*** are we doing wasting our time on a philosophy forum??
People who are interested in finding out about things, about anything, may be referred to as seekers of truth. This applies equally to science as it does to the arts and literature and, indeed, philosophy and religion (and psychology, anthropology, economics, political science, archeology. mathematics and so on and on). But there is no one truth that everyone is seeking. Many investigators do not even think of their investigations in terms of 'truth' at all.
So, what makes you think it would be a good idea to impose your idea of truth on others? Of course I haven't said anything against trying to encourage or convince others to see things the way we do. Isn't that what we are all doing here? Of course the flip side of that is that we should be prepared to be convinced to change our own minds if we find that someone presents us with a more fruitful or convincing way of thinking.
It is a matter of overcoming pride and admitting to ourselves ideas that we may not, for various emotional or psychological reasons, wish to entertain. Of course that struggle is a personal one and it is up to each individual above all else to be honest, inwardly for a start, about what they might be protecting themselves from.
How is "being a light unto yourself any different than what I have been arguing? I admitted that there are good elements to Buddhism.
As to my statement about the fallibility of Gautama; are you saying you believe he was infallible? If so, then on what would you base that belief?
I spend time on the philosophy forums because I like to have my ideas critiqued, and hope I might learn something from that process, or even just from writing to discover what I think. As I see it, we don't need "higher knowledge" to expand our ways of seeing and thinking about the world and our own experience. What you would call "higher knowledge" I would call "a sense of the numinous". Extremely little of modern philosophy has been concerned in the slightest with "higher knowledge". Would you say on that account that most of modern philosophy has simply been a waste of time?
If you did say that I would respond by pointing out that you, by your own admission, are not very familiar with modern philosophy, since you are basically predisposed against it, and are thus not in a very good position to judge its worth.
That's the problem with it, and why I didn't pursue it past my two years of undergraduate units.
What that seems to mean is just that philosophy is not for you. It's subjective and that's fine, but surely you don't expect others to feel the same, do you?
So, in that dimension, my higher truths, the things I really care about, belong to me and nobody else. I don't need or expect to be able to share them or have them validated by others. Religion, secular or otherwise, is a very personal matter. It's really exactly the same situation with regard to the arts. If you dream that there is higher knowledge that is capable of definitive demonstration then you are bound for either disappointment or delusion.
Please read again. I did not deprecate "theories from the time of Plato." I deprecated "theories of time" that came from Plato and others back then, because those ideas have been thoroughly shown to be false. Your red herrings are getting tiresome, and it's obvious you are getting so upset that you cannot even quote me correctly anymore. For the record, I have strong affinities to the ideas of many thinkers from ancient times, such as: Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Aristarchus of Samos, to name just a few. Notice who is absent from that list: people who said profoundly and systematically false things about the state of reality and people whose ideas became theological propaganda for desperate Christians looking to justify their fairy tales.
You will call nonsense on any attempt to answer a fundamental question unless a ready solution is handed to you on a plate. This is the attitude that separates your penchant for fairy tales with people who actually want to know how the world works.
Physics can be both in a state of flux and can still be making huge progress. You are focused on the controversies over string theory because they generate headlines. But you are blind to the enormous progress that has been made in condensed matter physics and other fields, which are influencing the answers to the very fundamental questions you are asking. Also, bear in mind that progress is not limited to science. Philosophy has made tremendous strides in the last three centuries with its broad rejections of idealism, dualism, and theism. These rejections by themselves do not mean that naturalism is right, but they make naturalism a powerful contender by default for the most powerful and accurate philosophical project that aims to describe the state of the world. I provided evidence earlier that naturalism is a very popular viewpoint among professional philosophers. So it's not just scientists who believe in naturalism. I understand it grates on your flawed understanding of reality to have naturalism be the canonical theory of philosophy, but deal with it and stop wasting my time.
Physical mind?
Knowledge of anything can be causal. The laws of nature don't communicate with us, neither do the truths of mathematics, but we can create knowledge of them, and once created, this knowledge may have profound effects on reality.
The apology is accepted, and gratefully received, but I'm afraid that the real problem, which is the attitude behind those words used, remains. You've presented an exposition about how you understand the terms of physical and non-physical, and when I confronted you with problems concerning your metaphysical principles, you countered in two ways. First, you switched a key word for some other, more vague description, as if altering a few words would make the problem with your principles disappear. Second, when I suggested alternative metaphysical principles, ones which avoided the problems I pointed to in your principles, instead of trying to understand what I was saying, you dismissed it as "nonsense". So it became clear to me that you were not interested in discussing metaphysical principles, all you were interested in is preaching.
Quoting Uber
Have you read Aristotle's Physics, his discussions on time? He displays a much more comprehensive understanding of time then you will find in most modern philosophy of time. Surely, you must understand that the nature of time has not been, and is not, understood by any human being. This means that if we are interested in the nature of time, we ought to consider all theories of time, to see what each of them has to offer. So, your statement, that you cannot have a rational discussion with someone who borrows theories of time from Plato, is nothing other than a statement of bias. It is an expression of your own irrationality.
Do you recognize that there is a difference between the past and future? If not, then it would be difficult for me to have a rational discussion with you, because such a recognition is implied in all that we say, think, and do. It would be a most hypocritical way of speaking to say that you do not recognize a difference between past and future. If you are truthful to yourself, and say that you do recognize a difference between past and future, how would you account for this difference? Would you say that the future is full of possibilities, and the past is full of actualities, or would you dismiss this as unacceptable Aristotelian terminology?
In Aristotle's description of time, he recognizes two ways that we apprehend time. First, and principally, time is a means of measurement, we use time as a ruler, to measure. Secondly, in another way, time is something which is measured. You offhandedly dismiss any way of looking at time which is not the way of modern physics, but modern physics provides no way to look at time as something which is measured. So if you think that the passing of time is something real, something which is measured by clocks, then you need a way of looking at time which is not the way of modern physics. And if you think that the way of modern physics is the only acceptable way of looking at time, then you exclude the possibility that the passing of time is something real, which we measure with clocks.
Quoting Uber
This argument was completely irrelevant to the point I was making. That's why I say you dismiss my points out of bias without even trying to understand what I was saying. Clearly the logic which tells us that 2+2=4 is not the same logic which tells us that numbers exist as immaterial objects.
Quoting Uber
But you're wrong here Uber, and you refuse to consider the possibility that you're wrong, to allow yourself to review your principles to see whether you might actually be wrong. It is not merely "empirical experience" which tells us whether something exists, because it is reasoning and logic which tells us what it means "to exist". Sure, you could define "exist" in any way that you desire, and whatever things fulfill that definition through empirical evidence, those things exist, but that is to be unreasonable. We need a reasonable definition of "exist". So it is not empirical experience which tells us which things exist and which do not, because reason must tell us what it means to exist. And if reason tells us that it's possible for things to exist which we have no empirical experience of, then we ought to accept that. Quit your childish protestations and behave reasonably.
Do you accept what I told you in my last post, that the capacities of the human senses are limited? If so, then it is clearly unreasonable for you to insist that the criteria for determining what exists and what does not exist is empirical experience. If you refuse to recognize the limitations of the senses, thus disallowing yourself from getting beyond the limitations of the senses, how are you ever going to proceed toward a higher level of understanding?
Quoting Uber
Let me see if I have this straight then. My argument is a completely unsound argument because it employs an understanding of time which is inconsistent with the understanding of time employed by modern physics. Now, I've described why the understanding of time employed by modern physics is inadequate, because it does not allow that the passing of time is something which is measurable. Therefore employing a different understanding of time does not necessitate that the argument is unsound. So I've addressed your counter argument, and you no longer have any reason to say that my argument is unsound.
Now we can have immaterial Forms without the epistemic problem in the way that the Neo-Platonists envisioned. Do you see, that the reason why modern materialists/physicalists deny immaterial existence, and dualism, plunging themselves into all sorts of contradictions and inconsistencies in their speak (because the language is developed on dualist principles), is simply due to a misunderstanding of time which they harbour?
Quoting Uber
I do not deny that empirical evidence has major importance. What I deny is that we can make an adequate decision about what exists and what does not exist, based on empirical evidence. This is due to the reasons I described. To make such a decision we need to first determine what it means to exist. This determination must be made by reason. And, it is unreasonable to base a definition of "exist" in empirical evidence because we know that the senses have limited capacities.
But this was not the question though. The issue was this:
Quoting Janus
Notice that you refer to the "higher truth" as an ideal. An ideal is something sought, as a perfection, so the "higher truth" is something sought, it is a goal. That's what an ideal is. Someone who believes in a "higher truth", as an ideal, believes that there is a higher truth, and that we ought to seek it. That is the commitment. It is not a belief that one knows a higher truth than others, and they are committed to this belief. To convince another to seek the same goal, a "higher truth", is not the same as imposing one's idea of truth on another.
I think you have not properly distinguished between an "idea" and an "ideal". An idea is a belief about what is, and ideal is a belief about what ought to be.
I actually have read part of Aristotle's physics. I have it in my library. So which part of Aristotle's physics and cosmology are we throwing out and keeping in? The part where objects fall at a rate in proportion to their weight? The part where the heavenly bodies are perfect spheres? The part where things are made of four elements? The part where everything orbits around the Earth in perfect circular motions?
So throw out these, but keep his understanding of time right?
When you say physics provides no means to look at time as something which is measured, you are basically implying that an absolute reference frame of time exists that ticks at the same rate for everything in the Universe. No modern physics does not have that understanding, because that conception of time is absolutely false. It can be and has been demonstrated to be false in numerous experiments, another thing Aristotle didn't much believe in! Modern physics does allow us to measure time, but it warns us that our measurements do not represent an absolute state of time, merely a relative one. It also warns us that time by itself does not make any sense separately from space, hence why we describe events and causes as unfolding in spacetime. On this basis, I challenged the notion that Forms can somehow be active in time without being active in space as well. In other words, what does it mean for them to be active, if not in spacetime? But of course to acknowledge that makes the Forms physical. Your argument remains unsound and will always remain unsound as long as you cling to a false understanding of causality.
Either way, reason by itself has not shown that Forms exist, because your argument is premised on causal concepts and not simply on logical principles. So you yourself rely on causal principles derived from experience in the formation of your argument (time, active, etc), then turn around and say that it was all logic. Aristotle himself represents one of the greatest warning flags about why you need reason informed through experience in order to reach the correct conclusions about the state of the world.
Finally, there is absolutely no such thing as metaphysical reason separate from the physical structure of the brain. Let's not equivocate: it is the brain that reaches conclusions about the world. Thank you modern neuroscience.
In the end I'm afraid you are the one who's wrong. But thanks for playing.
I try to, but it is never understood. As far as you're concerned, all such matters are personal. We invariably arrive at this point.
Quoting Uber
The article I cited, about Benecareff, is about the very topic in question. It is about how it is possible to know mathematical truths and proofs, if they are not empirical objects of perception. My response is that the very existence of this argument demonstrates the fact that the existence of mathematical knowledge and philosophical rationalism can't be accommodated by empiricism and materialist theories of mind - hence the necessity of devising sophisticated arguments about how indispensable maths is in science. But you're plainly not getting the point.
It's a shame you're not able to respond dispassionately, but never mind.
Quoting Uber
Kant argued in the Critique of Pure Reason that 'things conform to thoughts' - this was his so-called 'Copernican Revolution in philosophy' - but as you clearly have no familiarity with the subject, then there's little point in bringing it up. (And there's an example of 'apophaticism' for you.)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Thank you Metaphysician Undercover, well said.
Quoting tom
:up:
That supports one of my basic arguments, which is that reason is not a result of evolution. The capacity for reason is the result of evolution, but the facts that reason discovers are always already the case. That is why they are 'dis-covered'.
I am very familiar with Kant. I just disagree with your terrible arguments about why reason precedes science and experience, when science and experience plainly demonstrate that reason codevelops with experience, and cannot exist apart from it.
How many other stupid arguments do you have in your bag of tricks? I can keep rebutting this nonsense for as long as you wish.
And how can you know anything about the physical structure, without the capacity for abstract reasoning, whichi is required at the outset? You can’t set reason aside and see how it works, it is only disclosed by using it.
I am not the one resorting to ad hominem and outrage. Although I think it’s instructive that this debate pushes buttons, though.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Looks like the same question to me!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Seeking a higher truth may be seeking an ideal, but not all ideals that are sought are higher truths; in fact most are not. People strive towards all kinds of ideals: ideal weight, ideal physique, become the best athlete, musician, artist, writer, businessman, academic and so on; the list is endless.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure, but I've already explicitly acknowledged that. I would add that expecting others to share your beliefs and ideals is a form of imposition, even if it is not overtly acted upon, it will show up covertly in forms of passive/ aggressive behaviour.
MU set you a good challenge relating to a physical understanding of time. Even if Aristotle could be considered wrong on other things, this was the thing you were questioned on.
And it is clearly right that there is some ambiguity about whether time is a something of which change is predicated, or whether change is the measurable differences of which we imagine a temporal flow to be composed.
Time and energy are clearly connected in physics - all change being energetic. But they also stand in an inverse relation to each other. In relativity for instance, the faster something goes, the slower it’s clock ticks.
Physics also seems to contradict itself on time with the reversibility issue. Our microphysics is modelled as time symmetric, while our macrophysics sees it as a flow with an energetic direction, a thermal arrow. And when we get down to the quantum physics, we have to make the unmodelled choice of whether to believe there is or isn't a physical collapse of the wavefunction to remove the ambiguity of whether the symmetry is broken, as we experience, or not.
And to take the next step, to reach a theory of quantum gravity that might account for time, the wheel looks likely to turn again towards a constraints-based view where the past is the actualised and the future is the potential. Having spatialised time for so long, we may have a QG theory based on reality's thermal history.
Quoting Uber
So here we now get to something interesting. The traditional notion of the Forms is rather spatial and geometric. They are static mathematical shapes that would have eternal rational existence.
Well in fact the ancient view was more than that. Horses and humans were forms that had a substantial thermal structure too - they acted energetically in pursuit of characteristic ends. They were organisations expressing energetic tendencies.
So how would we understand forms in modern physics, once we move away from the spatialised version that incorporates the local symmetry or reversibility of direction that space has, and understand time instead as the generalised irreversible constraint which is a thermalising flow?
Are we going back more clearly to Aristotle now? Are the forms to be understood as latencies waiting to be expressed through striving - the shape of the structure that will emerge to organise a flow?
Is the non-physical simply the unexpressed-as-yet future then? MU will want to be more scholastic and place the forms clearly in the past - prior to that which actually exists. And they might be prior in the sense of being latencies.
But when it comes to physics having all the answers, clearly physics knows that it has gone a long distance following a certain track - one based on microphysical time symmetry. It is assumed by the modelling that time is a spatialised dimension which exists - it has actuality. And so change or potentiality becomes reduced to being some kind of relativistic or epiphenomenal illusion.
Yet eventually we need to take the other view of time more seriously. It does seem better assimilated to our notions of energy and action. We have to do justice to that macroscopically obvious fact that it is an organised structure, a flow, with a direction. The past is a collective (thermally coherent) history that constrains the freedoms of the as-yet unlived future. In time, nature's latent forms and purpose will be expressed.
So how can forms be active if not in spacetime? The trick is to see that they are active in themselves once time is understood in terms of the very possibilities of the expressions of energetic change.
Physics boils down to action with direction. Time has been partnered in our microphysical models with direction for a long time. But it likely makes more sense being unified with the action in some way - the potential for change that remains despite the past being now concretely actual.
The metaphysical reason you are talking about does not actually exist, except as a fabrication of your particular brain. We have been over this already.
I did not call you stupid. I called your arguments stupid, because they are.
As a dualist, you show be able to recognize the difference.
Again, instead of just succinctly answering the question here and now, you have diverted by referring to past instances where you have allegedly explained what a higher truth is beyond being a personal ideal or faith, and I have allegedly "misunderstood".
Empirical truths can be intersubjectively confirmed or dis-confirmed by shared observation, they can be tested, If higher truths are more than merely personal or cultural, then they should be the same for all people; they should be able to be clearly demonstrated to be so even to sceptics and the ignorant. Can "higher truths" be corroborated intersubjectively such that people can be clearly and definitively shown to be in error if they disbelieve them?
For example some people believe that Jesus is God, and that their faith is not merely a "higher truth", but the highest truth. Do you believe that? If not, are you thereby denying that it is a higher truth?
The capacity for reason - indeed it does. And also the capacity for language. But the 'furniture of reason' - such fundamental operations as 'the law of identity' and 'the law of the excluded middle' - don't evolve or develop. What evolves is the capacity to recognise them. And once the mind recognises them, then it's capable of forms of understanding which can't be understood solely through the perspective of the physical sciences. At this point, the mind transcends it's biological origins.(Actually there's a current book, The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will, Dr. Kenneth R. Miller - which I think makes a similar point, although I haven't read it yet.)
All throughout your posts, whenever you are trying to persuade or convince me, you have to use conjunctions - 'if-then', 'because', and so on. That is the sense in which rational discourse is 'permeated by reason' - which is from the quote I mentioned from Maritain on the cultural consequences of empiricism (amply illustrated in every dialogue on this forum). It is fundamental to what rational beings do. So, again, the fact that you find this 'absurd' or 'ridiculous' can't really do anything to support your arguments - you're rejecting the very faculty which enables you to make the argument in the first place.
From a couple of days back:
Quoting tom
Quoting Uber
It doesn't - the reason being, that it is just the ability to recognise universals and abstractions that constitutes the rational faculties of h. sapiens. It is how reason works. So a Platonist will say, once evolutionary biology had been discovered: yes, h. sapiens evolves, just as evolutionary biology has shown - but, once humans have evolved to the point of being able to reason and speak, then that being is no longer describable wholly and solely biological or physical terms. So, yes, we have to have a physical brain, but no, this does not make the objects of reason - language, culture, ideas - physical in nature, or 'the product of' or 'the output of' physical processes or describable in physical or empirical terms. (An attitude which is described as 'evolutionary materialism', which is subject of the critique I have referred to by Thomas Nagel's 2012 book; see Thoughts Are Real.)
Furthermore, if my argument was a product of my particular brain, then we couldn't converse at all. But we inhabit a domain of shared meanings and references via language and culture - which is what enables us to have this debate. And that has physical aspect, but it is not solely or only or even principally physical. It has a physical aspect, that is all.
Quoting Janus
I usually refer to the idea of 'domains of discourse' in this context. Clearly with regards to empirical method, the 'domain of discourse' is that of modern scientific method, which provides methodological and interpretive guidelines for the analysis of all manner of data. But it is interesting to note that, particularly in respect to social sciences and some other subject areas, that there is a 'replication crisis' in science, i.e. the inability of other researchers to reproduce the results of published experiments (see here.)
But in respect of subjects other than those covered by science (and there are some!) - then there are still processes of peer-review, there are teacher-student relationships, and so on. Consider how philosophy used to be taught in the ancient world - almost like guilds or crafts. Pierre Hadot has provided many great insights into these.
So in a culture which does recognise 'higher truth', which was probably the norm before the 'flatland' of today's secular culture, there are ways of both preserving and assimilating the notions of higher truth; this was arguably central to the whole University system in the beginning, although again this has now been 'flattened' by the loss of the vertical dimension.
So here in this argument, and many other threads, I am trying to refer to the Platonist tradition because I believe it is central to Western philosophy, but has been eclipsed or rejected by many currents in modern thought. It preserves that very notion of 'higher truth' but it tries to do so on the basis of rational argument and metaphysical conjecture, rather than through force of dogma, which seems to be the form that you're most aware of (which as I say, may well be a consequence of the effects of ecclesiastical dogmatism on modern culture, kind of a 'shadow'.)
But it seems to me that Platonism, generally, makes use of the rational faculty to argue that there is really a domain of higher truth, the domain accessible by 'the philosopher' through the exercise of reason and the life of virtue, symbolised by the Allegory of the Cave. And as the Platonic dialogues are arguably amongst the foundational texts of the Western Canon, then by reference to such arguments as these, I am trying to re-interpret and come to understand this particular intuition of there being a 'higher truth'.
Again, you are wrong in your foundational assumption that metaphysical reason exists. This is the error you need to correct in your thinking. And yes, I will always side with modern neuroscience instead of the fabrications spewing out of your brain.
The reason why we can have this debate is because we have brains and live in a society that has developed the Internet and computers. So very much a material process, once again.
I'd just mention that you are conflating two things. There is nothing that special about human brains when it comes to its neural architecture. It is a larger ape brain, with some greater capacity for visuospatial thinking and planning, probably due to the evolutionary demands of being tool-users as much as anything, but not radically different in a way that explains "reasoned thought".
It is the grammatical structure of speech itself that starts humans on the path to reasoned thinking. Speech demands that the world be broken down into tales of who did what to whom - some division into subject, object, verb. So it is the evolution of human culture - those grammatical habits - that sees us stumble into something (semiotically) new.
Our ape brain does not grow its syntactic structure genetically. It has to learn syntax by exposure to actual linguistic communities.
Of course, the human brain picks up those rules very easily. It has become adapted for that by - among other things - a prolonged period of brain plasticity in infancy. But still, the rules have to be learnt by exposure to cultural constraints.
And then a properly rational mindset - one organised by modern mathematical/logical syntax, the laws of thought - is the next step up. We must also grow up in that kind of world to wind up thinking in that kind of way.
Anthropologists find that native people react oddly to western IQ tests. They don't reason in the same abstract fashion. They seem to apply "magical thinking" - or a rationality that is very much based on the agential dynamics of ordinary human social interactions. At least that was the case 100 years ago. These days, everyone on the planet gets some education on how they should think to pass as properly "rational". :)
Anyway, @Wayfarer would be right that rationality is its own culturally discovered, or invented, thing.
The ape brain is great at induction, generalisation, prediction. That is what it evolved to do. And we just have a version with somewhat more horsepower.
But a logical mindset is usually defined by the further cultural thing of deductive thought. Some kind of grammatical or syntactic habit where chains of reasoning are produced for public consumption. We learn to explain ourselves in a rational cause and effect fashion.
Well, as I say, first came the "magical thinking" - the basic social style of speech - where everything is some combination of a subject, an object, and a causal action. The world is understood and communicated as some play of agents expressing their intentions in a way that caused events to happen.
Then later - around the time of Ancient Greece - we all took another big cultural step in objectifying and abstracting that agent-based causality. We discovered that reality is regulated by deep and impersonal forms. At that point, we started to loose our faith in an idealist reality - one where everything had an agential cause - and began to believe in an objective reality, where now nature became impersonal ... and eventually even mindless and computational. The semantics was washed away, leaving only the naked Platonic syntax.
A long-winded way of explaining how we have wound up so regularly split into the theists and the reductionists. Socially, we have one foot stuck in the past represented by magical thinking. All causality must have a moving mind at the back of it. The other foot is then stuck in the present with its mechanical or syntactical ontology. Reality is a fixed machine. Causation eventually becomes some kind of illusion as the Cosmos is a time-frozen logical block where nothing every really happens.
I advocate for the middle path that is Peircean pragmatism - the actual science of semiotics. Once you can see genes, neurons, words and numbers as a cascade of constraints, the same informational trick carried out in increasingly abstracted fashion, then you don't wind up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. You can minimise the subjectivity of syntactical argument without pretending to have eliminated it.
The Cosmos can be agential and spontaneous in some fundamental way (agential when complex, spontaneous when simple) while also being mostly in a highly constrained and mechanistic condition in its current "2.725 degrees from its Heat Death" state.
And so the agential vs the machine models of reality - which themselves reflect a historic shift from a grammar of social relations to a grammar of grammatical relations(!) - can be resolved in the thirdness of a pragmatic relation.
The ultimate kind of rationality is the one that results in the view of the world with us in it. Subjectivity emerges alongside the objectivity it believes it observes. We arrive at the Kantian realisation that we exist in our own semiotic Umwelts. But that is all good. It is how "we" get to exist. And it is all thanks to some developmental journey in terms of constraints - an education that was plugged into the world as being functional.
So theism becomes fine, even if it is "magical thinking" ... at least in the kind of minds it constructs within certain kinds of worlds.
And scientism is fine too ... on the same kind of judgement.
The question becomes where is this really leading - which is what was being discussed earlier in regard to the fate of the planet in the next 50 years. My criticism is that we are living socially as agents according one grammar, and then trying to understand our situation philosophically according to another, the grammar of abstract grammatical relations. The machine model of reality which patently leaves "us" out of it (even though we are then clearly there as the "gods" that make that mechanistic world for our own now unmodelled, unconstrained, purposes).
Neither of these grammars of thought are actually the grammars of metaphysical naturalism - the semiotic approach which is about seeing a world with us in it.
Theism legitimated the notion of transcending godhood. Machine rationality gave us the technological means to pretend to be those gods. We could enact the new modern project of Romanticism. We could believe we were aiming at beautiful creations while exponentially shitting up the planet.
So between the rationality embodied in social grammar and that embodied in mathematical grammar, there has to be another grammar that is both larger than these, and yet resolves these as aspects of that larger whole.
I mean biologists (like Aristotle) already think in that ecological or systems fashion. Naturalism of the full four causes kind has ticked along at the back of things. But a forum like this really brings out the historic division between the idealists and the realists - those that tend towards agential thinking and those that insist on a machine model of rationality.
[Sorry Uber. This isn't all directed at you. I'm just letting a reaction to your post run for the fun of it.]
The key word is 'discovered', right? Uncovered, made manifest, realised. They're not the product of evolution, nor the product of the brain. Indeed if Darwin hadn't been born in a milieu which was the product of the rationalist tradition of philosophy, which gave rise to the Scientific Revolution - then, no Theory of Natural Selection (which, by the way, was also prefigured by the Greeks). We wouldn't have computers nor the complex communications mechanisms we're using.
Sure, ancient forms of philosophy provided different methodologies for self-transformation; the common aim was to realize eudamonia, flourishing or the good life, and achieve a state of ataraxia, or tranquillity. I have read Hadot's book Philosophy as a Way of Life (I think that's the exact title but I can't be bothered to go to the shelves and check). In some ways this ancient dimension of philosophy is like the modern 'human potential' movement.
The Pyrhhonian Skeptics, the Cynics, the Cyreniacs, the Epicureans, the Stoics and the Neoplatonists all had their own practices which sought to achieve these states of eudamonia and ataraxia. None of them, other than perhaps the Neoplatonists concerned themselves with questions of transcendence or an afterlife. They mostly exemplify practical methodologies for achieving peace of mind. No assumption of any "higher dimension" is necessary. This lack of concern with, and even in some cases denial of, the "higher' is certainly the case at least with the Skeptics, the Cyreniacs, the Cynics and the Epicureans. The "higher" is probably essential to Neoplatonism, but arguably not to the Stoics, where the logos could be seen as being similar to the Chinese notion of the Dao, simply interpreted as the 'the way of nature'.
I have read some of the original works of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Marcus Aurelius and Sextus Empiricus, and many more secondary works about Ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, so I am actually reasonably well read in these areas of philosophy, so your contention that I simply don't understand the issues holds no water. I have noticed this is a common tactic with you: to assume that those who disagree with you simply don't understand. I think this is an intellectually dishonest move and actually does you no good service.
Nothing you have said here clearly explains anything about "higher truth" as far as I can tell, it just seems to consist in deflection, hand-waving, vague allusions, and the same old tropes you seem to never tire of repeating; and I have read it carefully. And you haven't attempted to answer any of my questions honestly and directly. Here they are again, in case you want to give it another go:
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
There is two other questions I would like you to answer honestly:
Do you actually claim to know for sure that there is a higher truth?
Do you want there to be a higher truth?
I'm not trying to be unkind; I'm just telling you what I genuinely think; I think you need to be prepared for the hard questions if you want to post on forums like these. I welcome any hard questions about anything I have said, and I will do my best to answer any such questions honestly and directly. And I am open to changing my mind as well if there is a good enough argument for doing so.
Of course. But are you prepared to enlarge your notion of physicalism to match?
Again, what is actually happening in physical theory? First biology realised that it is rooted in the informational regulation of material dynamics - the thermodynamical view where genes organise dissipative form. And now physics has been making the same information theoretic shift. As you say, suddenly the macro story of constraints has become basic as we take a condensed matter view of particles and states of materiality.
So this is what I recognise as semiotic - an ontology founded on the complementary reality of matter and information. This is not a dualism, but a dichotomy, as the two are formally reciprocal or inverse. They can be rotated into each other mathematically - the feature that blew everyone's mind about AdS/CFT correspondence.
There is big stuff going on here metaphysically. Action and direction must come to be seen as the two complementary halves of the one reciprocal relation. They must be the formal inverse of each other.
So time has to decide whether it stands on the side of action or direction. Or maybe it stands in the third place - as the manoeuvre which flips from one extreme to the other.
There is a really good post on how this connects with the three Planck constants - Okun's cube of physics - http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/physical_reality_less_more
But quickly, you can see how you need the three things of h (to scale local uncertainty or spontaneity), G (to scale global constraint, or energetic flatness), and then c as the speed of coherence (the rate at which quantum decoherence happens to relate the two opposing things of action and direction).
I think, in line with philosophers such as John Hicks, that there are many divergent accounts of humanity's 'encounter with the numinous'. So - I don't accept 'Christian triumphalism', i.e. that the Christian religion is the only truth. But I do accept that Christian religion as an instantiation of higher truth, sure. How each person responds to that, is indeed their own concern, but I don't believe, like some here, that the whole content of the religion, and indeed the Bible itself, is simply 'fantasy'. I have discovered many Christian teachers and philosophers that I admire and find inspiring - including John Hicks, Keith Ward, Cynthia Bourgeault, Richard Rohr, and Jacques Maritain (off the top of my head.) But does that mean I think Christianity alone is 'the truth and the way'? No, it doesn't. Does it mean that I think Christianity is an archaic superstition? No, it doesn't. I recognise Christianity's foundational role in Western culture, and I'm starting to think that it's erosion is overall a matter for regret. I do often think about whether I could return to the Christian church, but I'm not a church-goer and I don't think ever will be, although that could conceivably change. But I have an inherently pluralistic view of religions, I see them as operating on the level of archetypal psychology. And I see the danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, which most often happens.
Quoting Janus
If I fully knew the 'higher truth' that I think I am trying to discover, then presumably I would be a very different kind of person. I think that, allegorically, the 'myth of the Fall' does describe something real about the human condition. But, whereas in mainstream Christianity, one simply believes in the dogma and hopes for the best, I would like to think that such higher truths need to be discovered through the processes of philosophical reflection and self-realisation.
So - I agree that the human potential movement is like 'ancient philosophies' in that respect. But there's something else that I think needs mention - the pre-modern world was 'religious' in a sense we can't easily imagine now - 'the past is a different country', as a saying has it. That is why some of those philosophical schools you mention, whilst obviously not theistic in the modern sense, might still have had a type of religious sensibility, as many of them viewed 'the world' of the 'common person' (the 'hoi polloi') who was 'deceived by the passions' was precisely the adversary that had to be overcome through philosophy. That is why they were often ascetics (especially by today's standards). And I think there is an implicit dimension of the transcendent in such movements, again, even if not what us moderns would categorise as theistic. None of them would be 'believers' in our sense. But none of them are naive realists, or 'naturalistic' in today's sense. The idea that we have, that nature is somehow inherently 'good', is something very few of them shared (maybe the Epicureans, who were indeed materialists, and whom I am the furthest from in my general philosophy.)
Whereas, our 'cultural empiricism' is such that we can't imagine anything beyond 'the sensory domain'. So, insofar as I am beginning to understand that kind of philosophical orientation, then yes, I do believe there is what I call a 'vertical dimension' - states of being that are qualitatively different and better that can be attained by disciplined philosophical reflection and practice. And I think that is something I am beginning to understand, although obviously I am doing a dreadful job of communicating it.
Quoting Janus
:meh:
Quoting Janus
No, I don't assume that. I must have written about 5,000 words in this thread already, I constantly cite sources and references. But then, I do get to points where it's not worth trying to explain or unpack everything. I fully acknowledge many of my arguments are sketchy and my approach is often tendentious - fully acknowledge it, right? Plead guilty as charged. It's a public forum, it's not a peer-reviewed or published journal and everything is written on the fly. But if you say things like 'I just can't see how the idea of a First Cause makes sense', then I'm not going to try and persuade you that it does, even if I think it does.
Quoting Janus
My conception of philosophy is that there must be a vertical dimension; there must be something to anchor qualitative judgements - as per the above.
Quoting apokrisis
My [evolving and constantly subject-to-revision] understanding is that the Sky Father is indeed a cultural projection based on an amalgam of archetypes. (Notice, for instance, that the Greek 'Jupiter' is derived from the Sanskrit 'dyaus-pitar' which literally means 'Sky Father'.) Then all manner of father-related functions are attributed to this being - hence 'Our Father'. That is, I believe, the kind of belief that most atheists reject (but then, it's also nothing like what I believe.)
I think there are some plausible points in your arguments. But I need to consider them more carefully before I can fully make a coherent judgment. Some of these arguments are not that familiar to me.
Really??
Quoting Wayfarer
So, you don't believe that Jesus is God, is that right? The point is that others do and they consider that the highest truth. A related question which you didn't answer, but implied you believed the affirmative: Is Gautama infallible? Do you see how these beliefs must be subjective, since the Christian will say 'Yes' to the first and 'No' to the second, while the Buddhist will say the opposite. Can you give me an example of a higher truth that no one could fail to believe?
You referred to "divergent encounters with the numinous"; what are encounters with the numinous if not deeply affective experiences that then become interpreted in terms of the prevailing cultural symbolism? It would seem that these interpretations are what "higher truths' consist in; but that means they must be culturally relative. Of course there may be emotional, psychological, and phenomenological commonalities between experiences of the numinous, and I have not denied that. What I have been arguing is that such experiences can tell us nothing definitive about the metaphysical nature of reality. The metaphysical differences between different traditions attest to that.
Also, there are higher and lower levels just within the immanent milieus of cultures in general, and there may be commonalities between those, too. But that could equally well be understood to simply reflect human nature, that about us which is not culturally constructed, but is genetically or physiognomically determined, as it could be understood to reflect some transcendent spiritual being. That question we cannot answer, so it becomes a matter of faith, either way. In other words, it is a subjective matter to the degree that beliefs are determined by individuals and an intersubjective matter to the extent that beliefs are culturally, not individually, determined.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think we simply cannot adequately understand what religion was for the ancients, and that entails that it was not any notion of transcendence that we might currently entertain, even when it comes to the more arcane of the Hellenistic philosophies such as Neoplatonism. We certainly have no reason to impute notions of transcendence to the apparently much more secular philosophies such as Skepticism and Epicureanism, and even Stoicism. To do so would be to view them through "rose-coloured glasses".
Quoting Wayfarer
Here again you seem to have deflected and failed to answer the question directly. What I wanted to know is whether you personally desire that there should be higher truths, whether that is important to you such that you would feel that life is devalued if there were no transcendent realm.
I'll give you my answer: I do not desire that there be higher truths, unless the higher truth be that there is no determinate higher truth, because anything else would be an impingement on human freedom. There's a good reason, or perhaps many good reasons, why we cannot know anything about the nature of the afterlife; or even whether there is one.
I don't feel that life would be devalued at all if there were no afterlife. To live in expectation of an afterlife, and with presumptions about how my actions will affect my chances of gaining it, would lead me to focus on myself even more and devalue this life; and this life is all we really know. It's important to be good regardless; and we all know what being good consists in; it is very simple, it consists in being honest with ourselves and kind to others.
In any case, why could qualitative judgements not be anchored in general truths about human nature?
Somewhat irrelevant, but surely there is the earth mother also in the metaphysics of any agricultural society? So always that duality of the thunderous law maker and the fecund materiality.
Anyway, my point is that ordinary language has an agential grammar - as it should, as ordinary speech is all about organising our social worlds. But that then creates a rationality, a view of causal relations, predicated on minds with desires and intents. And so theistic metaphysics just super-scales that basic animism. Although - particular in regard to the Western Christian tradition - you had this new thing of a logical grammar, the root of an abstract or philosophical view of causation, enter the theistic picture.
So we wind up with a scholastic hybrid that tries to preserve a super-animism while appealing to Ancient Greek metaphysical rigour, setting up its own later strong conflict with objective science in this regard.
Does Buddhism protect you from the fray? Does it resolve these issues (in the way I say Peircean naturalism resolves them)? Or are you simply deploying the social animism you find there to attack the mechanical view?
The problem with Buddhism (in my view) is that - like PoMo - it avoids clear assertions about the issues. It enjoys and plays with the paradoxes rather than seeks to resolve them. And so it manages not to be found wrong by remaining strategically ambiguous.
But anyway, my point is about how there are two grammatical attitudes at work - the everyday agential one where even the wind seems to either favour or curse us, like another social player, and then the new mechanistic one where the Cosmos is ruled by Logos ... and somehow Flux still has to fit into that metaphysical equation.
The majority of posters here side either with an agential view of philosophy, or a mechanistic one. And probably that is because unless you have that kind of foundational disagreement, what else the heck would give you an excuse to post when the very nature of "a discussion" is the opposition inherent in a dialectic?
Again I come back to Peirce as the guy everyone is happy to disagree with as he takes the third position which is the resolution of all dialectical argumentation. He strived to create a grammar that was holistic - a story of constraints and freedoms, logos and flux. Semiotics is that more advanced grammar. Hegel and Kant were getting there, but Peirce - as also a scientist - sorted out something with foundational clarity.
Right, have you read his expose on time? Do you understand the difference between time as a measurement and time as something which measured? Are you familiar with Wittgenstein's discussion of the metre stick?
Quoting Uber
No, that's not what it means. It means that the passing of time is a real thing, which can be measured. This does not imply that it is absolute, it just implies that it is a "thing" like other things, like the metre stick, which can be measured. None of the things which we measure are absolute, measurement is to establish a relation between the thing and something else. So there is no reason to believe that time, as a measurable thing is absolute.
The problem appears to be that since time is a non-physical thing, you are hesitant to acknowledge that it is a thing at all. What about space then? Is space a thing to you? If not, then how about space-time? Is it a fiction, or is space-time a thing for you?
Quoting Uber
I disagree, the concept of time used by modern physics necessitates that there is nothing which is actually being measured. This is necessitated by the constant which is the speed of light. Assuming this as a constant necessitates that no time is passing at the speed of light and therefore the passing of time cannot be a real thing, because it is negated by light speed. And light speed is assumed to be very real, it is not a boundary like infinity. Since this negation of the passing of time is the constant, it acts as the premise upon which any measurement of time is based. Therefore any measurement of time is based in the denial of the passing of time as a real thing, and the measurements employed are arbitrary, based in assumptions other than the assumption of a real passing of time.
Quoting Uber
This is a falsity, the claim that time makes no sense without space. And this is why we must employ logic and reason rather than our senses, to figure this out. It is only this particular conception of time, which you call "spacetime" that assumes time does not make sense without space. But this assumption is completely unfounded because it is not difficult to conceive of time passing with active (immaterial), non-spatial Forms, in the Neo-Platonic sense, with space along with spatial existence, emerging from this. The inverse though, spatial existence with time emerging, is impossible to conceive of because emergence requires time. So it is impossible for time to emerge, but possible for space to emerge.
Quoting Uber
There are many ways to conceive of space, different dimensionalities, etc.. We can infer from this, that space is not necessarily the way that we conceive it to be. In fact, since there are different possibilities of how to conceive of space, we can infer from this, that space is probably not any of the ways that we do conceive it to be. Therefore, your conception of space, which ties time to space, implying that time makes no sense without space, is probably incorrect, and it is your argument, which relies on this unsound premise, which is unsound, not mine.
Quoting Uber
How do you know this? If there was a being with access only to its internal self, no senses to sense its environment, would this being be incapable of reasoning about what it means to exist? Why could it not learn things about what is happening outside itself just from understanding what is happening within itself? What comes to be, in the inner space, does not necessarily come through the outer space, and that's one of the quirky things about space which makes the conception of space, and space/time relations so difficult. Where did that fundamental particle come from which just popped onto the scene?
Quoting Uber
Having said that, I accept that rational human beings rely on their senses for much of the material with which they reason, but not all of it. And this is the issue here, that potion of the reasoning material which is derived from sources other than the senses. It's this material that we need pure reason to account for. You deny that there is such material, material derived from the non-physical, as is common today, but this denial is unreasonable.
Quoting Uber
Let's not change the subject on this matter. What is at issue is the supremacy of empirical experience, not whether it is the brain which does the thinking. "Empirical" implies specifically data derived from sensation. If we now discuss activities of the brain we need to differentiate data derived from sensation and data derived elsewhere. Once we allow that valid data is sourced internally, through means other than sensation, then the supremacy of empirical experience must be called into doubt. To re-establish this supremacy, as you would like to do, we need to fully analyze and understand the internally sourced data. You can start with that which is hereditary, but you will rapidly find that our understanding is incomplete, and there is evidence to implicate non-physical sources. Unless we can obtain complete understanding of the non-physical, or exclude it decisively, the supremacy of empirical experience over reason must be left as highly doubtful.
Quoting Janus
Right, and the point I made was that trying to persuade others to work with you toward an "ideal", whether it's a "higher truth", or any other ideal you might have in mind, this is not the same thing as trying to impose your own notion of truth onto another.
Quoting Janus
This is plainly untrue. Imposition implies enforcement. To discuss ideals, allowing one to judge and decide, by means of one's own free will, is by no means "imposition".
Quoting apokrisis
Despite the fact that I constantly harp on you concerning the things we do not agree on (Uber thinks I'm a broken record), I do recognize that we actually do agree on a lot of things. There's just no point in discussing those things.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, I'd agree that the non-physical Forms could be "the unexpressed-as-yet future". But there's a sense of "prior" here which is difficult to grasp. If the unexpressed future is non-physical, and the past is physical, then the present is the act of expression, whereby the non-physical produces the physical (future gives way to become the past). So if at each moment, as time passes, the non-physical produces the physical, then if this is not instantaneous (which by the nature of "becoming" seems impossible), then we have to account for this expression, as a process. Hence the things which come out of the future first, those which are nearest to the purest of the non-physical, are "prior" in that sense. This order is understood in Neo-Platonism as procession, or emanation.
I don’t know if I can accept the underlying rationale behind that terminology, and I have always objected to the way that it’s been used to enforce authority in Western history. When studying comparative religion, I read Elaine Pagel’s book on the formation of the Early Church, 'Beyond Belief'. She says that there was a battle between various doctrinal formulations, principally the Johannine sects (centred around 'Gospel of John') and gnostic sects (centred around 'the Gospel of Thomas'). The Johanine faction won out, and 'history was written by the victors' which is why the Gospel of Thomas had been lost until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codex; all this can be found on
gnosis.org site. The Thomas account was far more equivocal about the nature of Jesus and indeed of God - much more 'Oriental', in some ways (online version here.)
Quoting Janus
I think, technically, when you use the name 'Guatama', then you're referring to the historical person. 'The Buddha' is like an honorific, which describes a type or an archetype (as in later Buddhism, it is understood that there is more than one 'Buddha'). But the definition of the Buddha is, among other things, 'gone beyond', 'all-knowing', so on. How could the accuracy or otherwise of such purported attributes be ascertained objectively? What science would that fall under? How would you decide?
As for adjudicating the claims - I notice that many Buddhists are just as 'triumphalist' as are their Christian counterparts, although I rarely participate in such debates. I have some knowledge of Zen Christian teachers, such as Thomas Merton and his successors who do find a way to harmonize the principles of the two faiths.
But that doesn't mean that the claims of either religion are merely subjective, either. It's more that the nature of the discipline is such that it requires a personal, indeed a religious, commitment to them to plumb their depths. Hence,
Quoting Janus
That is true, and why I remain agnostic. But note this Pali Sutta on this very question:
So - here the Buddha is saying that the ultimate goal is 'a footing in the Deathless'. But the dialogue acknowledges that, for those who have not 'known, seen, penetrated or realized' it, then it has to be 'taken on conviction'. And that, I think, is a pretty succinct definition of religious faith.
Quoting Janus
Yes, definitely. You see that in many threads about anti-natalism, philosophical pessimism, nihilism, and so on. You also see it in many of the social malaises of current culture. I can't see how there can be much wrong with the belief that there is a higher truth, the pursuit of which requires discipline and the cultivation of virtue, even though many seem to regard the whole idea as a ridiculous superstition.
Quoting apokrisis
Aquinas never believed that there ought to be or could be a ultimate conflict between religion and religion, and I would like to believe that is true. Of course, the 'conflict thesis' is a major weapon in the armoury of scientific materialism, so they will defend it tooth and nail.
Quoting apokrisis
'Come out here and stand still where I can see you, dammit!' :-)
On that note, I really have to log out for a day or two, as have a commercial commitment and am being continually drawn into this dialogue - although I won't say I haven't been enjoying it. Bye for now.
But doesn't this come back to our usual sticking point? I say the problem with the Aristotelian telling is that is seems to put actuality before potentiality - in time. And Peirce would put it the other way round in seeing crisp actuality arising out of vague potentiality, with the Forms being the a-temporal midwife, so to speak.
So the Aristotelian story - actuality generates the potential - does work in the sense that historically actualised states of constraint do then act to give concrete shape to all remaining future possibilities.
Once a river has forked at a certain place, then that choice tends to persist as it becomes a difficult choice to reverse. And likewise, if I make a cube with six flat sides and which is evenly weighted, then I have an actual die which can potentially fall on any of those six faces with complete freedom.
So as we extrapolate from the simplicity of nature - the river and its fractal branching - to human mechanistic control, our desire for a "machine" that is a random number generator, we can see how the Form shifts from something that is smeared out in time, to something that is clearly present in a mind that wants to make the thing in question.
The river is feeling the constraint of a global form from the moment it was a first fresh trickle of rain creating rivulets on a new cooling volcanic slope. Over millennia, it carved out some very definite persisting (because self-reinforcing) pattern of channels while operating under exactly the same Form of Being. So the constraints that made the river were there at the beginning - as finality at least. But also as form, as the form is always fractal. And then steadily some river becomes a particular entrenched form - the Nile or the Tiber. So it becomes hard to pin a before or after on the formal/final cause. It is imperceptibly there from the start. And it is powerfully there at the end. But it is always there, shaping things - placing its restrictions on material spontaneity.
But with the die, it got made because some mind saw it as a form that could serve a rather human purpose. Nature breaks symmetries - as in a fractal. But humans can imagine a world in which symmetries get unbroken - as in a perfect Platonic solid. And so randomness can be idealised and thus realised on demand. We can imagine a cube that has six numbered sides, and we can imagine rolling it in a fashion where we "don't care" about the one it lands on.
Of course, a die is an odd sort of machine. Mostly we want to do the opposite of harnessing randomness to produce order. An engine is a system of cylinders, pistons and cranks aimed at constraining a petrol vapour explosion, pointing all its energy in a certain completely predictable direction to do work. But the causal principle is the same. First the human purpose and the form that inspires, then the actual building of a machine that expresses that system of material action constrained to achieve an efficient cause.
So yes, the Aristotelian story - bricks exist because someone wanted to build a house - does reverse the temporal sequence. And that fits with the notion of a creator god.
But I am talking naturalism where formal and final cause are always present, yet also they begin in that radical uncertainty we call the potential, and wind up in that habitual certainty we call the actual.
So the Tiber or the Nile might have had completely different stories. Maybe the first burst of rain could have been on this naked volcano slope over here rather than that one over there. All the water might have carved out a slightly different initial channel pattern. In 40 million years, a very different landscape might be the result - still fractal in its drainage pattern, but your map of the Nile or Tiber would not help you much.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The present is where the actualised past is exerting its historical weight of established being on the possibilities that may ensue to mark out its future. So every moment has some limited set of choices. But the choices are free ones - either properly random, at the level of physical nature, or ones that reflect the kind of options that life and mind can construct for themselves in having their own memories, habits and intentions.
You speak of time then passing, and that passage making the difference. But I am talking about the choices actually happening, and thus establishing a further concrete fact about historical existence. Another brick in the wall that further limits future choices. So time - as something global - does not pass exactly. It gets fixed in place as history. Actuality is getting baked in as the still available free potential gets energetically consumed.
But the things that come out of the future first will in some sense have to be the simplest, the purest, the least complex.
And that is the take of the Big Bang. In the beginning, science agrees, the symmetry breaking command was "let there be light". :)
Well actually, light - as electromagnetic radiation - was several symmetry-breakings later. The first act was the organisation that was the splitting of reality into action and direction in the form of a vanilla grand unified theory (GUT) force and a cooling~expanding gravitational backdrop.
Current cosmology speculates about this first Planck-scale act. The potential that came just before would have been a "quantum geodynamical foam" - a mix of spatial blackholes and temporal wormholes. Matter densities and temporal anomalies.
A bit poetic perhaps. But that seems a solid extrapolation from known physical models to start to try to understand these things. As you push right up to the smaller and hotter limits that define the ultimate Planck scale, you start getting fluctuations so pure and indeterminate that we can only recognise them as equal parts blackhole and wormhole.
This is a nice intro on that - http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec17.html
On Aristotle and time. Yes I am familiar with Aristotle's thoughts on time. What I am telling you is that there is absolutely no basis, rational or empirical, for deriving our understanding of time from Aristotle, anymore than one should look at him for inspiration on why the Sun revolves around the Earth. Someone who got every major argument about physical reality wrong should be greeted with major skepticism. You are obviously content to wallow in your metaphysical delusions, so instead of greeting him with skepticism, you ask me silly questions that can never be adequately answered. The dichotomy you have invented in your head is a false choice because it asks me to pick between Nonsense #1 and Nonsense #2. Your inability to recognize why your question cannot be adequately addressed just by looking at time alone, as some abstraction apart from the rest of spatial reality, is very much a sign that you need to stop reading Aristotle and start watching a YouTube video on relativity. Of course I could provide such resources, but I already know that it's a pointless exercise. The passage or the measurement of time cannot be analyzed without the broader context of space. Period. So you can keep asking this useless question a million times, rephrase it a million times, and you would still be wrong a million times.
In GR, spacetime is very much a dynamical part of nature, so it is most definitely "a thing," assuming we all understand that word in the same way (see the end of this post about that issue). We also know observers in different gravitational fields measure the passage of time at different rates, because mass and energy, in distorting the curvature of space, also distort the nature of time. Also, denying the postulates of SR, including that observers in all reference frames measure the same speed of light, is tantamount to viewing time as an absolute ticking clock for all observers. Contrary to your drivel, you have in fact proposed that time exists as an absolute for everyone living anywhere. I know you missed all of this stuff in Aristotle, so I wanted to give you an update on things that were endlessly debated in physics 100 years ago.
There was some talk about quantum gravity as it relates to this problem, so let me address that real quick. Quantum gravity at this point is an umbrella term for many different theories and ideas, not all of which agree in their understanding of time. But I don't see how the canonical versions of quantum gravity help the Forms in any way. If spacetime is an emergent property of quantum entanglement, and if the Forms are "active" in spacetime, then that implies that the Forms are themselves just emergent properties of entanglement. In other words if you insist on putting the Forms in spacetime, then that requires the prior and foundational existence of entanglement. So you are making the operation of the Forms dependent on entanglement, and that brings up more questions about how they relate to physical reality. I have no idea what a metaphysics of that would look like, but I'm sure someone here does, because it's very easy to come up with nonsense when you don't care about evidence.
The conceivability arguments about the Forms and space are absolutely infantile, the result of doing too much imagining and too little thinking. First of all, there are very many people who have conceived of just time emerging. There are special versions of quantum gravity where precisely this happens, so it's just not true that it's inconceivable for time to emerge. The only thing that's true here is that you don't want to allow for time to emerge because it ruins your argument. But don't conflate your personal fantasies with what other people can conceive.
Let's consider another angle to your argument. Why can't I conceive of a material Form in non-spatial reality? Alternatively, how can you conceive of an immaterial Form in non-spatial reality? I mean try thinking of one right now. Whatever you thought of either had a material property or a spatial property. Suppose you thought of the number 3 in a completely black background. That does not mean you thought of a non-spatial property. It just means you put that number in empty space. You could have also placed the number in some other background entirely, but either way you are necessarily imagining the existence of spatial dimension. Maybe your 3 even has a color like white, but the only reason why it can have a color is because you have material experience of colors. And the same goes for whatever background you placed the 3 in. Your very imagination of that background having color is the result of material experience. Maybe you aren't picturing anything at all in your mind. Maybe you are just reciting the word for the number 3 over and over. But if so, what have you actually conceived of? All you would be doing is just repeating a word, and I know you don't actually mean to suggest that Forms are words! Thus I have demonstrated that this ridiculous argument falls apart completely.
The question over the existence of metaphysical reason is in some sense what the entire debate on this thread has been about. I have already demonstrated that mind-body dualism cannot be true in any substantive sense. And even philosophers like Chalmers, who fully accept the validity of the hard problem, have resorted to funny and clever labels in their quest to avoid materialism. They call themselves "naturalistic dualists" or "property dualists" or anything else that basically means materialism. Of course most serious philosophers have come around to materialism by now, agreeing with the central conclusions of modern neuroscience: the mind is a physical product of the brain, the operations of the mind depend on brain states, and consciousness cannot actually exist apart from a physical brain.
Let me briefly address the issue on reason, existence, and evidence. Here we have another futile attempt to argue against materialism through philosophical zombies. Richard Brown had the best refutation of this nonsense when he pointed out that the zombie argument is circular. To paraphrase his argument, imagine special creatures called "zoombies," which are nonphysically identical to human beings and lack phenomenal consciousness. Because we can conceive of zoombies, it's possible that they exist. If zoombies exist, then they clearly refute dualism because they show that consciousness is physical. Point being? You cannot use a priori arguments to settle this issue. You have to use evidence! I know that's a horrible idea for some philosophers, but it does give me comfort knowing that there are plenty of philosophers out there who still bother to think for more than ten seconds about this nonsense.
Meaning and reason represent a complex collection of mental operations that emerge in the brain as the latter interacts with the external world, forms memories and experiences, and develops new physical structures and patterns. This dynamical coupling between the brain and the external world is important because it's what allows the brain to learn language, to understand basic causation, to perceive differences, to notice motion, and to observe when things live or die, among many other features and abilities. And these experiences are then not just important, but absolutely foundational in the development of thoughts about existence, meaning, and reason. Additional metaphysical layers, about the independence of rational insight and all that, have no more explanatory power to add and are absolutely unnecessary.
Finally, it's worth noting for the record that this thread has still not reached an understanding of what is physical and what is not. All of the debates on this thread, including my posts, have relied on some hazy and contingent assumptions about what we mean by that term, but the debates reveal very clearly that we really have no clue. And that's ok to the extent that our debates are limited to analyzing certain parts of reality, but a more ambitious project would need a more concrete solution. Maybe apokrisis has provided one. I don't know, but I enjoyed the vigorous exchange of ideas.
You all take care.
This is true, but completely useless nonetheless. :wink: To describe Microsoft Word as a collection of bytes is true. Winword.exe is just that. And yet the useful (and also true) way to define Word is as a word processor. It is still a collection of bytes, but the more abstract definition describes it usefully. I think that matters.
The very epistemology of science relies on the "non-physical" idea to ground any conception of the physics. And the measurement itself is just a further idea in that, in the end, we represent the measured state of the world as a number. We assign a value. At the very least, we tick a box to mark a presence or an absence. So the whole of the epistemic operation involves having an idea of what to look out for in terms of some system of signs, and reading those signs off the world, updating our conceptions of the world accordingly.
There seems some critical duality of matter and symbol, or matter and information, at work here, surely? We don't have direct access to the world - the Kantian thing-in-itself. We just have systems of thought where global conceptions are intimately tied to localised acts of perception. We understand our interactions with reality only in terms of a constructed realm of ideas encoded as signs.
This is the epistemic truth that ought not be buried. And that should be science's great strength - in being founded on the philosophy of pragmatism. It recognises that we only model the world and so, in the final analysis, construct a useful working story about it. Which in turn means - as we consider metaphysics, the ontological story of Being itself that we hope to tell though all our fundamental physical theories - that we have to incorporate this epistemic fact into any telling of that tale.
If we construct physics as a tale of the observables by placing the observer outside the physics - in some nonphysical realm! - then at what point are we going to finish the job and include that observer in the very tale we want to tell?
This is the deep dilemma that runs through all modern physics. It is also the problem for neuroscience. And Aristotle's philosophical pondering on time was pretty deep as it focuses on this as the issue.
He pointed out that change looks to be what we are really talking about. Things are not still, but dynamic. There is difference in terms of one thing becoming another thing. But that seems continuous. It is always the case. There seems some sort of constant flow where the past is fixed, the future opens up, and there is no now, no present moment, that interrupts.
But to measure time, we have to start counting intervals. We have to start numbering differences. And we want to number the past and the future in the same way - even if one is the already actualised, the other some kind of unactualised possibility. So we start counting time in terms of spatialised passage of moments. We impose a conceptual framework on our experience that allows us to imagine change happening "in time". There is a crisp stopping and starting to events.
Or critically, there is the stopping that is our ability to shout out "now!", while watching the hands sweep the numbered dial of a clock. A continuous world gets stopped, then started, then stopped, by a ticking second hand ... in the world that is now the one conjured up by our scientific imagination.
So I think you risk rushing right past the basic philosophy of science issues that any talk of "the physical" must answer. And Aristotle was certainly on to it.
Quoting Uber
But a lot of folk still believe that consciousness is an informational, or indeed computational, state. It is a kind of form - in the Aristotelian sense even - in being accounted for by a functional ontology. Consciousness - in this view - would be multi-realisable. You could build a "brain" out of tin cans and string so long as it replicated the functionality that is the processing structure of the actual human organ.
So a really modern neuroscientific understanding would dispute this. Or at least, it would say there is something special about the hardware of brains that the hardware of computers lacks. Computers are machines and so depend on completely inert and stable parts. Bodies are organisms that depend on the opposite thing of all their parts being in a state of generalised critical instability.
That is how life and mind bridge the "explanatory gap" of causality. States of information can regulate states of material organisation because it takes virtually no effort to nudge an unstable system in a desired direction. The cell is a thermodynamic storm of material structure constantly about to fall apart. And life is the trick of just delivering the right well time nudges to, instead, keep it constantly falling back together. The mind does the same balancing act in terms of behaviour.
But anyway, the point is that some kind of dualism - that seems very much like a form vs matter, or non-physical vs physical debate - runs through both the epistemology and ontology of science. So any scientist, who cares about the big picture being painted, can't afford to simply brush away the issues as somehow anachronistic and not still top of mind.
The way we have constructed our own physical model of the world has ultimately left us standing on the outside of that construction. We got there by sharply dividing the observer from the observables.
And then our best neuroscientific theories have been probing what that means. And the upshot is the emerging dissipative structure or infodynamic view, where life and mind are understood semiotically as the informational management of material instability. Form shapes material plasticity to create substantial being - Aristotle's hylomorphic view of "the physics".
Then even fundamental physics is undergoing a revolution where information is being granted some kind of physical reality. It is intelligible form, structure or constraint that shapes plastic material potential. Again, Aristotle's hylomorphism is being cashed out finally. Or at least ontic structuralism is top of mind in fundamental physics.
As you say, the deep assumption seems anti-dualistic. Information and matter must together compose the one world somehow. The mind is somehow still a product of the brain (or the structure of the brain a product of a lifetime's habit of being mindful?). The Universe is still a product of local material events - even if in the end, there is nothing at all but the blackbody radiation sizzle of cosmic event horizons, the zero-degree excitations being produced by the rather immaterial holographic bounds of a de Sitter spacetime.
So physics wants to reject actual dualism, and yet it can't do without the dialectically divided. Just as the Ancient Greeks got science going by establishing the basic dialectical divisions of nature.
And so - as Peircean pragmatism argues - the only other choice is Hegelian synthesis. If you want one-ness, and have to get there by incorporating a two-ness, then the only way to resolve that is hierarchical three-ness. The holistic or systems view. Which again would be Aristotle's answer with hylomorphism.
So the marvel is how quickly the Ancient Greeks got down to the metaphysical basics. And science has been a long time working back around towards that ontological framework.
OK, you still haven't really answered the other questions directly, but at least you have answered this one.
The point I am trying to make is that, even if it is true that some people are unhappy if they believe there is no overarching meaning to life (I say "some people" since I think it is arguably true that many, perhaps most, people simply don't care about such questions), I am not at all convinced that the social malaise you refer to stems predominately from that. I would say it stems from many, many other factors in modern life.
If you think there is a pre-given, overarching meaning to life, the problem still lies with any attempt to objectify that meaning; that is to say, to claim that it is one absolute meaning, it is like this, and so on. No one can actually say what the meaning is, and people have conflicting ideas about it, as is evidenced by the different religions. So, whatever the meaning might be, it cannot be known because it is indeterminable, and there is therefore simply no alternative for any individual but to trust their feelings about it, and place their faith wherever their feelings lead them to. I think this is as true of people with a secular bent, as it is of those with a religious bent.
So, I think, for me at least, the most intellectually honest thing to do is suspend judgement on the whole matter. I say "for me at least" because I don't know what experiences others might have that may lead them to some religious faith or other; Christianity for many Westerners (and increasingly Easterners) and Buddhism for some others, such as yourself. We are accountable only to ourselves as to how convincing we find our own intuitions and experiences; in this regard only the individual can really judge her own intellectual integrity and honesty when it comes to matters of faith.
The experiences of others are not directly known to us, and so should not convince us except through feeling of affinity which could only come from our own experience; in the absence of our own experiential feeling for them arguments from others' experiences are empty for us.
I think placing faith where feeling leads is what everyone does, ultimately, even the so-called "enlightened ones". They cannot know an indeterminate meaning any more than any one else can; they just have a greater sense of the numinous and heart-felt commitment to the cultural forms which have become entrenched by tradition. I think that to imagine they have some 'secret knowledge" beyond that is pure fantasy. I would never want deny anyone's right to entertain such a fantasy if they want to; but it would take solid evidence and a very strong argument to convince me that it could be anything more than a fantasy.
Just quickly, the problem here is that you still treat meaning as something to be discovered. You simply place that discovery in the individual, rather than the collective, view.
But what if - pragmatically/semiotically - meaning is something to be constructed. And so the objective part of this is the correct understanding of that process of construction.
The issue isn't what, but how. Once we have a model of the how, we can run the process to produce the what.
And this is how we get into a developmental naturalism where we can see how individual psychology is dependent on both the naturalism of a linguistic social super-organism and a genetic biological super-organism. We, as individuated beings, have to participate in semiosis taking place at two quite different levels - the cultural and ecological. We have to situate our selfhood with the systems of both nurture and nature, as it usually put.
And the general problem - for this selfhood - is that the two systems are not that well aligned in the modern world. Hence all the moaning about an existence lacking clear meaning.
So it ain't about discovering meaning itself, but about discovering the natural process that produces meaning.
From there, we can see how being a human individual is semiotic, but a semiosis that relies on two general levels of semiosis - the linguistic and the genetic. And the obvious philosphical project is to get these two levels of self-making in better alignment ... given we all seem to agree that they are rather out of alignment to some degree that causes dissatisfaction.
My argument with @Wayfarer is that he dismisses biology's general goal of entropy dissipation. That kind of denial prevents progress on the problem.
What if human biological flourishing is defined by psychological flow - the rush that is smoothly managed energy expenditure? Maybe driving a fast car is as much the point of life as much as anything could be?
But of course, ecosystems thinking relies on there being limits. If we want a long-run future, culture needs to find some way to make a flow psychology work within the ecological constraints. Then again, if technology can remove those constraints, what then spells a meaningful and flourishing life?
However, until we have a clear model of the reality of flourishing, a clear view of its semiotic mechanics, we can't address the useful questions. Neither the self, nor the society, are going to discover anything, just blunder on helplessly into whatever eventuates.
That actuality is put before potentiality is the logical conclusion produced by Aristotle's cosmological argument. The argument is very simple, and once understood it is very forceful. Simply put, it states that if at any time, there was only potential, there would always be only potential, because if any actuality comes into existence it requires an actuality as its cause. However, we observe that there is actual existence, therefore it is impossible that potentiality is prior to actuality in an absolute sense.
The argument was intended by Aristotle, to demonstrate that anything eternal is necessarily actual, and it appears to produce an infinite regress of actuality. That's why Aristotle introduced the eternal circular motion. as the representation of this eternal actuality. In modern times, many monists will posit an infinite regression of the co-existence of actuality and potentiality. Neo-Platonists, and Christian theologians reject infinite regress as repugnant to the intellect, infinite regress is produced by misunderstanding. So they maintain a dualist separation between the actuality which is prior to time, and the temporal actuality which exists in time.
These two different perspectives produce two distinct meanings of "eternal", and consequently two distinct interpretations of "time". From the monist perspective, eternal means extending forever in time, infinite temporal extension, and this is what is dismissed in theology as repugnant, unintelligible. In the theological representation, eternal means outside of time. The meaning of "time" is the same here, it is a concept derived from physical motion. But when eternal is understood in the theological way, as outside of time (as derived from physical motion), then we need to reconceive "time" to allow that the things which have been designated as outside of time can interact with temporal things.
This is why I cannot accept that principle you derive from your interpretation of Peirce. To place potential as first is to violate the very simple logic of Aristotle's cosmological argument, and so it is illogical. The monist approach unites potential and actual as one, making them co-dependent. This may appear to be acceptable, but it renders time as unintelligible. The separation between past and future, the boundary, is lost because there is no real difference between potential and actual, as this is just two different ways of looking at the same thing. There is no real beginning and end as there is a beginning of the past and an end of the future when we allow for a real division, so intelligibility is lost to infinity.
Quoting apokrisis
This is the way of thinking about time that I think we need to avoid. It views the impetus of motion as "historical weight", inertia, The way that something has been, in the past, will force it to continue to be that way in the future. But this notion is just derived from our perspective, our memories of how things were, our observations of consistency, and our inductive reasoning. In reality I think, what determines how things will materialize at the present, is the Forms which are prior to the present. We observe these patterns of materialization as consistent, and inertial, but the real "cause" of how things exist at the present is the Forms which are prior to the present, causing things to come to be at the present, the way that they are. And in an inverse way, due to our observations and induction, we attribute "cause" to historical weight, the past, as if what has already past has causal power. But what has already past has no real power to affect the future.
Quoting apokrisis
Consider that every moment has in principle, an unlimited number of choices. But the choices by which the universe may materialize at each moment are limited in a way similar to the choices that a human being makes are limited. The human being's choices are limited by the ideas in its mind, and the possibilities for the universe are limited by the Forms which are existing in the universe. Now we approach the need for the second type of actuality which is the basis for dualism. We must assume something which chooses the possibilities to actualize. In Aristotle's biology, this is the soul. The living body consists as potencies which are not necessarily actualized. They are classed as potencies because they are not always active, but when activated they proceed in the same way, like a habit. The habitual activity is not occurring all the time, it lies in potency until it is activated. The point being that we must assume an actuality (the soul), as that which activates the various potencies. From this perspective, the living body exists as a conglomeration of potencies, it is produced and maintained by this further actuality, the soul.
Quoting apokrisis
Remember, a set of choices is meaningless without something which chooses. Possibilities will come and go, but unless there is something which chooses, some form of actuality (like the soul), which can actualize one possibility rather than another, the whole structure of possibilities is meaningless.
Quoting Uber
The preacher has left the building. "Conception" and "imagination" have the same meaning to you. Where lies reason in this confused mess, which is your mind?
Quoting Uber
Then why preach as if you have it all figured out, and those who don't agree with you are speaking infantile nonsense?
I agree; if there were an objectively real overarching meaning then it would be something to be discovered. But absent that (which seems to be obviously the situation for us) our own meanings are to be created by us.
I'm not sure it's true to describe Microsoft Word as a collection of bytes. The source-code archive is as much Word, and with different computer architectures, the collection of bytes will be different. Whatever Word is, it is not just a collection of bytes.
As far as I can see the term ''non-physical'' has an empty extension - there are no non-physical things.
Consciousness is just a pattern arising from a specific permuation of matter and energy. Think of it like neon lights. They're physical but may be used to spell out the name. The neon lights are physical and the name it spells out is just a specific pattern of the physical elements of the lights. The brain-consciousness could be something similar.
What does it even mean for a physical object (us) to think of non-physical stuff?
Perhaps we need to redefine ''existence'' and try to include non-physical stuff but how would we even understand things like that as language itself seems to be inextricably bound to our senses. Look at our language. The words of perception, necessary for comprehension, always, in any language, are sensorially meaningful. For instance a synonym for ''understand'' is ''see''.
May be we need a different language...I don't know.
Nice summary.
Clear, coherent, concise, and imbued with profound understanding, in short; very well written.
Also, I am in general agreement with the concepts as presented (though my own concept of time is largely undeveloped).
Any computer program can be correctly and accurately described as a collection of bytes, but it doesn't matter. Addressing the details of my analogy ignores the point I was offering. There is a large abstract-level gap between a stream of bytes and a word processor. The gap separating brain and mind is much bigger. It's just too large a gap for us to bridge, when we try to think about the mind in terms of the brain. If/when we have filled-in some more gaps, things might be different. But today, now, we can't usefully describe the mind in terms of the brain.
N.B. I don't dispute the relationship between brain and mind; I'm concerned with understanding, particularly ease of understanding. You see? :up: :wink:
It can't, no more than a rhinoceros can be correctly and accurately described as a collection of the letters A, G, C, and T.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Which is one of the main reasons an abstract entity cannot be correctly or accurately described as a collection of bytes, or base pairs.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Yet we manage to distinguish between the word-processor and the hardware. The mind is software.
I don't think it amounts to something philosophically meaningful. What I think it is, is the most high-level, general cause which is recognised by the physical sciences, and which, therefore, more or less occupies the role formerly assigned to the 'First Cause'. It's what remains when the 'divine intelligence' is removed from the picture.
You can see how that developed historically - how the tradition of science in the West developed out of the original Platonist/Aristotelian/Medieval precedents, and then over time, as the scope of natural science changed and expanded, the very conception of what amounted to science changed with it.
Whereas in the original conception, there was in intrinsic connection between meaning, purpose and value and the principles that were being sought by science, one of the consequences of modernity is just the abandonment of that sense, and its replacement with a purely instrumental or physicalist account. It comes from the early modern period, with the relegation of mind to the 'secondary qualities' and the treatment of what is mathematically quantifiable as being fundamentally real. But that leads to something more than just a theoretical construct - or rather, it actually is a metaphysic, but one that we're so embedded in that we take it for granted.
'The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Many assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed. Yet that is the secular view of secularity, its own self-understanding.' ~ David Loy.
Quoting Janus
But this is what I take philosophy to be about. It's why I study it.
I would even go so far as to say that explanations derived from verifiable pure data (general form) supercede explanations derived from theology.
Religion is a social institution, a means of social control which has conformity (ultimately, social stability) as its goal. This goal is antithetical to the scientific enterprise.
For me, it makes more sense to keep theology out of science (let each have its appropriate domain), and dedicate it to explanations regarding the spiritual domain (which is non-physical).
We can suspend judgement on all principles, as doubtful, and this is the way of skepticism. But it is possible to reach the bottom, a principle which is uncontrovertible, and on the uncontrovertible principle we can construct a reasonable ideology. For me, this is Aristotle's cosmological argument. It's a logical principle describing what cannot be otherwise, if we accept the validity of empirical evidence.
I don't see doing philosophy, at least metaphysics, as being a matter of reaching conclusions, but of gaining an ever more comprehensive grasp of the problems and possibilities. Most important is to gain the critical ability to do philosophy for yourself and not merely study what others have done.
MU, if it is accepted that there must be a uncaused cause for all things, what does that tell us about the nature of that uncaused cause, other than that it is not caused by anything within the Cosmos? Or, on the other hand, why can the Cosmos itself not be the uncaused cause of all things?
Thanks, Galuchat. Much appreciated.
But didn't you slip up in presuming that time always exists? My approach says it emerges. So when there is only the originating potential in "existence" (which of course, can't be existence as we normally mean it), then there is no actual time. At best, time is one of the possible emergent outcomes of a process of cosmological evolution, along with space and energy.
So there is a suppressed premise here - that time exists before the existence in which I say it emerges.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Right. And I reject the premise of eternality, and so I can stop looking for outs that don't work, like a cyclic cosmology. For me, infinite regress is solved by the starting points turning radically vague and indeterminate. Exactly as suggested by Big Bang quantum physics.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And outside space and energy too. Outside existence in general. Hence the abstract realm of Platonism.
Doesn't really work, I'm afraid.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The actual physical argument is way more interesting. There is in fact a limit to the constraint of motion. You can suppress action - breaking its symmetries - right down to the point you arrive at the fundamental symmetries of translation and rotation. So a Cosmos exists because, in the end, there is a concrete limit to the symmetry breaking. You arrive at motions so simple in the form of inertial spin and inertial motion, that they can't be made simpler.
You are taking the view that motion could be completely eradicated and so absolute rest would be the natural baseline state of existence. But inertial motion could be used as proof of my constraints-based approach. The fact that spin and straight-line motion are energy conserving symmetries - symmetries that can't be broken - shows that your atomistic assumptions about absolute rest can't be right. Physics has concrete proof against your metaphysics.
If there is no time, then emergence, which is a type of change, is impossible. So it doesn't make any sense to say that there was potential before there was time, this unintelligible, incomprehensible. This is why Aristotle's metaphysical principles are highly acceptable, he makes "potential" intelligible by restricting it, or constraining it, with time. It is a temporal term, having no meaning outside of time. Putting "potential" outside of time renders the term unintelligible, without any real meaning.
So that's exactly what the cosmological argument does, it demonstrates that it is logically impossible for pure potential to be prior to time. Think about your proposal. There is potential, with no time passing. Something has to start time in order for time to start passing. It is impossible that potential itself can cause time to start passing, because it is just the potential for time, and any potential needs something to actualize it for it to become actual. There is an act required.
Quoting apokrisis
It is not a "suppressed premise", it is the conclusion, and it's not begging the question. The argument is based on what the terms "change", or in this case, "emerge" mean. The nature of "emerge", or in Aristotelian physics, "change", is such that it requires time. Time cannot come into existence from change, it cannot emerge, because time must already exist in order for any change or emergence to happen.
Quoting apokrisis
Do you not see that you are contradicting your own premise here? Your premise, "potential without time", is exactly what you deny here, "absolute rest". So you propose "absolute rest", disguised as "potential without time", to counter the cosmological argument, then you turn around to say that physics has concrete proof against this. If you truly believe that physics has concrete proof against "absolute rest", then drop your contradictory proposal of "potential without time".
The cosmological argument says nothing more than what you say physics has concrete proof against, that absolute rest is impossible. Pure potential, without anything actual is exactly that, absolute rest. Since absolute rest is denied, the Neo-Platonists take the premise that there are active Forms (in Christian theology God and angels) which are prior to any potential, "potential" being a word used to refer to a non existent motion. Non-existent motion is rest.
Isn't it necessary to reach conclusions in order to gain a comprehensive grasp? How can you say that you have grasped anything if you haven't reached any conclusions?
Quoting Janus
It is not necessarily represented as "uncaused cause". I think that's a misrepresentation of Aristotle's cosmological argument, because "cause" is an ambiguous term, as Aristotle demonstrates with the "four uses of 'cause'". The argument is against those like apokrisis, who place potential as prior to actual, in an absolute way. This category of premise, placing potential as first, comes in two types, idealists like apokrisis who put the potential of ideals (symmetry) as first, and materialist who put the potential of matter as first.
In your kind of model the radical vagueness or indeterminacy is not only "there" at the beginning of time but "always", no? It is the eternal out of which the temporal forever emerges? Do you presume it to be radically indeterminate in itself or merely for us?
One intuitive observation is that there is nothing that is known that is its own cause. What would it mean to say that something ‘is its own cause?’ Is there anything like that in experience? So saying the cosmos is 'its own cause' basically is saying 'it just is'. Whereas if you retrace the steps of the philosophical tradition, it always starts with 'how or why can it be this way? What causes it to be this way?'
Actually I thought some more about your questions to me - about my 'meta-philosophy'. Without launching into an epic, my quest still is, and has always been, about the idea of enlightenment. Even The Enlightenment was about enlightenment! Except for in that case, there was a (sometimes tacit) agreement to seek for it in any terms other than the religious, for the reasons that you yourself frequently articulate: scepticism of the idea of there being a higher truth or any form religious authority. That anti-religion is what I say is a cultural meme found widely in Western culture as a kind of reactive scepticism.
But what I am seeking, or the way that I understand the term 'enlightenment', is more to do with the transformation of perception - a radical re-ordering of the way we see the world. We spoke before about experiences under entheogens - it is like that, with the caveat that it can't be obtained by artificial means, on account of those experiences always being transient, and also the consequent lack of ability to integrate the insight into real life. But I see the spiritual quest in terms of penetrating or overcoming some fundamental error or problem in consciousness. That is where it is much more like a form of gnosticism, as 'gnosis' comprises exactly that seeing-through or enhanced understanding or a radical re-ordering of consciousness. (This is why, indeed, Richard M. Bucke's book Cosmic Consciousness does provide a model for the idea and why I still think it is fundamentally sound.)
So my counter-cultural understanding is that this was what 'religion' was originally about, or at any rate, that element of transformed understanding was the only aspect of it that is really worth anything. But these fundamental insights then got incorporated into the various mythologies and tropes of the culture in which they finds themselves, and then they become understood in terms of such tropes - and then it becomes part of the problem and no longer part of the solution. That is what happens with the formation of religious authority - it's a process of ossification (you see that in the agrarian symbology of the Bible, 'flocks' and 'the blood of the lamb' and the other anachronistic symbolism it contains). Originally there is a mind-transforming insight or radical vision but it is then passed down to others who don't truly understand it, or incorporated by the elite for political reasons, it becomes the basis of social or political power, and then it is no longer radical but ultra-conservative. This is observable throughout history and culture.
So - how that relates to physics, metaphysics and philosophy, is that from the outset, that 'sapiential' or gnostic dimension was actually part of the vision of philosophy. The Parmenides contains references to non-dualist realisation and states of samadhi (which are explained in detail in McEvilly's The Shape of Ancient Thought). Without that background understanding, none of it makes any sense whatever (and even his contemporaries struggled to understand it, which is what the dialogue is about). Even a lot of what is said about it in philosophy class - and I did study it formally in the unit on Pre-Socratics - completely misses the point that the Parmenides is referring to something very much like what Bucke described in the case of sages and 'realised beings' (what with the allusions to the 'plain beyond day and night' and the vision of the goddess.) It is about a completely different frame of reference, an entirely different state or way of being. It's that idea of 'realisation' or 'self-realisation' that you still find in the Vedantic sages like Ramana. But where is that, in Western culture? (For comment, see Camille Paglia, Cults and Cosmic Consciousness.)
Anyway - I don't expect agreement. These thoughts have come up in response to your questions, as to what got me into posting on forums in the first place, what my meta-philosophical outlook is. Most secular philosophy, so-called, has arisen in reaction against religious dogma, but in doing so, it has also been inoculated against the original vision which still might be preserved under the layers of dogmatics, which is why it so frequently results in nihilism, as it ends up being the rejection of the very idea of meaning. (This was the theme of Theodore Roszak's book Where the Wasteland Ends which was another formative text for me.) So, anyway, life goes on, I have to work out ways to actually try and incorporate this understanding in the day-to-day, otherwise it might all turn out to have been the fantasy that many will say it must have been. I really don't think it is, mind you, but there has to be a chance that it is; that is part of the game. :-)
Can one point to what ain't there? Sure. People do it all the time when it comes to negation. From our vantage point - observing from our state of determinate being - It can be crisply determinate that some thing doesn't exist.
Vagueness is then just the same, just more extreme. We are pointing to the very lack of crisp being, the very lack of any determination in any form or material degree, and giving it a name.
For you to talk about what it is "in itself" is already smuggling unwarranted definiteness into the concept of the vague. Old habits may die hard, but questions about whether the vague is inside or outside time, inside or outside space, inside or outside energetic action, are all queries that can only make sense if you presume the distinctions could even apply in intelligible fashion. But the definition of vagueness would be that they don't. As Peirce said, vagueness is that to which the principle of contradiction fails to apply.
So to point to vagueness, we have to "point" at that which is unspeakable in lacking intelligibility. But we can then say some very precise things about it on the presumption that the intelligible itself had to "exist" within that vague grounding potential as the intelligible is clearly what has emerged out of it. The PNC does apply to the existence we know, to the degree it has a crisply developed state - a state composed of its definite presences and definite absences.
I'm saying time emerges. A global temporal organisation emerges as a symmetry breaking (or indeed, a series of them in which time takes on an increasingly definite and classical character).
I mentioned earlier the current cosmological modelling of the Planck scale in terms of relativistic anomalies. The first moment - before there was any proper distinction between gravity and the other forces - was a hot soup of blackholes and wormholes. Spacetime - in any sense that it existed - was so curved and disconnected that we can only understand it in terms of features like time wormholes where past and future did not yet exist. There was no forward and backward direction wired in, so time might as well be going in one direction at one point, a different direction at another point.
So on the basis of the known physics, this is our best retroductive description of the earliest conceivable state.
Now you can ignore what the physics suggests on this score. But I prefer to let the available evidence inform the metaphysics. Especially when on logical grounds, Peirce had already set out the machinery of this kind of radically emergent ontology.
OK, so obviously the concept of the vague is the concept of the indeterminate. Are you saying that the vague itself is something other than the concept of it? If you say it is then it follows that there is a vague as we conceive it and a vague in itself. In that case it would seem to follow that the vague in itself must be indeterminate. Or would you say that it is neither determinate nor indeterminate, neither vague nor not vague?
The problem here of course is that you are still trying to make sense of this in terms of one kind of thing becoming its other thing - a dualistically disconnected story of vagueness completely disappearing and crispness completely replacing it, as though the two can’t exist simultaneously.
But my logic is that of a triadic or hierarchical development. So what emerges by a dichotomous separation is the clarity that all structured being lies defined by these two absolute limits - that of the vague and the crisp.
Vagueness emerges also in a retroductive fashion as something now made definite by the emergence of the crisp. So while you might want to arrange them as the start and the end of being - and that may be the temporal story that emerges as the crisp develops, and the vague becomes clearly that which was left behind - the big picture is the vague only has “existence” in a sense relative to what we mean by a definitely structured existence.
I think the problem is the same for the "crisp". Is the crisp something other than the idea of the determinate. Or in other words is anything determinate in itself or only determinate for us? I understand that you are conceiving of crispness and indeterminacy as the two absolute termini of a continuum along which neither crispness nor vagueness are pure, but that's not what I'm concerned with. If neither vagueness nor determinacy can be precisely defined or determined then it would seem that we are face with an eternally recurring fudge factor.
Quoting apokrisis
It seems to me that insofar as structured being can be defined it is defined in crisp terms. It doesn't make much sense to me to define something in vague terms; a vague definition is not a definition at all precisely to the extent that it is vague. On the other hand I can see how something could be evoked in vague terms, but that is different matter, to do with aesthetics, not knowledge.
Say you believe that prior to the BIg Bang there was a "sea" of quantum fluctuations. or some such. Would that be a state of absolute vagueness? Would there be any determinacy in that? Or would there be any determinacy in anything at all independently of us? An undetermined determinacy perhaps?
We know only parts of the Cosmos, we never know, or even could know, the whole. The parts we know are arguably known to us in causal terms, that is they are intelligible only insofar as we understand them to have sufficient reason(s) for their existence. Sufficient reasons for the existence of something must lie outside the thing. If nothing lies outside the Cosmos (by definition) then we cannot say the Cosmos has any cause that lies outside itself. It is a special case. We might want to say there is a creator that lies outside the Cosmos, that is the sufficient reason for the Cosmos. But why could the Cosmos not be self-creating if the purported creator could be?
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't understand why you call it a "reactive scepticism". Skepticism is a natural outcome once knowledge reaches a certain point. The ancient Skeptics saw that there is no foundation for any absolute or metaphysical claims, so they concluded that the natural state of humanity is to be in a constant state of inquiry. They were so consistently skeptical that they didn't even rule out the possibility that certain knowledge might be found. However with that admission I think they were just trying to avoid being called inconsistent; and really they showed that there is no possibility of absolutely certain metaphysical knowledge; we can have only conventional "certainties". the problem of the "criterion" sees to that.
Quoting Wayfarer
I have never denied that there can be "states of samadhi", but the metaphysical import of the possibility of such altered states of consciousness is precisely what is in question. Entheogenerated experiences are transient, to be sure, but they are much more sustained than any other experiences of the numinous I have had. I think it is a matter of brain chemistry; there is only so much serotonin or dopamine; and entheogens cause a massive flood of these neurochemicals which probably can be achieved (to the same degree anyway) no other way. Or even if it can be achieved other ways it must still be subject to the same subsequent depletion of those neurochemicals as is the case with psychotropics. So all such experiences are transient: I don't see any reason to believe in the possibility of constant samadhi.
Yet, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with having faith that there is such a possibility and living your life accordingly if that is your wont. I just think it would be in the interest of intellectual integrity and honesty to oneself to acknowledge that it cannot ever be more than a matter of faith, unless and until I can directly experience the reality of constant samadhi. And even then it would not be impossible that I was deluding myself, or had become a 'false prophet'. How many so-called "Gurus" have deluded themselves and others? How would any of us ever be able to tell the difference, or follow anything other than what 'feels right" to us personally. This is the ineradicably subjective nature of the spiritual quest, and what I like about Christianity is its (sometimes and in some places at least) frank acknowledgement of this fact.
Do you agree that emergence is a type of change? And doesn't change require time? If so, then it is impossible that time could emerge (come to be as the result of a change0.
Quoting apokrisis
If "the physics" is contradictory then of course I will ignore it as unintelligible nonsense. But I really don't think that "the physics" suggests that time emerges, I think that this is just undisciplined metaphysics.
Here's an analogy. I have met different people who have ideas, even plans for types of perpetual motion machines, electric cars which can recharge their batteries from their own forward motion, and things like this; machines that produce enough power to do work and also recharge their own source of energy. These people are uneducated in basic high school physics, not understanding the basic laws of conservation. We try to convince these people that their ideas won't work, without ridiculing them, but they just can't seem to understand that their ideas contravene fundamental laws of the field in which they are speculating, physics.
Likewise, there are people who are highly educated in science, who have not been educated in the broader field of philosophy. They have not been disciplined on issues of human consciousness, the nature and history of ideas, concepts, the human will, judgement, ethics and morality. Some of these people will venture into metaphysical speculations without the proper training. They may put forward ideas which contravene fundamental principles, like the cosmological argument. We must explain to these people, trying not to ridicule them, that their speculations are a meaningless waste of time because they contravene this fundamental principle, the cosmological argument, just like we have to do this for those who dream about machines which contravene the law of conservation of energy. It is simply a matter of undisciplined, uneducated speculation, when you put forward ideas, schemes which contravene fundamental principles of the field in which you are speculating. How do we convince these people of this without ridiculing them?
Time is change with a general direction. That general direction is what emerges due to symmetry breaking. So time does not pre-exist change as such when there is only change, or fluctuation, lacking in a general direction.
That was my point. Folk take crispness for granted. The PNC applies without a second thought. I am saying it will always be relative to a point of view. So we sit in the middle of existence and act as if it is completely crisp or determinate. We don’t even consider that it never could be completely as vagueness is always an irreducible aspect of the very existence of any determinism. We only know the crisp in terms of an empirical lack of vagueness. So the vague is what we vanquish by measurement. And measurement is never complete when you are inside the world needing to be exactly measured.
Isn’t that why Platonism ran into problems? We can imagine the ideal triangle. We also accept that no actual triangle would be so perfect. So we can imagine the structure (of symmetries) as being perfect and ideal. And then any material incarnation of those structures is going to be only a material approach to that ideal limit. It will be always vague or uncertain that the ideal has been met.
Quoting Janus
You keep trying to trap me into talking your way - where vagueness is understood as something dualistically independent. And of course that way of talking winds up paradoxical. So accept that I am talking in terms of the mutual causation of a dichotomy. The absolute, in being the limit of existence, becomes precisely what can never exist as then it would no longer stand in a mutual relation with its dichotomous other.
Not really, I'm trying to find out what you think: I'm talking about a "time" prior to the existence of anything, and asking whether you think that would have been a virtual quantum state, or whether you think it could have been an absolute nothingness. It would seem it was certainly a no-thing-ness.
I thought I had explained that. It is 'reactive' in the sense that it's a reaction against the previous accepted order - something like the dialectic of thesis and anti-thesis, where the thesis was classical theism, and the anti-thesis is scientific materialism. That was why I brought in Nagel's 'fear of religion'. It is practically instinctive.
Quoting Janus
There's an ontological distinction between 'the uncreated' and 'the created' that is understood in the classical tradition. I don't think there's anything like 'the uncreated' in modern or analytic philosophy, although the original meaning of the Apeiron that Apokrisis mentions is:
[quote=Wikipedia]From the few existing fragments, we learn that [Animaxander] believed the beginning or ultimate reality (arche) is eternal and infinite, or boundless (apeiron), subject to neither old age nor decay, which perpetually yields fresh materials from which everything we can perceive is derived.[/quote]
So it would be reasonable to think that the 'aperion' is not something 'created' - although such ideas were to evolve considerably in the subsequent tradition. But at the end of the classical period, such ideas are still discernable for instance in Proclus:
Quoting Janus
Clearly, very many. But there would be no fool's gold if there were no gold; if there were no genuine article, then there would be nothing to counterfeit.
Quoting Janus
It's not so much living in such a state. It's more that the insights arising from such states are what is significant about them. I think it is what I think 'meta-noia' originally meant:
Subsequently it became glossed as 'religious conversion' and categorised along with other religious ideas but I think originally it had that particular meaning i.e. 'transformative change of perception or outlook'.
Quoting Janus
There has to be an element of intuition, of what 'feels right'. But there's also a sense in which such truths impose themselves on us, and also a demand that they be sought out. Again - where in the modern curriculum, is taught such fundamental axioms as 'man know thyself?' It's all very well to say that it's up to us - indeed it is in some ways - but at the same time, situating that in the context of the subject of philosophy is important, I think.
Quoting apokrisis
Platonism didn't 'run into problems' so much as fall into neglect. And besides, it was just the ability of the intellect to conceive of the beauty of mathematics and symmetries and the ideal forms which became one of the main sources of the very scientific tradition of which you yourself are an advocate. That is arguably why Greek philosophy gave rise to the Scientific Revolution, which Indian and Chinese philosophies did not do, despite the fact that 2,000 years ago, both their cultures seemed much more advanced than the European.
So that is the general difference. Instead of starting with nothing and wondering how something - something material - appeared for no reason, I take the constraints view were everthing is trying to happen in chaotic and disconnected fashion, and so all that is required is that some form of organisation emerges to limit the chaos and shape it into some recognisable flow of events.
According to Hoffmeyer & Emmeche, it is inactive, and:
1) Determinate to the extent that it preserves identity through time.
2) Indeterminate with respect to material detail.
Hoffmeyer, J. & Emmeche, C. (1991). Code-Duality and the Semiotics of Nature. pp. 117-166 in: Myrdene Anderson and Floyd Merrell (eds.). On Semiotic Modeling. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York.
So prior to "symmetry breaking", there is change without direction. This must be disorderly change, change which is not in any way directed. Where does the intent come from, which is necessary to direct change, making it orderly, directed, what you would call "temporal"?
Do you see what I mean? In order that directed change emerges from undirected change, we must assume that something starts to direct it. This directing agent could not be part of the undirected because then it would pre-exist the emergence, and would not actually be emergent. It would be a separate type of existence, like what is implied by dualism.
If you deny the need for a directing agent, then you are only saying that order could emerge out of disorder. This is what I say is a statement made by a person uneducated in the field of study, analogous to a person uneducated in the laws of physics claiming that one could make a machine which powers itself, (perpetual motion). Both of these claims are the result of not having a well-rounded understanding of the relationship between physical existence and time.
Exactly right. That is what I am saying. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization
Right, that's exactly the uneducated metaphysical speculation I was referring to. It's clearly unprincipled speculations which are completely meaningless, just like speculations about perpetual motion machines. You can discuss it all you want, as if it's a real possibility if you ignore fundamental principles. Perpetual motion requires ignoring fundamental empirical principles, and self-organization requires ignoring fundamental logical principles.
Oddly, you seem happy with what this "uneducated metaphysical speculation" - ie: physics - has to says about perpetual motion machines, but not what it then has to say about dissipative structures.
Try to keep up with the educated view.
You are trying to assimilate the Apeiron to a materialist ontology. So you are thinking of causality in terms of constructive action - everything starting with a material/efficient cause. And so, metaphysically, the question that the Milesian first philosophers were trying to answer was "what fundamental substance is reality made out of?".
Some dude says water must be that ur-stuff. Some other dude says it must be air. Everyone seems to be after the primal element, and so Anaximander is just talking about this other kind of stuff - the inexhaustible Apeiron.
But pay attention. He was talking about the boundless. He was characterising a naked potentiality that is logically all that would remain after all constraint was removed. So now creation becomes constraints-based, not construction-based. It starts with formal and final cause, not material and efficient cause.
It is a fundamentally different way of thinking about creation. We don't start with some uncreated stuff - the material required to construct. We start with the structural limitation of the unformed and the undirected. We begin with the process of reining in possibility itself so as to start to have a material world that expresses the intelligibility of form and finality in its existence.
Sure, construction quickly follows. Indeed, some form of constructive material activity is going to have to be there pretty much from the start. History has to begin by freedoms being physically disposed of in a fashion that makes the past materially concrete.
But you can only understand Anaximander by flipping your understanding of how creation works. It doesn't start with some ur-stuff that then gets busy for some reason, but with some ur-constraint on possibility itself. Materiality is what arises from this.
So the Apeiron is not an "eternal and inexhaustible stuff". To try to understand it as a pre-existing building material is to completely miss the point.
Not guilty, your honor. I was simply commenting on the fragment I quoted from. I never said nor implied that he meant ‘eternal stuff’ - there is literally no eternal ‘stuff’ as all physical matter is compound, temporal and finite - right? Energy might never be created or destroyed, but matter is created and destroyed all the time. So how do you get that I was proposing ‘materialist ontology’ in what I wrote?
The question I have for you is this: why should there be such ‘constraints’ so as to give rise to complex matter, as distinct from formless chaos, out of the so called ‘Big Bang?’ There is that book by Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers which goes into this: ‘How did a single genesis event create billions of galaxies, black holes, stars and planets? How did atoms assemble - here on Earth, and perhaps on other worlds - into living beings intricate enough to ponder their origins? This book describes the recent avalanche of discoveries about the universe's fundamental laws, and the deep connections that exist between stars and atoms - the cosmos and the microscopic world. Just six numbers, imprinted in the big bang, determine the essence of our world, and this book devotes one chapter to explaining each.’
Do you think that there’s any relationship between these ‘six numbers’ and the ‘constraints’ you’re referring to?
I don't agree; scepticism is not predominately reactive but simply a timely questioning, and finding wanting, of what has been previously taken for granted. Someone who questions and loses faith in the deliverances of religion has no need to fear it. If there was fear it would likely mostly be on account of deep anxieties which have been culturally inculcated, and cannot be entirely eradicated even with a change of intellectual perspective.
Quoting Wayfarer
But, why should we think there is no uncreated or unmanifest aspect of the Cosmos?
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think this follows at all. What you say entails that there is real truth in any belief that humans have entertained. Think of alchemy, or astrology for example. What if all gurus are deceivers of self and/ or others? I can't see anything that precludes that possibility.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't deny that there may be insights that come from altered states of consciousness. whether drug-induced or not, but they need to be thought through and integrated into our daily lives if they are to be of value. There are also heightened affective states which can stay with us and be profoundly transformative. we may associate symbols, metaphors and allegories with those states in order to evoke or re-invoke them, but the symbols, metaphors and allegories are secondary to the feeling I would say.
On the contrary without the affect the symbols are empty; it is the feeling which changes us and gives us a kind of knowledge which is akin to aesthetic knowledge; that is to say it is not cognitive or discursive knowledge. I see you trying to convince yourself that there are "hidden truths" of reason; I have become disabused of this notion altogether. Any truth of reason, or even any merely reasonable proposition, to qualify as such, must be supportable by either logic or evidence that can be corroborated either empirically or phenomenologically.
In general I am not moved by what terms "originally meant". That would only speak to the common-sense notions of the Ancients. I think we have good reason to distrust all common-sense notions , ancient or modern, when it comes to metaphysics.
At the Big Bang, all you had was a cooling~expanding bath of radiation. Too hot for any stability. There was no effective difference between all the different kinds of particles - each particle we know today being just one possible way of breaking the symmetry of the grand unified theory (GUT) force.
So initially, there was very little constraint, apart from the general one of a constraint of action to a three dimensional spatial framework that could in fact cool by expanding. Particles were vanilla in all moving at relativistic speed, all having effectively the same mass, all just being different versions of a generally unconstrained gauge symmetry-breaking. A fluctuation might be quark-like one instant, lepton-like the next. The six numbers weren't yet locking in much by way of stable material identity. It was a hot soup freely flashing through all its modes.
The hard little numbers that stand for the constants are what you would arrive at at the "end of time". It is what all that wildness would look like once it has cooled~expanded and arrived at its classical limit. So the constants weren't there to ensure things got going. They were there in a latent fashion as the values which would be left once all the symmetries got broken down by the cooling~expanding.
The connection between constraints and constants is thus that the vital numbers are emergent from the constrained relations.
The really fundamental constants are the Planck triad of h, G and c which encode - via their various reciprocal or dichotomous relations - the basic attributes of spacetime extent and material action. And being formally reciprocal, the vital number just ends up being 1 - the identity element.
This is rather Platonic as it means we understand them like a shape, a structure, a ratio that is constant. Like a triangle, any material size drops out of the picture. The size of a triangle might as well always be set to 1. It is the structural relationship that defines the existence of the triangle, not its size measured in any material sense.
Rees of course confuses the issue because he mixes up the physical constants that would be mathematically necessary for some kind of cosmos as a dissipative structure, and the "constants" that a particular kind of Cosmos would have to have to be able to result in us as observers of its existence.
So - as usual - constraints also spell freedoms. Aspects of our universe could be regarded as just accidental. And multiverse anthropery applies to the extent that is so. The fine-tuning that gives us life might only exist for some accidental choice of universe.
It is an open question of how much of the contingency will be removed by the progress towards a structural theory of everything. The space of possible existences might be very limited by Platonic-strength principles. Or it might not.
But that is the relation between constraints and constants. Constraints break the symmetry. Constants are the "residue" that is the eventual limit to that symmetry breaking. Constants put a number on the steady balance that emerges when things can't be broken down any further.
That’s not how I read it. The ratios being talked about represent the fundamental conditions and physical relatioships - the constraints - that must exist in order for anything intelligible to condense out of chaos in the first place. I mean, the 'big bang' might just have culminated in nothing whatever; it just seems that it did pan out, in such a way that stars could be condensed from the plasma, then go through their life-cycle and produce the heavy elements. There seems no compelling reason why it should happen that way, and in any of zillions of other ways, nothing would emerge. So in respect of these fundamental constants - the numbers don't emerge out of the order so much as the order emerges out of the numbers.
And that is also why scientific knowledge - the knowledge of the principles according to which matter behaves - is of a higher order. By generalising from observations of patterns you can arrive at abstractions which can then be used predictively. Which is why reason was understood to be of a higher order than simple sense-perception in the classical period. And there you're seeing into a rational order, as evidenced by the fact that synthetic a priori proposition can be true.
Quoting apokrisis
Rees himself doesn't engage in any such metaphysical conjecture. But his arguments obviously suggest something like the 'anthropic principle'. That might have been one of the reasons he was awared the Templeton Prize in 2011, for which he was dubbed 'a Quisling' by Richard Dawkins - apparently because anyone with scientific credentials who receives such an honour is comparable to a Nazi collaborator. (But I don't believe he's 'confusing' anything.)
Here's another question: as we have discussed, one of the motivations for the 'multiverse conjecture' is because it appears to deflate the suggestion that the Universe is indeed 'fine-tuned for life'. For instance:
DOES THE MULTIVERSE REALLY EXIST? (cover story). By: Ellis, George F. R. Scientific American. Aug2011, Vol. 305 Issue 2, p38-43
That always strikes me as an infinitely worse example of 'special pleading' than the argument it is purportedly supposed to defeat.
Quoting Janus
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Janus
My view also. Although the argument I'm pursuing is not about losing religion per se, but losing a vital metaphysical insight that had become associated with it. But then I know that many people will reject it because it is associated with religion; hence, 'reactive atheism'.
So I don’t know what you’re talking about.
There’s that word again.
I'm not sure the anthropic principle applies even with multiverses, let alone our universe.
If I observe a fair die land on a 1 a thousand times in a row, I could reasonably conclude that something must be constraining that die to land in such a way. This is because the chances of it landing on a 1 a thousand times without external influence are astronomically small. But I only know this because I know the probability space well. It's not just knowing that 2, 3, 4, 5,and 6 are also available options (making the probability of a 1 on each throw 1:6), but It's knowing that one of the faces suddenly morphing into a 7 is not an option I need to consider. Without this knowledge of the constraints on the probability field, the probability of getting a 1, even on a single throw would always be astronomically small, because there are so many alternative conceivable things that could happen other than the die land such that it shows a 1.
So how is this so with the universe? In what way does the seeming unlikelihood of our universe ultimately creating life not just indicate our lack of knowledge of the probability field? If we say "this was unlikely to have happened by chance it must be a one in a million", where are we getting the million figure from?
It’s really an argument against the notion that ‘chance’ amounts to a reason or cause.
Think back to Bertrand Russell’s famous essay, ‘A Free Man’s Worship’. It was published at the turn of the twentieth century and was, and is, considered, a milestone in the philosophy of scientific rationalism [in the contemporary sense of that term]. This articulated the notion that ‘man was a consequence of the chance collocation of atoms’ - the exact phrase- a roll of the dice, so to speak, something that occurs ‘by chance’ as distinct from as the consequence of an intentional act, namely, ‘the act of creation’. And that has lodged in the popular imagination as an answer to the question ‘why do we exist’? The answer comes: for no reason. It just happens to be that way; it’s the way it turned out; a ‘brute fact’ as the saying goes. The cosmic crapshoot, as an American might say.
But the anthropic argument raises the question, where does the causal sequence that results in the ‘warm little pond’ actually originate? Does it originate with the coalescence of the solar system from the celestial debris of the previous solar explosion? But then whence the solar explosion? And as it happens, if you trace the causal sequence back, it seems to go right back to the original event - the so-called ‘big bang’ that just happened to culminate in the kinds of matter that forms stars, and the kinds of stars that form matter, and the kind of matter that sparks life, and the kind of life that then likes to argue about ‘what just happened’.
I get that bit, what I don't get is what's wrong with "it just happened". The inconceivability of things 'just happening' seems to be based on a misconceptions that we have some knowledge of the probability field of 'things' such as to be able to assess that any of them 'just happening' must be very unlikely.
Now without determinism, we might well claim to have some knowledge of this field. We could say "look at all the 'things' that happen in the world, none of then 'just happen'. There must be billions of things so the chances of something 'just happening' must be at least a billion to one". But determinism of the type you're talking about - tracing the causes back - takes all this justification away. If we're content that life evolved because of such-and-such a condition, and that came to be because of some constraints at the big bang, then we no longer have a massive collection of 'things' to act as our probability field. We have only one thing that happened - the big bang. So how are we assessing it as unlikely that it should have happened that exact way it did? It's not like we've observed thousands of other big bangs and seen that they all resulted in chaos. We only have the conceivably possible' big bangs of theory, but that leads to the dilemma with the die morphing into a seven. If we include all that is conceivably possible in our probability space then absolutely any event has an astronomically small chance of happening. So the universe seems to be nothing special in this respect, we might as well invoke the anthropic principle to the result of a coin toss.
Without this unlikelihood, the anthropic principle is nothing but storytelling.
You were talking about disorder being prior to order, in an absolutely way, as Peirce's Firstness. This is contrary to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. I know that you place this type of "disorder" as outside of time, but this 2nd law defines order in relation to time, so your use of disorder, or undirected, is meaningless nonsense.
Quoting apokrisis
I have nothing against the general concept of "dissipative structures", it is you're application of the concept which is unprincipled, and therefore uneducated. You go beyond the boundaries intended by the concept, pretending that this is acceptable. And your pretense, that it is the "educated view", when it is clearly unprincipled and undisciplined is pure deception.
Quoting apokrisis
This is precisely where your speculation is illogical. A constraint is an actuality. You remove all constraint to have no actuality in the first place. If you have no actuality, you have nothing to cause the existence of any constraints, and the emergence of constraints from pure potential is logically impossible.
Quoting apokrisis
"Fundamentally different" is useless when it is also illogical. When you start with an illogical premise, your conclusions lead you deeper and deeper into the illogical. Next, you will need to defy the laws of non-contradiction, and excluded middle, in a completely unprincipled way, in order to support the conclusions which follow from your illogical first principle.
Quoting apokrisis
This is what contradicts the 2nd law of thermodynamics. You have unconstrained potential, absolute freedom, pure lack of information, then all of a sudden the "construction" of information occurs spontaneously. You have simply adopted the disproven concept of spontaneous generation, to account for the emergence of the universe, from your illogical Firstness.
Multiverses are the product of locally deterministic thinking without anything concrete to constrain the infinity of possible worlds that then have to result. So the only constraint left is the non-constraint of the anthropic principle - the quite reasonable conclusion that if every alternative exists, then we live in one of those where we could arise as observers. Survivor bias.
But my metaphysical position is very different. I am arguing constraint is primary and so that already limits existence to the single Cosmos that is mathematically intelligible or coherent.
The fact that we exist to appreciate that is a huge surprise perhaps. It is certainly generally allowed - as intelligence does a good job of increasing entropy production. But constraint by its very nature isn’t directed towards a goal like creating a world fit for humans. We aren’t being reserved for some other more grand purpose as @Wayfarer wants to suggest.
Yes, I understood that to be the case, I only tagged you in for the tangential link.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, I was really referring to the Strong Anthropic Principle of John Barrow, which seems to be more the type Wayfarer is trying to use. So, to my mind, the argument by which the SAP is arrived at (rather than the conclusions drawn from adhering to it) seem to me to rely implicitly on an understanding of the probability space that we not only do not have, but which would, applied to everything else, render probability itself meaningless.
That "unbridled everythingness" would seem to be, for you, the genesis state prior to the existence of anything. Can we say that state exists, or subsists, eternally (since it is atemporal and aspatial)? Insofar as it is prior to any temporal or spatial existence it is utterly indeterminate and indeterminable; and it follows that we cannot say anything about it at all.
The question remains, though, as to just what is that "insight". If it is a rational insight then you should be able to say what it is and argue for it. If it is a poetic insight, a so-called "mystical' insight, then it is based in feeling, not rational thought, and therefore cannot be pinned down by argument or propositional discourse; which is just what I have been saying to you all along.
So I can keep saying that I am attempting to describe a limit and you will keep ignoring that?
I am trying to do justice to an internalist metaphysics. You keep replying to that from an externalist perspective. You are demanding the kind of crisp initial conditions that could be the definite start of things - even if that then propels you straight into your infinite regress of "first moments" and "first actions". I am describing how things are when beginnings dissolve into a vagueness that is less than nothing, as nothing already supposes the actualised possibility of an absence.
Quoting Janus
This is just a formula of words to justify a claim of arriving at an externalist perspective. So no. That would be a false victory in my view. Pragmatism is the embracing of internalism. It doesn't have to beat it by the end.
And - treating vagueness as a limit - we can say plenty about it in crisply apophatic fashion.
We know that we came out of it. We know that this somethingness develops via a dichotomous or dialectical logic. We know that the Cosmos is the result of a quite mathematically specific cascade of symmetry breakings.
So we can reverse the physics to wind everything back to a crisp model of a vague limit. We can imagine a definite start in a state of "perfect symmetry". We can form an image of the vague that does some pragmatic work.
And then, in Kantian fashion, we can accept it is then only the image of the thing-in-itself - the metaphysical umwelt we have created to turn the unspeakable into a speakable theory. So it becomes the story secured against the measurable somethingness of the world as we find it to be. Which is of course better than a metaphysics secured against nothing much at all except some shallow reductionist and mechanical conception of cause and time.
If we don't believe in classical physics, why would we believe in classical metaphysics? Why would you keep promoting classical cause and effect thinking as the framework that anything I say must assimilate itself to? That is exactly what I mean to challenge at the fundamental level.
Crisp classicality certainly exists. But as another emergent limit on Being. It describes the world after it has developed into a large cold void occupied by small hot objects. It describes the counter ideal of a world that is simply a completely constrained and deterministic mechanism.
Because science is purportedly in the business of finding reasons. The positing of chance as cause doesn't seem to me to amount to either an hypothesis or a metaphysical principle. It seems to me motivated more by the desire to avoid the alternative. Here's an example from a 2012 edition of New Scientist - Why Physics Can't Avoid a Creation Event - which sees Stephen Hawking arguing against models which suggest that the Universe truly has a 'beginning', 'because then we should have to appeal to the Hand of God'. So the very fact that a theoretical model seems to suggest such an idea, is grounds for the World's Most Influential Scientist not to consider it. And yet it's 'theists' that are accused of being tendentious in this respect.
Quoting Pseudonym
The argument in the book I mentioned is there are a very small number - 6 - of natural relationships and ratios inherent in the nature of the Cosmos that have a very specific value, which, were they different in some minute degree, would entail that matter would not form at all. But if you view the Universe as a grand simulation, something which can be mathematically modelled, then these parameters seem very specifically set for such an outcome. That is why when Fred Hoyle - convinced atheist that he was - discovered the principle of carbon resonance, he exclaimed 'something's been monkeying with the physics'. ( As I said, Martin Rees, who wrote the book 'Just Six Numbers' - a dull read, by the way - does not, on that basis, engage in any metaphysical conjecture as to why this is so. But the book certainly suggests the possibility of what has become known as the 'fine-tuning' or 'anthropic' arguments.)
Quoting apokrisis
Perhaps living things, generally, and rational living beings, namely humans, are in some fundamental sense the Universe coming to know itself, and thereby opening up horizons of possibility that would not be available in a non-living universe. It might be 'grand', although a lot depends on what you make of it, but understanding it that way at least opens up the prospect of a purpose other than the shortest possible line to non-being, which seems to be what is on offer from your model.
I am not defending 'intelligent design', as I don't believe that it's feasible or meaningful to 'prove' the 'existence of God' - which is kind of the point.
Quoting Janus
What you mean by 'rational' is actually closer to being 'scientifically or empirically demonstrable', isn't it?
Quoting Janus
My argument in this thread, and elsewhere, is that number (etc) is real but not physical. It is real in that it is intrinsic to the operations of the intellect, and without it, we couldn't actually do science at all. (This point is elaborated in this post.) In any case, the argument from the reality of intellectual objects is a rational argument with a long pedigree. The fact that you don't accept it doesn't amount to a refutation.
No, I actually think both internalism and externalism are wrongheaded.
No. I've covered this before. What is rational is what can be measured (ratio), which means compared, tested for consistency and coherency against empirical evidence or logic. The rational is determinable thought. Poetic language is obviously something else; poetic truth is not rational truth; and I would subsume religious or mystical truth by poetic truth.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is a red herring. I don't deny the reality of "intellectual objects"; I just deny that they are real in any substantive sense beyond the intellect, beyond consciousness. You could say they are incipient in things, and thus not totally arbitrary, but they only emerge, and become fully real, when intellects complex enough to conceive them evolve.
And yet it is externalist language you keep using against my account.
Just calling any explanation "wrong" is a sound tactic I guess. But you could instead put forward some clear story on what you might in fact believe here.
If it is neither internalism nor externalism, what is it?
I haven't been arguing against your account at all, but asking questions about it so that I can gain an understanding of exactly what it is proposing.
The problem is that rationalist arguments against materialism presuppose an impoverished notion of the physical that should have been dispensed with long ago. With a process notion of the physical, one that incorporates experience at all levels, there is no need for transcendental or platonic realms over and above the cosmos. I think you would benefit from reading some Whitehead.
I would go for a kind of "flat' ontology, where there is no absolute distinction between inner and outer, higher and lower. That's why I often argue with you that we are not exhaustively socially constructed, because to say that is to valorize a kind of anthropocentric internalism that denies that our experience is in the world, of the world and mediated by the world.
Of course that is not to say that things cannot be internal or external to other things in a relative sense.
Thank you for the recommendation. As it happens I am awaiting Amazon delivery of The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition James Matthew Wilson.
Quoting Janus
Hey you're sounding like SLX :-)
I didn't think we had that much in common. I rarely receive any response at all when I comment in his threads! You know I have long been interested in Whitehead; well I am currently reading Without Criteria Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze and Aesthetics by Steven Shapiro, which, like another book I have been slowly digesting over the last year or so: Thinking With Whitehead by Isabelle Stengers finds many commonalities between Deleuze and Whitehead. I am much more familiar with Whitehead than Deleuze, but I know Deleuze is a favourite of StreetlightX's, so perhaps there is some shared ground after all.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, I hope it is a work rich in poetic insights for you! :cool: :wink:
So it seems you want the benefits of my structured system without having to commit to the notion of that structure. It is to be left "flat". That is vague and beyond contradictions. :)
Look, my internalism is explicitly the triadic internalism of Peirce and not the dualistic internalism of Kantian representationalism. Peirce was trying to fix the issues with Kantianism (and Hegelism), while being quite scornful of Cartesianism.
So yes, it is not "flat" but comes with clear triadic structure. And remember that Peircean semiotics cashes out in ontological pansemiosis.
The internalism might start as the psychological or epistemic reality. But the speculative metaphysical claim (increasingly in accordance with what the physics says) is that the Cosmos itself bootstraps into being via ontic semiosis.
The anthropomorphic story of the human semiotic condition is that we are "modelling the world with us in it". So we are now beyond simple realism and even indirect representationalism in seeing our own selves, as observers, arising along with the umwelt that is our field of observables, the set of signs by which we relate to the actual world as the thing-in-itself.
The dualism is replaced by a trichotomy where the "self" is found in the same place as the "world" is found - both being the complementary aspects of the mediating system of signs that emerges with habitual definiteness in the middle.
The usual assumption is that nature would want some kind of direct veridical connection between consciousness and reality. Our view of the world should be faithful to its reality. But the psychological evidence already tells us that we want to be able to ignore the actual world so as to be able to live in a world of our own creative invention - the world where we are freely choosing beings able to impose our own desires and forms on its inert materiality. And so that is the kind of umwelt we have to develop. A world that is fit for that kind of self. A system of habitual signs is how we construct this mediating tale.
And then - pansemiotically and ontically - the world would also be understood as "a model with itself in it". It becomes a self, an enduring and autonomous state of affairs, by developing a structure of habits that represent it. It develops laws that encode what it means to be "the Universe". It becomes a system of constraints expressing the purpose of being "that thing" until it safely reaches the very end of time.
So I am certainly not denying the world. Pansemiosis is an attempt to explain the world in the exact same terms we would explain ourselves.
As Uber said, just like a broken record. At least I am consistent, unlike your incoherent babbling.
But that is just what I would understand by "flat ontology" or actually an even flatter ontology than what I would recommend, because I do not think we can be exhaustively understood in the same way as the rest of the world, (and I wonder whether the world be properly understood in terms of the way we understand ourselves, that is in terms of intentionality). I mean animals cannot be exhaustively understood in terms of chemistry, yet perhaps the difference is of degree not of kind. So we might impute a kind of proto-intentionality or proto-experientaility to the physical, but nonetheless that might not help us in physics, for example.
Also, as i see it, to explain ourselves in the same terms we explain the world is not internalism, but if anything would be more of an externalism, if not an ultimate denial of the whole distinction, since the sign relation is not understood to begin with humans as far as I understand.
But I am arguing for pragmatism. So not only am I arguing against an exhaustive account, I have argued that the very logic is instead to find the account which ignores the most that it can. What we are interested in arriving at are our limits of indifference that thus give crisp definition to the "other" that is ourself.
We exist as organisms to the degree we can take the world for granted in pursuing the desires that best define us. That is the autonomous condition towards which we strive to develop.
Quoting Janus
You are still setting this up dualistically. It is the inside vs the outside. The observer vs the observables.
Internalism, in the sense I am using it, is to understand Being in terms of the triadic sign relation that produces both distinctions themselves. It is the difference between immanence/development and transcendence/creation. The observer and the observables are the splitting apart that allow the wholeness of a sign relation mediating that divide in a long-run, habitual, way.
Inside and outside are again our names for the absolute limits within which reality itself would arise.
So internalism certainly starts with the epistemological argument - we are trapped inside our own heads making models of a world.
But then internalism becomes an ontology by saying all reality arises via that kind of "mindlike" relation. This opposes it to externalism which says our minds are in fact completely explainable by objective material physics ... or a transcendent creator.
Externalism lets you pick your poison on that score. Either matter or mind is understood as the world that is larger, and so stands outside, its "other".
As I say, internalism goes the other direction. It brings the objective and the subjective into the one world as two opposing limits in a historically mediated interaction.
Quoting apokrisis
I think this is much more of a dualistic setup than what I was proposing. Sure, you can say my way of speaking about explaining the world is dualistic, but of course we do make distinctions between ourselves and the world and we simply can't escape dualistic language. That doesn't mean we have to buy into such arch-dualistic ideas as that "we are trapped inside our own heads making models of the world"; that takes dualistic thinking to a whole other level!
Well again, do you have a proposal that doesn't retreat back into vague indeterminism every time I give it a prod?
You are happy to be sort of flat, but not radically flat. You are happy to be sort of dualistic, but not arch-dualistic.
So do you see a pattern? You want the benefits of making structural assertions, yet shy away from the costs. You mount challenges based on definite distinctions that you back away from as soon as that hard line is questioned.
A whole epistemology could of course be constructed on "treading lightly" in this fashion. It could be made to sound a good thing. Wittgenstein gets wheeled out all the time to tell us whereof one cannot speak.
But I can only reply in terms of my own objective here - which is to push until even the vague is crisply modelled and we can arrive at some kind of happy metaphysical terminus in terms of the question, "Why anything?".
I don't think it's a matter of me being happy about it; our language is ineluctably dualistic, and of course I'm not happy to be arch-dualistic: are you?. I haven't been mounting challenges so much as asking questions. For example can the "unbridled everythingness" exist or subsist prior to the crisp somethingness of spatio-temporal existence? Does the latter emerge from the former or are they co-dependent, co-emergent? I'm just trying to get a better grip on what are your metaphysical commitments. I actually haven't stated any metaphysical commitments of my own, or even that I have any metaphysical commitments.
It's something of both.
As soon as there is any definite development towards something, it counts also as a definite move away from something. So it is co-emergent in that sense. As soon as there is enough of a history, enough of a developing story, that points in the direction of the crisp, then there is also the direction pointing away from the vague.
Yet when this co-emergence is first the case, it is as vaguely the case as possible. It is only by the end of time that it could arrive at fully actualised crispness. So in some sense, the vague actually exists for a while before it gets supplanted. When the Big Bang first happened, it would have been so hot, so dense, that its physical state counts for something so generally vague and structureless that we might as well call it a state of actual vagueness. It was 99.99999...% vague. We can treat that as a concrete state of being which then gets dissipated by the cooling and expanding that leaves the Universe crisply flat and empty - its state at the end of time when it has hit its Heat Death.
So this is a feature of the language being triadic. The metaphysics requires a pair of dichotomies - the developmental or diachronic one that speaks to the vague~crisp, and the developed or synchronic one that speaks to the hierarchically structure state of being organised in a definite local~global fashion.
So two axes map the story. One tracks the emergence of crisply divided order. The other is like the cross-section view that measures just how well divided everything has become.
At the beginning, when vagueness rules, there is no cross-section to speak of. It is like a debating the width of a point as the local and the global - that is, the local actions and the global directions - are pretty much indistinguishably the same thing. They are so unseparated that they just look like a chaotic froth of quantum fluctuations.
But exponentially the actions and the directions move apart. You get the expansion and cooling that constructs a clear local~global separation. The froth settles and condenses into massive particles blundering around in a yawning void.
It is this duality of the axes of description - the longitudinal view vs the cross-sectional view - which make talking about the character of the beginning so tricky. The beginning is like a now featureless point. It has the least length possible - the shortest distance separating the vague from the crisp. And also the least width possible - the shortest distance separating the local from the global.
So it is simply the nature of triadic metaphysics that you have to be imagining a duality of dichotomous separations.
Dyadic metaphysics is dead simple. Just apply LEM to choose option A or B.
Or upgrade to dialectics and be mildly puzzled by a little ninja move like sublation. Thesis generates antithesis, but is resolved in synthesis, all ready to launch another spin around the same basic spiral.
But Peirce is another level beyond. You've got the longitudinal and the cross-sectional stories of a development that says both the determinate and the indeterminate are being crisply actualised out of the same unresolved initial vague blur.
I agree it can be very confusing. The beginning is when chance rules. You have unbriddled everythingness. But chance in any strongly constrained or determinate sense - chance as actual possibility - only emerges and achieves its fullest expression at the end of time. At the beginning, chance lacks the generality or regularity it gains later in the story. Even calling the beginning "chaotic" is an understatement as chaos is already the product of a definite set of boundary conditions.
Quoting Janus
Not even to Geist? Is my memory that bad?
I don't think it is. I think most scientists consider themselves in the business of making testable theories. It's in the business of predicting, not explaining. I'm no expert, but my limited understanding of the methods in quantum physics (where currently one has to include an element of chance, so I'm lead to believe), is to simply include that chance mathematically. Scientists are trying to eliminate that chance element, I suppose, in order to make the theory more accurately predictive, but until that point, the 'scientific' theory simply includes probability and everyone's quite happy that they are still doing 'science'. Prediction is far more useful than reasons.
If anything, the very deterministic nature of science leads even the most causal thinker to conclude that if we keep asking "why?", we must obviously arrive at either an infinite task or the answer "just because". So any scientists who did think that they were one day going to arrive at the ultimate reason why would be deluded indeed.
Quoting Wayfarer
Firstly, a minor correction, it's not chance as cause, chance can't cause something, it's an expression of the lack of determinism. The Physicalist position as I understand it is simply that our most useful theory for the creation of the universe at the moment is that it just is. It's most useful because it leaves open all routes of investigation as to the next most proximate cause, whilst accepting that there are limits to what we can find out empirically about conditions before the universe began (I'm using 'before' in a causal sense here, as I think it's possible that even time did not exist before the universe began, but my physics definitely gets hazy here, as well it should. To paraphrase Feynman, anyone who thinks they understand that level of physics certainly doesn't). So what is it about suggesting that a thing simply exists without (for now) a determinable cause, that you think precludes it from the set of 'hypotheses' or 'metaphysical principles'. why are you placing constraints on what is allowed as a metaphysical proposition?
Quoting Wayfarer
So this is the exact point I'm making. That is not an argument, it's a statement of facts. It's simply the statement that the 6 parameters are set exactly the way they need to be set in order to develop life. The bit that's implied in your argument (and yet missing any evidence), is..."and that's really unlikely to have happened without some reason". But the point I'm making is that we have no justification at all for thinking it's unlikely. We have no other universes to compare ours to and say "look at all these other universes, ours is so unique", ours just is, that's all we know about it. People arguing for the Strong Anthropic Principle are taking the unwarranted step of saying that because it is possible to conceive of a universe where the numbers are different, ours is an unlikely outcome. What I'm saying is that it is possible to conceive of a situation where the fair die that I'm throwing will suddenly morph into an icosahedron. That does not now make the probability of my throwing a 1 1:20. I can conceive of a million possible things that could happen when I throw the die, my probability of getting a 1 is not now 1:1,000,000. Probability, as we normally use it, is about comparing the event to known alternatives (landing on one of the other five faces). As we currently have no other known alternatives, the chances of our universe being the way it is are currently 100%, so the theory that it just is this way is a perfectly rational one.
This recent paper on quantum mechanics should clarify the matter for you. Science is about explanation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.02048
Quoting Pseudonym
The laws of nature are deterministic, and yes, knowledge seeking is an infinite task, and we are always at the beginning of it. Here's a book about that very subject.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-beginning-of-infinity-explanations-that-transform-the-world-by-david-deutsch-2258470.html
Quoting Pseudonym
You are right, there are no stochastic processes in nature. Here's a video about it.
I appreciate the links. You seem, as in a lot of your posts, to be confusing "David Deutch says..." with "it is the case that...". All I read in the paper you've provided is Deutch (with far more humility than you're citing him with) saying things like "I present an account of...", and "in this view...". Absolutely no where does he say "This is the way things are and anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong". So no, I don't accept your contention that science is about explanation on the basis of a single paper in which the author himself admits that he is only presenting "an" account not "the" account.
I see. I show you in the most striking way that science is exclusively about explanation, a fact that you deny, and you chide me because I lack humility? I'll take straight talking over willful misconception any day.
Since the inception of the Scientific Method, explanation has been central to science. Popper even tried to develop a mathematical theory of explanatory depth in his "Logic of Scientific Discovery".
Deutsch a particularly interesting case. He is a practicing Popperian, a world-ranking physicist who has made perhaps the only advance in the philosophy of science since Popper. I make no apologies for citing his discoveries.
I am disappointed to discover that 32 years of designing and building programs did not leave me with a proper understanding of what they are. But, as I said, it doesn't matter. Focussing on my analogy, which is clearly not to your taste, ignores the simple point I am making:
the conceptual difference between the mind and the brain is just too big for humans to usefully span.
Let's try another analogy, to illustrate the point. I could accurately refer to your car as a collection of quarks. But if we wish to understand your car in the context of it being a means of transport, thinking of it as a quark collection is not in any way useful or helpful, even though it is perfectly accurate and correct.
So, you think pretending an arbitrary epistemological barrier exists, constitutes what? An analogy or an argument?
Quoting Pattern-chaser
No you can't.
If you think you can, then be my guest.
I regret that the conceptual gap between your understanding and mine is too large to bridge.
Shame.
Oh well.
You had the opportunity to be true to your word, but you declined. In reality what else could you do?
Anyway, keep erecting fantasy epistemological barriers based on nothing but ignorance and prejudice, if that is all you have.
So, the vague, or the virtual, or whatever you want to call it, can be thought only in terms of everything the determinate is not, it would seem. It's a kind of 'apophasis all the way down'.
Quoting apokrisis
Geist is such a versatile, polyvalent idea; it could be adapted to almost any metaphysic; will, will to power, elan vital, natura naturans, God, apeiron...Or it could be taken just to represent the collective spirit of humankind; the totality of zeitgeists, so to speak.
I have toyed with entertaining the more religious notions of geist, but I am never able to convince myself one way or the other. it seems as though, beyond the shear religious or mystical affect, and the paradoxical, poetic language that may evoke it, there is nothing but dogma. I've never been much good at having faith in dogma.
That would seem to be what I said. Internalism would take advantage of the resource that is apophatic reasoning.
Quoting Janus
So vague then? It absorbs all contradictions like a thirsty sponge.
Quoting Janus
But Hegel at least would have wanted it to anchor his general metaphysical scheme in some definite fashion. So it has to be granted some kind of particular meaning in that historical context.
Like it or not, we can't use the term as if it is actually completely vague and without concrete referential intent. It has to be opposed to some "other" when you employ it, not conveniently change its meaning whenever it encounters an objection on how you seem to be using it.
You are treating Geist like a Joker or blank card - something you can lay it down on the table and claim it completes the winning hand, without needing to reveal which proper card it is meant to represent in the game this time around.
Is there anything at all of philosophical merit at the back of all this?
I think what you want to point to is a generalised and diffuse sense of meaningfulness and intentionality - that oceanic feeling which can come over us at the top of the mountain when all feels right about the world spread out below us. Reality as a whole has a ... spirit. Our self, with its purposes, feels less bounded, less demarcated, and becomes one with ... everything.
But to bring this back to psychological reality, I would point out the "other" that is involved. This kind of emotional reaction - this sense of fit, of rightness, of salience, of intentional direction - is a natural cognitive dichotomy. We can feel it both generally - the flow experience - and also particularly, as the aha! experience. When we realise that 2+2 must equal 4, or we find the last bit that must complete the jigsaw, we have that sharp sense of psychic conviction. We have an intense jolt of belief.
We know that this sense of focused rightness - an emotional response to the salient - is basic to neurocognition as we can see what happens when it goes wrong. When it goes wrong, we get the many cases studies along the lines of Oliver Sacks' man who mistook his wife for a hat. Or just the blind certainty that we left the keys on the shelf as usual, so they must have been stolen, when in fact we left them in the front door.
So a logical philosophising frame of mind still relies on a well functioning deep sense of conviction that knows when an argument is actually true ... because it feels true at the level of blind conviction.
And because we can laugh at that view of knowable truth, so we must also laugh at its "other" in the form of Geist - if Geist cashes out as some generalised conviction about a world being experienced in terms of an all-pervading salience, a holistic guiding spirit, lacking any particular structure or definable feature.
Feeling things is not enough. We have to construct the intellectual frameworks that minimise the degree of helpless blind conviction that is involved. That is what a scientific or logico-mathematical level of semiosis is all about.
That is why I hold Peirce above all others involved in this little game. He did not deny feeling. He wrapped it around with a strong enough structure to test it as well as it could be tested. He set things out as the dichotomy of the particular and the general (secondness and thirdness) - acting in concert to separate the vague (or firstness) into a state of hierarchically poised order. Habits of interpretance.
So that is why I say if you want to talk about Geist - even if you mean to refer to the primacy of the purely vague - you have to get back to that having secured your general and particular notions of Geist. You do need a theory of Geist, coupled to a measurement of Geist, that then says something about Geist - even if apophatically as the ground from which Geist is understood in terms of that which it is not. That "other" now being the crisp conceptual framework which is particular Geist and general Geist as the limits of how Geist could be conceived.
A tricky business as usual. But that is internalism and its apophatic manoeuvre by which it catches a glimpse of its own self-origination.
I think at issue is indeed the notion of 'intentionality'. I mean, it is an accepted dogma that evolution itself is not 'intentional' - to say that it is, is to fall into the error of 'orthogenesis':
(Which is taboo according to the current orthodoxy; Lamarck, De Chardin and Bergson are all bywords for discarded theories about life I would think.)
But Hegel himself was arguably of a similar ilk, insofar as he said that the world was 'geist manifesting itself' (the main argument of the Phenomenology of Spirit) through the dialectical processes of history (which Marx then appropriated, or purloined, and then incorporated into historical materialism).
But this is another sense in which the argument for the anthropic principle comes into play: that if indeed the Universe is such that it give rise to matter and then living beings, then we're no longer simply detached observers who have come along as part of some random process, watching the Universe wend its way towards the heat death, but are ourselves a vital aspect of it:
[quote=Julian Huxley]As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future. This cosmic self-awareness is being realized in one tiny fragment of the universe — in a few of us human beings. Perhaps it has been realized elsewhere too, through the evolution of conscious living creatures on the planets of other stars. But on this our planet, it has never happened before.[/quote]
[quote=Neils Bohr] A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself[/quote]
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos]Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.[/quote]
Quoting Pseudonym
The discussion is more about the contention that 'everything knowable is knowable by means of science' - which is not itself a testable theory.
Quoting Pseudonym
The fact that metaphysical or at least philosophical conclusions are so often drawn from the purported non-intentionality of the Cosmos. Whereas, the causal chain that gave rise to matter and living beings, seems intrinsic to the whole process of cosmic evolution, rather than Russell's principle of 'accidental collocation'.
All I can do is shrug and think of all the theoretical biologists who don't accept this dogma.
They might not accept your theistic dogma either - the claim that evolution might be driven by a divine or transcendent purpose.
But that is also OK by me.
Which included Alfred Russel Wallace.
incidentally the remainder of the review of Nagel's book, in a Buddhist journal that I copied that quote from, from has this to say:
Which is pretty well how I see things also.
My view is that math and logical truths originated (at least on earth) as physical constructs in our ancestors minds because we both possessed the mental capacity, and the generalizing of recurring patterns in nature gave our soft selves survival advantages.
It is true that the number 1 does not directly describe something else that is physical, but directly describing something physical is not the purpose of generic thinking aids like math and logic truths.
I don't see how or why these thinking aids would exist without sentient hosts.
We sort of agree except I talk about sign rather than mind.
What I object to is the lingering dualism of treating consciousness as a substance, an immaterial soul-stuff or transcendent spirit.
But still, the other side of that traditional dualism - the one that speaks about matter as a material substance with all its own spooky actions and tendencies - has to be dissolved too.
And that is what I see semiotics doing. It dissolves both mind and matter as species of substantial being. They both become emergent states of semiotic organisation.
But 1 exists as the identity element. It is the name we give an actual universal symmetry. And can nature escape being a story of symmetries and their breaking?
Between Platonism and constructionism there is the middle path that realises maths is doing its level best to directly describe something that is actual and fundamental about reality.
Tom's universal computation is clearly not in that class. It is the mechanistic caricature of how the world really is. One of the convenient fictions.
But when you get down to the maths of symmetry and symmetry breaking, now you are closing your hand around something fundamentally true - true because its truth is simply inescapable as a necessary fact of existence in any sense.
That doesn't mean we have the whole story of mathematical symmetry either finished or correct. But there is a reason why we are not merely inventing happy fictions to pretend we exist in a reality of intelligible structure.
Some maths is just a game of patterns. But the core maths is a science of patterns.
There's many points we do agree on. I don't agree with that form of dualism either, but it is very much part of the background of the debate. But anyway, it's good that we do have some common ground.
Quoting apokrisis
:up:
I have to tear myself away for a couple of days again for work. I am highly distractable. :groan:
Right, math and logic rules have been shown to be compatible with how nature work, which separates these concepts from other creations of the human mind (like Pegasus).
Forces of nature do not rely on our stories of symmetries and their breaking. We create these stories in through thinking in an attempt to make sense of these forces.
But the forces are also a "just a story". So what makes sense of what here?
Sure, that means we are in an epistemic bind. We only ever "talk about" reality. But what I'm picking you up on is the idea that one part of this talk is pure constructionism, the other might be talk about something concretely actual.
You are going with the usual reductionist division of epistemology that says our perception of abstracts or universals are just ideas, free inventions of the human mind, while our knowledge of the concrete particulars is something else - proper physical fact. And that framing is what I would question.
So yes, generally epistemology is a social construction of reality. That applies to the universal and the particular, the abstract and the concrete. It is all modelling.
But then modelling - if tied to the world in proper fashion - says the abstract and the concrete have a persisting reality. They are the forms and the actions that keep emerging as we hold our gaze. Symmetry is somehow just as real as the force which is the result of its breaking.
So the story is trickier. Platonism isn't just flat wrong. Symmetries are elements of reality, part of the ontic furniture of existence. Everything is a model. But also, we are seeing something true when it comes to the kind of abstract objects that force themselves upon physicalist theory.
Still not seeing how this is a problem. Surely it's just one of the available options. Aren't metaphysical conclusions drawn from the purported intentionality of the cosmos too?
Quoting Wayfarer
How does it seem intrinsic, rather than incidental? All we know is that it is there. The constraints on physical processes are such that life eventually evolved. That's all we know. We've no reason to think that this was particularly unlikely, because we don't have any other universes to compare it to. We've no reason to think that it was particularly necessary or intrinsic, because, again, we have no other universes to compare ours to. For all we know there might be a billion other universes exactly the same as ours except without life (proving life is unnecessary but unlikely), or there could be a billion other universes exactly like ours except one which is without life (proving that it is likely but not necessary) or there might be a billion other universes exactly like ours without exception (proving life is both necessary and likely).
At the moment though, we only have the one to go on, so cannot drawn any conclusions about necessity or likelihood. At the moment, all we can say with any certainty is that it just is.
The broader question is the nature of intention or intentionality, altogether. When the 'accidental' nature of the universe was first mooted, which really didn't occur until modern times, it was felt to be profoundly shocking; prior to that time, such a possibility was not even considered.
But this particular ideas is well beyond the scope of this thread - for which I will accept responsibility, by the way, as I introduced it! But to go further would really warrant a separate discussion, I think.
Quoting Read Parfit
However, they're predictive - you can discover genuinely new facts about the actual universe through mathematics that you otherwise would have no way of knowing. The whole history of mathematical physics is testimony to that. So it doesn't work to say that maths are simply 'in the mind' or simply a 'human story' - it's clearly more intertwined with the nature of things. But quite how, or why, is indeed a thorny epistemological problem; after all, Einstein himself, whose theories are an enduring testimony to the predictive power of modern mathematical physics, mused that 'the most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible'.
I declined nothing. You own a car that isn't made of quarks, it seems. What do I deny? :roll:
Parfit defends a narrow and wide ontological sense in relation to abstract concepts like math, truths and possibilities. Take the statement:
“(R) if it had been true that nothing ever existed, there would have been this truth.”
... and his conclusion...
“(S) though there would have been this truth, this truth would have existed only in the wide sense and the non-ontological sense.”
I am fine with this. I also think when we ‘discover’ these truths, these abstract concepts assume a new, if ephemeral, ontological status in the narrow sense, as physical patterns in our minds. These truths derive their power from accurately modeling how nature works, and help our minds ‘discover’ new possibilities. We sometimes take action to actualize these possibilities and thereby create other ontological entities, like an airplane. I believe this particular ontological transformation of abstract truths requires a conscious host.
That is the issue which apokrisis doesn't seem to understand. Apokrisis wants to reduce everything to semiotics, not apprehending the logical conclusion that this requires something (an agent) who is practising semiosis
Quoting apokrisis
See, apokrisis places the cart before the horse, claiming that mind, and matter (which is necessary for the existence of the signs which are interpreted by minds), emerge from semiotic organisation, when actually it is very clear that mind and matter are the required elements of semiotic organisation.
So at least one or the other, mind or matter, must be prior to semiotic organization. In the Neo-Platonist tradition, consequent to Aristotle's cosmological argument, we conclude that mind, being the active agent in this process, is prior, creating the signs, and matter itself which constitutes the existence of physical information, as all matter can be interpreted as containing information.
Biosemioticians would say that only life (not conscious agency) is required for semiotic relationships to obtain.
In the case of gene expression, is it the complementarity of message source (sign) and destination (interpreter), or the purpose of a conscious agent, which effects the construction of an organism?
While I can appreciate the role of semiosis in the empirical domain (as above), is its role with reference to the pure domain limited to the purposes of conscious agents?
I didn't refer to "conscious agency". The soul is understood to be the agent of all living things. I believe it is a mistake to associate consciousness with agency in such a way as to make agency necessarily conscious agency. Conscious agency is a type of agency, but we see agency in all living things whether they are conscious or not..
My bad. @Read Parfit referred to "a conscious host", and you replied: "...something (an agent) who is practising semiosis", here. So, I assumed you were referring to a conscious person.
Please define "agent", "agency", and "soul".
Does the process of gene expression involve semiotic relationships, the soul, or agency?
There is one additional consideration that most people are not aware of. The brain can process data in 2-D as well as 3-D. An example of 2-D thinking is logic, where cause and affect are the (x,y) axis, with logic the plotted curve. Most of science and philosophy is 2-D.
There is also 3-D thinking which is not the same. This is (x,y,z) with the axis being described as effect, cause and affect, or cause, affect and cause. This type of thinking and perception, can at times, be deterministic in 3-D, but will appear to be nondeterministic in 2-D. This, to the rational mind, is often attributed to the metaphysical.
As an analogy, say we start with a golf ball; 3-D sphere. We can approximate this ball with a large number of 2-D circles, all with a common center, but with each ball at a different angle. This is a descriptive way to describe a large number of different rational opinions; 2-D circles, about a given topic; common center. Each of us may take a different rational angle, with the sum of all these opinions approximating the volume of the 3-D ball; a spatial relationship.
Say I was to strike the ball with a golf club. The ball will deform in 3-D, which can be modeled with stress and shear equations. This deformation is deterministic in 3-D, based on the materials used. On the other hand, if we look any of the many rational planes; circles, used to approximate the ball, many of these circles will become deformed out of their plane. The 3-D logic can add what appears to be indeterminism to that plane. The change is deterministic in 3-D, but will not appear to be so in 2-D.
The reason is, 3-D thinking is integral thinking which, like the math operation of integration, defines the area under a curve. Whereas, 2-D thinking is differential thinking. This finds the slope at a given point on the curve. The 2-D thinking is better for differentiating the details of the universe, but is not designed to properly integrate all the data together. Instead we have a lot of opinions with the best based on funding. Whereas 3-D can integrate the data, but it can makes differentiation; slope, appear fuzzy or indeterministic at times, in we use 2-D theory.
Statistics is sort of a bridge concept between 2-D and 3-D, where the determinism in 3-D is given approximation math in 2-D, to help explain the deformation in the rational planes of theory. This is needed in 2-D, but not 3-D.
An agent is something active, actual. In semiotic processes it is required that there is an agent which produces signs and an agent which interprets signs. That's why it doesn't make sense to say that both the categories, mind and matter, emerge from semiotic process. We might restrict "mind" to consciousness, and say that it emerged through evolution, but if we posit semiotic processes which existed prior to such evolution we need to account for that agent which is similar to mind, but not the same as mind, and is active in such semiotic processes. Classically this agent was known as the soul.
Aristotle's definition of soul: the first grade of actuality of a natural body having life potentially in it.
I think you’re right. That is why I say that the fact that Peirce was not atheist is philosophically significant. Sure you can appropriate his semiotic theory without subscribing to his theism but it leaves a rather significant gap.
So, an agent may be a: human being, dog, volcano, tornado, force, wave, phase transition, biochemical signal or reaction, fertilized egg (zygote), television broadcast, mechanical actuator, etc.?
"Aristotle ascribed to each living organism a psuche (soul). The psuche was conceived to be the form of a natural body that has life. It was also characterised as the first actuality of a natural body that has organs (De Anima 412 5-6)." (Bennett & Hacker, 2003)
So, in terms of modern science and Aristotle, we could say that human genetic code is the particular form (first actuality) of an individual human being.
So, (given your definition of agent) in the case of gene expression, human fertilization would be the agent which produces the genetic code (sign) which is accessed by the zygote (interpreter) which produces a human organism (object) which has a human body and a human mind.
Why doesn't this make sense?
You use soul as a metaphor for chemical reactions behind gene expression?
I find this definition unhelpful. Electromagnetic waves were physical before we knew about them. In my view it is clearer to refer to 'known' and 'unknown' components of the physical world. If someone wants to make the case that some phenomena in the world is actually non-physical, that warrants a separate classification from the widely accepted belief that there are still unknown physical entities.
Right, but we have two distinct categories, physical agents and non-physical agents. The physical agent accounts for what we call efficient cause, and the non-physical accounts for what we call final cause.
It is often the case that we can describe the same act by referring to either a physical agent or a non-physical agent. If we say that a certain person did such and such, the person, a physical human being, is a physical agent, acting in the world. But if we turn to the person's intent, then we must account for the non-physical cause of that physical agent's action. Here we must turn to a non-physical agent.
Quoting Galuchat
No, I wouldn't agree with that characterization. A genetic code is a physical thing which is not necessarily the "first" actualization of the living body. It is necessary to assume an agent which causes the existence of a genetic code, and this is an actuality which is prior to the genetic code itself. So prior to all genetic codes there is an agent which we are required to assume in order to account for the existence of genetic codes.
Quoting Galuchat
Again, I wouldn't agree with this, because the genetic code is prior to the zygote which is just a continuation of it. What actually creates genetic code is somewhat unknown, and this is what we attribute to the non-physical soul.
The important point we can derive from Aristotle's definition is that the existence of a living body must be accounted for by some form of actuality. The living body is itself an active physical thing which consists of many potencies. The "first actuality" is what gives that living body its actual existence as an active thing. This, "the soul", cannot itself be a physical body, because it is what is required logically, to account for the actual existence of the physical body.
Quoting Read Parfit
No metaphor here, this is a description of reality. Prior to what I think you mean by "gene expression", we need to account for the creation and existence of genes themselves. If we are describing things in terms of semiotics, we cannot just refer to the reading and interpreting of signs, we must account for the creation and existence of signs.
This would appear to be our fundamental point of disagreement.
“You use soul as a metaphor for chemical reactions behind gene expression?”
— Read Parfit
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Evolution accounts for the creation of gene expression. Phosphodiester and hydrogen bonds are examples of expression between the handful of molecules comprising and animating DNA?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21261/
At this point it seems we have reached the first grade of actuality of life on earth as specified in the Aristotle definition you provided. Digging further into what causes these molecules to express themselves through these bonds seems to be a broader question than the subset of nature that we call life?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A few posts earlier, I made the case that the term non-physical is unhelpful since it requires further parsing to get at an author's meaning. Are you referring to unknown physical processes? Are you talking about some theory of an actual non-physical entity? I see no reason to believe intention is anything more than a complex aggregation of physical processes based in the mind/body mechanics given us through evolution.
Which part do you disagree with, that what creates genetic code is somewhat unknown, or that the logic leads us to conclude that this cause is non-physical?
Quoting Read Parfit
The article you referred describes the chemical composition of DNA, and the duplication of genetic material, it does not describe what created it, or caused its existence. Nor does evolutionary theory explain this cause.
Quoting Read Parfit
Why do you assume that this, the cause of genetic material, is a question of a broader nature than life? Isn't genetic material confined to living things?
It really doesn't, you know. The theory of evolution doesn't account for the existence of DNA.
With reference to gene expression, both.
What is your concept of the relations between Form, Matter, and Mind? Hopefully, it is not based on an Aristotelian/Thomist equivocation of "soul".
Sorry Galuchat, but I really have difficulty with your terminology, and this makes it very hard to answer your questions. You ask me "what is your concept of the relations between Form, Matter, and Mind?", when each of these concepts are extremely broad, requiring pages to describe. Where am I supposed to start? If you do not understand my use of terms, then you probably are not educated in classical philosophy, and it would be extremely difficult for me to teach you that in this sort of forum. You would need to read it yourself.
Quoting Galuchat
So here's a question for you which is more straight forward. What do you mean by "Aristotelian/Thomist equivocation of "soul'"? I've never seen such an accusation, that these philosophers equivocate with this word. Aristotle was very explicit with his definition of "soul" as you outlined above, and I think Aquinas adhered to it quite strictly. So what is the basis for the charge of equivocation?
— Read Parfit
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Right, the article just described the chemical expression side.
@Wayfarer too. If you are not familiar with the leading evolutionary theories related to the forging of the krebs cycle 3,400 - 2,500 million years ago, I suggest the book “Life Ascending, The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution” written by Nick Lane. I imagine if he read my sentence”Evolution accounts for the creation…” he would suggest I change it to “It is broadly plausible that Evolution accounts for the creation…”.
"Aquinas, capitalising on Aristotle's obscure remarks about the active intellect, argued that 'the intellectual principle which is called the mind or intellect has an operation through itself (per se) unless it subsists through itself, for activity belongs to a being in act...Consequently, the human soul, which is called the intellect or mind, is something incorporeal and subsisting' (Summa Theologiae I, 76, 1)." (Bennett & Hacker, 2003)
So, Aquinas changed the meaning of "soul" from "form" to "mind" and separated it from "body" for theological reasons.
Your posts suggest to me that you may be conflating "form" and "mind", or using "soul" in an equivocal manner, and that you may not recognise the mind-body unity of human beings, hence; my request for clarification.
What Aquinas argues in this passage is that the intellect and the soul of the human being are united as one, such that the human soul is an intellectual soul. The soul was always understood as separable from the body, even following Aristotle's definition, designating it as the form of the body, because forms are in principle separable. The question considered by Aquinas was whether the intellect is separable in the same way that the soul is separable. Aquinas argues that the human soul is an intellectual soul. So the soul maintains its status as the form of the living body, but in the case of intellectual beings, the soul is an intellectual soul
So it is not as you claim, that Aquinas changes the meaning of "soul" to "mind". What he argues is that the soul of an intellectual being is a special type of soul, an intellectual soul. "Soul" maintains its definition as the first actuality (form) of a living body, but he gives the intellectual soul special status in comparison with the vegetative soul, etc..
.
Actually, there's a very deep philosophical issue here. Although such terms as 'soul' now sound antiquated, I have learned from my reading that the so-called 'hylomorphic' (matter-form) dualism of Aristotelean and Thomist philosophy, is really pretty sophisticated. But to unpack it and understand why this is so, takes quite a bit of explanation. Also your earlier comments in this thread about the inherent conflict between scientific and religious views are likely to incline you against such a philosophy. Nevertheless I will have a shot at a thumbnail sketch, so to speak.
The Platonic idea of 'form' and the related idea of the universal, is often, nowadays, reduced to caricature, in my view, as it has fallen so far out of favour that it is hardly understood any more. But it all goes back to Platonic epistemology and what it means to say that we really do know. Such things as logical truths and geometric proofs are known with a directness and intuitive certainty that is not characteristic of the knowledge of the sensible (sense-able) domain; when the mind knows such things, it actually in some sense becomes completely united with them in a way that is impossible with sensible particulars; such an understanding allows us to 'see the essence', as it were. And when it comes to the underlying arche, the 'forms' of humans and creatures, and even the form of general things like virtue or justice - to really 'see the form' is to understand the essence with a direct insight which is likewise apodictic and indubitable - like mathematical knowledge, dianoia, but of even a higher quality than that. Whereas knowledge of everyday affairs and phenomena is only knowledge of 'what appears', so it is of a lower order - it is doxai or pistis, belief or opinion.
While it's true that Aristotle didn't accept that the forms were real in a discarnate sense that Plato seemed to imply, he nevertheless accepted that the forms are what informs matter, or makes matter intelligible. That is why his view is called 'hylo-morphic' where 'hyle' is matter and 'morphe' is form (although that term itself is a neologism.) But in any case, the forms of things are what determines what kind of being they are. So very simplistically, intellect perceives the form (morphe), and the senses perceive the matter (hyle) which is 'accidental'. But this is very different from Cartesian dualism, because there's no conception of 'spirit' and 'matter' being separable in that way. I suppose it is more like a dual-aspect monism in some ways; 'the soul is the form of the body'.
I am curious, do you believe what Aquinas argued?
Thanks for your clarification.
I find it unfortunate that Aquinas conflated soul (form) and mind, because it is:
1) Theologically unnecessary. Other theologians have managed to posit human beings consisting of a united body and mind, and separable spirit (i.e., tripartite being).
2) Metaphysically unnecessary and confused. It doesn't derive from the intuitively obvious unity of human mind and body.
True science and true theology will not contradict each other.
I like the basic Platonic and Aristotelian framework of Forms, because it involves the process of information (which provides a direct link to modern science) and allows for the possibility of spiritual things. So, I find the reality/existence, form/matter, pure/empirical, and other, distinctions useful to science.
In attempting to modernise this framework, I find it useful to distinguish between data (asymmetries), communication (the discovery of pure data or creation of empirical data), and information (communicated data). Data being Form re-defined (it wouldn't be the first time).
I currently view semiotics as a specialised type of communication (i.e., signification), so have no problem with assigning it a significant role in a modern metaphysics.
I think the issue of the unity of the soul and body is complicated, as Wayfarer says. Aquinas wrote a lot about it so he is a good source. At other places he clearly argues a distinction between independent Forms, and the objects which the human intellect comes to know as intelligible objects, because the human intellect is dependent on the body. Because of this, the intelligible objects known to the human intellect are not truly separate Forms.
Here though, the question appears to be whether the intellect itself ought to be related to the soul or to the body. I would say that since the intelligible objects are essentially non-physical, that their essence is non-physical, and they have only physical accidents, then the intellect is more closely related to the non-physical soul. What I mean by this, is that the concept of numbers, or triangle, for example, is essentially the same in its non-physical form, in all sorts of human beings, while the differences within these concepts due to the individuality of the various human bodies, are accidental to the concepts.
So I can agree with Aquinas, that the intellect is more properly referred to as a property of the soul, rather than a property of the body, such that the human being has an intellectual soul rather than an intellectual body. This is because the objects associated with the intellect, the intelligible objects, are essentially non-physical, like the soul, and the physical aspect of them, that they occur in various different individual human beings, is accidental.
Quoting Galuchat
These are good points, but the issue becomes much more difficult when we consider the existence of intelligible objects. If we have a unity of body and mind, and a separate spirit or soul, then the intelligible objects are either a product of the mind/body unity, or they are directly associated with the separate soul. Clearly intelligible objects are non-physical, in essence, and ought to be associated with the separate soul. But we have the problem exposed by Aristotle, that the intelligible objects known to the human intellect only have actual existence after being "discovered" by the human intellect.
So your three part categorizing, body, intellect, and soul, only unnecessarily complicates the issue. Instead of having the intellect as part of the relation between the soul and body, as Aquinas does, you have a relation between intellect and body. But we now need a further relation between this unity, and the independent soul, to account for how the intelligible objects are "discovered" by the unity of intellect and body, when they are described as non-physical, and separate from any individual human being. So instead of having two things, soul and body with a relationship between them, intellect being part of this relation, you have mind and body, with a relation between them, and another relation between the unity of these two, and the soul or spirit. So you introduce an extra relation which is an unnecessary complication.
I agree that a triadic formulation of human substance is more complicated than a dyadic one. Whether or not it's necessary depends on the relevant science and one's theology (or lack thereof).
I think my formulation is triadic. Yours is much more complicated requiring as much as five elements. I have body and soul as the two principals, with the third element being all those features of the relationship between the two, such things as desire, passion, emotion, will, intention, and intellect. If you start with a unity of mind and body, then you still need the third element which is the relationship between these two, desire, passion, emotion, etc.. Further, you have a fourth element, the soul, which you posit as something separate from all of this. So you will then need a fifth element, which will describe the relationship between the mind/body unity, and the soul itself. This complication is unnecessary because it is sufficiently avoided by maintaining the classical soul/body unity instead of your proposed mind/body unity, where the intellect, or mind, becomes a feature of the relationship between the body and soul, instead of one of the two principals.
?Metaphysician Undercover
I know I owe you a couple more replies that I hope I can get to this weekend, but I just want to do some quick mopup.
Although I mentioned Nick Lane’s book on evolution as a reference to leading scientific theories concerning the evolutionary creation of the krebs cycle and RNA/DNA, I did not provide links.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro1991
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/362/1486/1887.short
At this point, one can only invoke the Fourth Law of Holes.
I have enjoyed this conversation. I think your assumption that a soul is a separate entity is an error that makes further conclusions based on the assumption nonsensical. In my life, I have heard plenty of personal testament about a separate soul, but have seen no evidence. What I have seen is science continually discovering physical activities in our brain and the rest of our body that humans have historically assumed is the work of a separate soul.
Aristotle had no way of knowing about the fossil and biological evidence showing plants and animals share common ancestors in bacteria that lived 2.5 million years ago, yet he showed his brilliance in deducing there was something plants and animals had in common. In 2018, I think it is unfair to Aristotle to invoke his name as a reason to conclude there is a separate soul. In light of the current facts we know about evolution and biology, I like to think that if he were alive today, he would be the first to point out the updates to that are necessary to his theory,
It's not physical evidence which tells us that the soul is non-physical, that doesn't make sense. It's logic which gives us this conclusion. Here's a sample. Consider that the entire living body, any living body, consists of directed activities. I think that there is evidence of this, that every part of the physical body is active, and directed in the sense of acting as a part of a whole. This means that no physical part of the living body could come into existence without consisting of a directed activity. Therefore we must conclude that the thing which directs the activity of the physical living body is prior in time to the physical body itself. This is the non-physical soul. Do you see what I mean? If the living body only exists as directed activity, then the thing which directs the activity must be prior to the physical body.
You mean, like the information of a genome?
Physical configurations encode constraints and thus tendencies generally. So finality, as globalised or collective tendencies, can simply evolve so long as physical configurations are a thing. You just need enough cohesion for the world to have a history being written into its state.
Time itself can thus evolve like the way a river gets established with a direction. Once constraints arise on material possibility, you get the emergent thing of a past as the information now fixed in a physical configuration, the future as the limits being imposed by that configuration, and the present as the point in between where possibilities are being actualised and being added to that configuration information.
If this is so, why do 99% of humans really suck at maths in this fashion? :razz:
Either they lack a rational soul or in fact it takes considerable training to routinely look past the immediate world and “see” it’s abstract structures.
Quoting Wayfarer
This works better. It speaks to the information theoretic view of physical reality. You have the complementary duo of information and entropy.
So it is a kind of dual aspect monism. But that says the two faces of reality are simply ontically different. And I would argue that everything slots into place once we can see the two aspects composing physical reality as being formally complementary. We need them to be a dichotomous pair of limits connected by a reciprocal relation.
So Aristotle - before the manglings of scholasticism - was on the money. Form does in-form material accidents, or entropy/degrees of freedom, with necessary limits.
The physical - that is the substantial and not just the material - is a story of the complementary things of top down constraints and bottom up accidents of history. Forms stabilise the instability of unrestrained potential.
We do need a duality of some kind at the heart of substantial being. And physics now agrees with hylomorphism to the degree it understands information and entropy as the complementary faces of the one physicalist world.
That leaves out “mind” of course. Physics talks about the simple and life and mind are another angle on the story - where you get to when the basic semiotic trick of the informational regulation of entropic instability evolves to have incredible hierarchical complexity.
I'm among them. The point being, though, that when you know an a priori truth, that knowledge is apodictic and invariant. That is why the Platonists thought that mathematical knowledge - dianoia - was of a higher order than sensory knowledge. It's because of the ability to perceive the forms, which are the type, and the ability to then abstract, categorise and compare. All of this is fundamental to science. Galileo was greatly influenced by the Italian renaissance philosophers, Ficino in particular, who translated all of Plato's works into Latin; that's where you get 'the book of nature is written in mathematics'. From E A Burtt, Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, we learn that Galileo took dianoia and used it to re-define the fundamental concepts of physics, which hitherto had been entangled with Aristotelian (and very anthropomorphic) notions of teleology (along with the rest of the Ptolmaic model). And that was indubitably a huge breakthrough, the beginning of the 'scientific revolution' and arguably modern science as such.
But it's also where problems were to arise:
[quote=Nagel, Mind and Cosmos]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatio-temporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.[/quote]
However, what this overlooks is that the human mind remains inextricably an aspect of the picture, but one that is forgotten or suppressed. Hence:
[quote=Arthur Schopenhauer]The fundamental absurdity of materialism consist in the fact that it starts from the objective; it takes an objective something as the ultimate ground of explanation, whether this be matter in the abstract simply as it is thought, or after it has entered in to the form and is empirically given, and hence substance, perhaps the chemical elements, together with their primary combinations. Some such thing it takes as existing absolutely and in itself, in order to let organic nature and finally the knowing subject emerge from it, and thus completely explain these; whereas in truth everything objective is already conditioned as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject with the forms of its knowing, and presupposes these forms. Materialism is therefore the attempt to explain what is directly given to us from what is given indirectly. Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this....can leave nothing to be desired. All this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space and causality, by virtue of which it is first of all extended in space and operating in time.[/quote]
(This most pristine expression of this suppression is, of course, eliminative materialism.)
Which is why Jacques Maritain is correct in saying of the empiricist:
Semiotics does overcome this to some extent, but only by its ability to impart or project mind-like attributes to the natural domain; however this is still supposed to be a result or consequence of an essentially mindless process, so ontologically it is still derivative rather than primary.
Fossil and biological evidence show that we slowly evolved from bacteria over millions of years. While there are still details to fill in related to abiogenesis, we know for a fact that the tiny krebs cycle and RNA/DNA were the necessary drivers for our branch of life to kick start from single celled organisms. These very physical and basic molecular activities, which are driven by chemical bonds, are that force I think you miss.
https://www.ducksters.com/science/molecules.php
https://www.ducksters.com/science/the_atom.ph
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Since there is a broadly plausible and very physical explanation for how our bodies came into existence, I disagree that we must conclude anything non physical is necessary. Overwhelming fossil and biological evidence provide a detailed story of how living creatures developed our capacity to conduct directed activity through physical means over millions of years.
Nope. Semiotics does reimagine the fundamentally simple as being pansemiotic and thus as much mind-like as matter-like in some good sense. But consciousness - and its material technological products - are derivative of this simplicity in being the product of complexity. Or multiple levels of increasing informational and abstracted semiosis.
So the simple becomes semiotic. And complex semiosis arises out of that. You are conflating the simplest form with the most highly complex form in talking about the world being mind-like in some conscious, and even super sensible or divine sense of the word.
So we have humans and their machines. We have the semiotics of maths piled upon speech, piled upon neurons, piled upon genes, to result in some sharp division between conscious beings and their mechanised environments. In one tiny corner of the Cosmos where a steep entropic gradient was begging to be colonised, there was a brief eruption of this fantastical complexity.
But only hubris would lead you to want to read that exceptionalism into the generally far simpler tale of a thermalising Cosmos, doing everything it wants with far less semiotically developed machinery.
But as I think we have agreed, the 'furniture of reason' is not the product of the brain. At that point of evolution, the mind is sufficiently advanced to discover a pre-existing order:
[quote=C S Peirce]The soul's deeper parts can only be reached through its surface. In this way the Eternal Forms, that mathematics and philosophy and the other sciences make us acquainted with, will by slow percolation gradually reach the very core of one's being, and will come to influence our lives; and this they will do, not because they involve truths of merely vital importance, but because they [are] ideal and eternal verities.[/quote]
Quoted by Thomas Nagel. I don't see it as hubristic; what I see as hubristic is the attitude that we can be defined in the terms of what the natural sciences can know.
But what we see is a world divided into its structural necessities and its material accidents. And is the world actually divided, or instead hylomorphically whole?
So it is impressive once we reach a mathematical level of semiotic engagement with the world. But it is still a modelled “world” we end up “perceiving”. You are talking as if the mind is the kind of thing that eventually arrives at direct access to the truth of being. All we have is a more sophisticated umwelt forming our phenomenal experience.
Yes. There is something deeper about that view. It sees the whole of the Cosmos in getting down to the structural necessities of “existence” itself.
But it is still a model - indirect. The mind does not discover in some simple fashion, like finally opening its eyes to find what is nakedly right there. It has to build up to an understanding by way of conceptual abstraction. It has to in fact erase and forget every particular or detail it can. The grand structure is then whatever is finally left as that which cannot be cancelled away.
But the point about the Western philosophical tradition was to discern those elements in the flux of sensation that were indubitable and certain - hence the respect for mathematics and rationalism in the first place. That’s where the entire distinction between sensible and intelligible ideas originated. And science itself is based on the mathematical modelling of experience on the basis of the observed regularities of nature - natural laws, as they used to be called.
And, of course I agree that the mind builds understanding by way of abstraction [and why I think it’s important to understand Kant]. The mind is capable of that abstraction - that is the basis of rationality and language after all. It’s where that is said to be only ‘the product of evolution’ that it sells intelligence short - it is explaining intelligence as an evolved adaption, not evaluating it on its own merits. The classical tradition valued rational thought and mathematics, but that wasn’t the top-most level of the hierarchy of knowledge, which was ‘noesis’. And I don’t think there’s even an analogy for that in current philosophy, as there is no heirarchy - it’s the vertical dimension that has been eliminated from the landscape.
And anyway, as I said to Uber, the argument I’m reading up on, is the ‘argument from reason’. I don’t necessarily concur that it ‘proves’ the case for ‘theism’. What interests me about it, is that reason is always prior - no matter where you look, what empirical data you cite, it is always already ‘informed’ by reason, so to speak. But I have a lot more work to do on developing that - I’m slogging through some of the literature on it, and there are many nits to pick.
But right now, I have to go and wash the dog.
No, the genome is the physical body. There is an activity which creates and interprets the information. What directs the activity cannot be the genome, because the activity has created the genome. That activity must be directed by something prior to the genome. It's like what I was saying about semiotic processes. We cannot simply describe these processes as interpretation of symbols or signs, because we need to also account for the creation of such signs. If the living physical body consists of signs, we need to refer to something non-physical as prior to the physical signs to account for their creation.
Quoting Read Parfit
I am fully aware of all that. What I am saying is that there must be something non-physical prior to these molecular activities to account for their occurrence. Activities of the living body may be accounted for by these molecular activities. But these molecules have already been created by specific activity, directed activity. When we get to the bottom of the physical realm, the most fundamental physical components of living beings, we still need to account for the activities which have brought these most fundamental physical components into existence. These activities can be nothing other than non-physical activities. Abiogenesis is unsupported, random speculation, therefore unreasonable.
Quoting Read Parfit
Did you read and understand my argument? I'm not talking about "our bodies" specifically, I'm talking about living bodies in general. So evolution is irrelevant here. Directed activity was present with the very first life form, and this is what must be accounted for. Since that directed activity was the cause of the very first life form (living physical body) on earth, then the directed activity must be prior to the very first living physical body. There is absolutely no evidence of such directed activity in nonliving physical things, therefore it could be nothing other than non-physical living activity.
But your thesis is stronger. It follows from the Greek claim that what we humans can do with our rational faculty is a diminished form of the omnescient rational vision that would be native to a creator god.
So I say we climb the semiotic ladder of our own ability to conceive of the Cosmos as a whole.
You are aiming at the story that we aspire to the kind of rational perception that a creator would be endowed with. We are cut down gods rather than cranked up animals.
And which bit of this creating and interpreting of genetic information can’t be explained by physicalism?
You say logically there must be something beyond the physical goings on. And yet there is no evidence of that.
And it wouldn’t even be hylomorphism for the formal/final aspects of substance to exist in some removed and non-substantial sense. It isn’t actually logical on that score.
Exactly as I described, the creation of the living physical body. That is not explained by physicalism, which refers to some unsupported, random and therefore unreasonable speculation of abiogenesis.
Quoting apokrisis
There is no physical evidence of it, because it is non-physical. That's why we need logic to figure it out. And logic is non-physical, so there is your evidence. Go figure, the evidence is right in your own mind. So you ought not try to claim that there is no evidence. You can dismiss the evidence, reject it for whatever reason, but your rejection doesn't negate it, rendering it as not evidence. That's the way evidence is, we have the choice to either accept it as evidence, or not accept it as evidence. But your rejection doesn't mean it's not evidence.
But you show no signs of being up to date on that science. @Read Parfit gave you excellent reading suggestions from a researcher in the front line. So your comment here is supported only by your ignorance of the available evidence.
Nick Lane’s latest book indeed makes the case that life anywhere could only take the form of electron respiratory chains and proton gradients.
This is a neat conclusion as it fits the predictions of a biosemiotic approach to abiogenesis. And it even flows from the very particle asymmetry that permits a Cosmos that is more than just a featureless bath of radiation.
A universe with proper matter - lumpy bits of gravitating stuff with charges and sub-lightspeed inertial freedoms - is only possible because electrons wound up having the negative charge, and protons the positive charge.
And then life also depends on this fortunate asymmetry. Because of the physical size difference, electrons could be used to capture the energy to drive life as a process. Protons then could release this energy back in a controlled fashion to spin the molecular machinery.
So it is not all a tale of irrational randomness. That semiotic distinction between rate independent information and rate dependent process is not just about the genotype-phenotype distinction. It arises directly out of the possibilities created by fundamental particles being of different size.
Suddenly all it took was a membrane to hold protons back and then a turnstile to let them pass in a regulated fashion.
As accidents go, in a place like a warm alkaline sea vent, it was an accident waiting to happen. Abiogensis in this form suddenly seems so reasonable that alternative stories become matchingly hard to imagine.
I find that less hubristic, really. If you think about it, there’s no biological reason why a species ought to be able to know the kinds of things we already know, purely on the basis of what is described in evolutionary theory.
And I don’t know if the Greek philosophers really did think in terms of a ‘creator God’ - that came from the later absorption of Greek philosophy into Christian philosophy. I admit, I feel a greater affinity with Christian Platonism than with modern scientific naturalism but ‘creator god’ is not part of my philosophical lexicon.
And regarding Meta’s statement above - I too believe, and have argued at length, that ‘logic is not physical’. In fact I’ve come to the point that this seems so obvious to me that I can’t be bothered arguing it any more. It’s like those who wish to take issue with it, really have to use the very faculty that they’re trying to explain to make the argument; every time they say ‘because’ or ‘therefore’, then they’re already appealing to the relationship of ideas, not to so-called ‘physical facts’. You need to reason in order to even establish facts. That’s why I’m putting some time into reading up on the argument from reason - sans reference to the ‘creator god’, of course. :wink:
Quoting apokrisis
Meaning, not an accident.
OK. Blame that on the scholastic rewrite if you like.
Quoting Wayfarer
But once culture, language and technology came along, could it have ended differently?
That was the further level of semiosis that laid the ground. What then prevented a mathematical/rational level emerging on top of that?
So as soon as language became a thing, a formal grammar was on the cards, no?
I read some of the referrals, I found it wildly speculative, as I said, and uninteresting. Read Parfit seems to try to make a point by referral, and I don't like that form of argument. If Read understands the material, why not explain it to me in a way which relates to my point, rather than referring me to various articles, which don't seem to be relevant to the point I am making.
Quoting apokrisis
This is consistent with my claim. At the bottom of such physical activity, the most fundamental, there is still a need to conclude existence of the non-physical to account for the cause of existence of such physical activity.
Quoting apokrisis
One problem though, the proper conclusion to draw from this knowledge concerning the degree of complexity at this fundamental level, is that abiogenesis is even less likely, and is therefore even more unreasonable as a speculation. So to use this knowledge as an "approach to abiogenesis" is misguided speculation, unreasonable.
Quoting apokrisis
You have replaced my terms, "irrational randomness" with "fortunate asymmetry". Thanks for the laugh, "lumpy bits of gravitating stuff" sounds like the cheerios floating on my milk this morning.
Quoting apokrisis
Oh, the membrane! A complex filter for atoms. It seems like you almost forgot the most important part, in the reciting of your joke.
Quoting apokrisis
An accident waiting for the substance, "a membrane", to magically appear. I see said the blind man.
I was not aware of his new book. Thanks!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There is no logical “need” to conclude the existence of “non-physical” entities being the cause of physical activity. That is just a theory with without meat on the bone.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Unike your theory of intent filled non-physical entities, the alkaline hydrothermal vent theory provides a level of detail that is falsifiable.
I agree with apokrisis that you need to get caught up with the advances in scientific theory in this area.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You find broadly plausible scientific theories related to abiogenesis “uninteresting”, and “don’t like that” I refer you to the source of my claims. These statements make me wonder how much effort you put into your "wildly speculative" conclusion. :(.
Did you read the argument? It's not a theory, it's a logical argument. You haven't yet addressed it. As it's a very simple argument, you ought to be able to easily refute it if it's not sound logic. Instead you ignore it and keep pushing the unreasonable abiogenesis
.Quoting Read Parfit
That's right, because abiogenesis is an unreasonable starting point. So reading authors who use science in an attempt to support this nonsense speculation is just a waste of time. As I've explained to you, there's very simple, and sound logic which demonstrates that there is necessarily a non-physical agent which is prior to, as the cause of, the living physical body.
I'll spell it out again so you don't have to go back. The living physical body came into existence as an organized structure. Therefore the "organizer" precedes the physical body. It is well known from the observation of inanimate physical things, that no inanimate physical thing is capable of doing such organizing. Therefore the organizer must be non-physical. The only objection came from apokrisis who said that there is no evidence of anything "non-physical". But both wayfarer and I replied by referring to the fact that the evidence of the non-physical is right there within our own minds. So not only do we have a sound logical argument, but it is also supported by evidence as well. What more could you ask for?
To simply ignore this logic, and proceed to adopt abiogenesis as a principle, and then attempt in some haphazard way to support abiogenesis with science, is nothing other than unreasonable behaviour. Did you read my reply to apokrisis, who postulates the magical appearance of a membrane?
By “the living body” do you mean the first living bodies? By that I mean bacteria and their predecessors existing ~3 billion years ago?
I will give you a detailed reply to the rest of your stated logic, I just want to hit some terra firma with you first.
Yes, the very first, as the argument is that prior to the physical existence of life there is necessarily a non-physical agent. That's the basis for my claim that abiogenesis is unreasonable. And the educated metaphysician will seek to understand the nature of the non-physical rather than wasting time speculating about abiogenesis. .
Okay, here is a breakdown of your argument:
A) The living physical body came into existence as an organized structure.
B) Therefore the "organizer" precedes the physical body.
C) It is well known from the observation of inanimate physical things, that no inanimate physical thing is capable of doing such organizing.
D) Therefore the organizer must be non-physical.
Logically, I agree with A and B.
Logically, C could be tossed. Whether or not something is “well known” does not make it true or false, and we have already established a physical body needing an “organizer” in A and B.
Logically, D is pulled from thin air. You made no case why the “organiser” “must be non-physical”. You did not even use the term “non-physical“ until after your last 'Therefore'. You did not establish how a non-physical "organizer" exists or explain how it would interact with the physical in the way you say it must have done.
Your use of the word “must” in D is further called into question given an alternate "organizer" has been described as alkaline hydrothermal vents in a broadly plausible scientific theory that does not require any non-physical entities. This theory details how the tiny krebs cycle (with membrane) could be forged in alkaline hydrothermal vents which just happen to have all the necessary molecular components and millions of tiny pockets that are the same size as bacteria.
This is just one example of a theory makes the use of "must" in D pretty flimsy. There are other theories like "we're living in a simulation" and "aliens seeded earth" that could just as easily be substituted for "be non-physical" in D.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think I owe Wayfarer a response on this subject a few pages back. Regardless, I don’t think you are going to get to a “must” in D from “non-physical in right there within our own minds”, but try me :)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I hope you will not continue to say I ignore your logic. I admit my description is somewhat haphazard when compared to someone with scientific training, but I think it is unfair to say that pointing to leading scientific theories on the subject is unreasonable behavior.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, and I thought your use of the word "magical" was an attempt to substitute sarcasm for an actual counter argument.
OK, so your dismissing inductive reasoning as not capable of assuring truth. That's not an unusual tactic, but we might just as well say that we can never be sure that a premise is true.
Quoting Read Parfit
There is an organizer and the organizer is not physical. Therefore the organizer is non-physical. Sounds like a valid conclusion to me. You just do not make that conclusion because you reject the truth of C, the inductive conclusion that inanimate physical substance is not capable of such organization. Inductive reasoning does not suffice to produce a valid premise for you.
Quoting Read Parfit
Fiction and fantasy, what you call "a broadly plausible scientific theory" does not suffice as evidence against C. Anyone can create a fictional scenario under which any inductive conclusion is falsified, and claim it to be a plausible scientific theory. But of course that doesn't really falsify the inductive logic, it just proves that inductive logic cannot exclude the possibility of error.
Quoting Read Parfit
OK then, here's the issue. We observe all sorts of things which have been created artificially through human activity. I think you will agree with that. The dualist apprehends what is obvious, that non-physical things like ideas and concepts, and the associated activities of reason, logic, intention and will, are responsible for the coming into being of these artificial things. The physicalist, for some unknown reason denies the obvious, that these things are non-physical, but then has no real way to account for the coming into being of artificial things. Artificial things are seen as natural, coming into being as a natural effect of living things. This just defers the problem because the coming into being of living things needs to be accounted for.
However, the coming into being of living things cannot be accounted for by the physicalists, so they posit abiogenesis. And abiogenesis is just a fancy word for spontaneous generation, which has long ago been dismissed as an appeal to magic. Now the physicalists in a state of jealous hypocrisy tend to accuse the dualists as conjuring up magic, when really the hypocrisy is that it is the physicalists who turn to magic, spontaneous generation. And the physicalist's jealousy is of the dualist's solid principles, grounded in sound logic and abundant evidence. So they resort to ploys like denying the reliability of inductive reasoning.
Quoting Read Parfit
My use of "magic" was warranted. Apokrisis described at length, how the existence of life is dependent on an asymmetrical relation between protons and electrons, as if this were the essence of life. Then apokriisis casually added "suddenly all it took was a membrane". So the key feature, which accounts for the emergence of life is not the asymmetrical relation between photons and electrons, but the magical appearance of this special membrane. It's not hard to refute an argument for abiogenesis which relies on the magical appearance of a special membrane.
I have to admit that given our recent conversation I am surprised by this. When talking about God and timelessness and eternity, your interest was enough to make a question meaningful, and you were generally resistant to providing some groundedness, preferring, instead, to say that questions are like poetry to which we bring our own meaning. My quest for some grounding on this question was met with the idea that I had a prejudice against finding meaning in it.
And now here I see that you are uninterested in this particular hypothesis because it is "wildly speculative". Do you think you might have two different sets of standards that you apply depending on whether the argument relates to God?
— Read Parfit
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The logical problem with C is that it is not even wrong. C only argues that it is well known that no inanimate physical thing is capable of doing such organizing.
The most you can infer from C is:
Therefore it must be well known that the organizer was non-physical.
Not exactly the truth you are shooting for?
Would you be open to rewording C?
It was impossible for pre-existing physical processes on Earth to have organized the first living organisms.
I think that is your intended point, and gives you a more plausible line to keeping D intact?
The rest of your post raises some deep and important issues. I doubt I will be able to reply to them until this weekend.
— Read Parfit
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In the interest of giving you a concise response, can you give a couple of examples of artificially created things you are referring to? If you are talking about maths, for instance, I think abstract is more concise term than artificial.
Let me rephrase C then, if you want to nit pick. No inanimate physical thing is capable of doing such organizing. C, as is customary in premises of deductive logic is supported by inductive reasoning. I would not go so far as to accept your suggestion of "it is impossible..." because inductive reasoning doesn't ever give us that degree of certainty. For example, we say that the sky is blue, and this is known from inductive reasoning, "the sky is blue", we could use that as a premise in a deductive argument. But this does not mean that it is impossible that I might wake up one morning and find that the sky is some other colour. Inductive reasoning doesn't give us the certainty required for "it is impossible..."
Quoting Read Parfit
A deductive argument cannot produce a conclusion which is more certain than any of its premises. The premises are generally inductive conclusions, which have varying degrees of certainty. Since the deductive argument uses multiple premises, the conclusion will always have a lower degree of certainty than any of its premises. So my intended point is not to say with absolutely certainty that something non-physical is the cause of the physical living body, but that it is probable, and therefore the most plausible avenue for the metaphysician to explore.
Quoting Read Parfit
Actually, I was talking about physical things, cars, trains, planes, buildings etc.. You can observe the existence of these things, and know that they are artificial, created by human beings. To account for the existence of these things, we may to turn to the non-physical, mathematics for example. We can see that these non-physical things are essential for such creations. The dualist metaphysician will pursue this line of inquiry, how non-physical things like ideas and concepts can act to cause the existence of physical things. We see that intention and will are at the point of interaction where the non-physical bears upon the physical, to bring into existence the various physical objects. So the dualist already apprehends the world in such a way as to understand that the non-physical has causal priority over the physical. This is the observed relationship between the nonphysical and the physical in such things as art, construction, manufacturing and production, the idea, plan, or concept (non-physical), is prior to the physical thing which is produced. That is the basis for the concept of final cause.
The physicalist metaphysician on the other hand will not pursue the existence of nonphysical things. So the existence of artificial things must be accounted for in terms of physics. Then the capacity of the human brain to create these things needs to be explained. You might turn to biology, and evolution, but we see within all the living things, this same type of creative activity, constructing, manufacturing, producing, all these forms of organizing occurring within the living bodies, similar to what human beings do in the external world. Now we still have to account for the capacity of living things to do this at the most fundamental level, and when we get to the beginning of evolution, the proposed first life form, there is still the issue of determining where this capacity came from. The dualist already has the jump on this problem because the dualist apprehends the non-physical as causally prior to the physical.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your use of the word “magic” in relation to membrane assembly reveals a lack of understanding in how atoms and molecules ‘want’ to act according to these forces apokriisis described.
If you take a spoonful of lipids and place them in a cup of water that is in the right temperature range, these lipids will quickly assemble into the same type of membrane that encase our cells.
Check out figure 17.3.2 entitled “Spontaneously Formed Polar Lipid Structures in Water: Monolayer, Micelle, and Bilayer”. Our cells are encased in a Bilayer.
https://chem.libretexts.org/LibreTexts/University_of_South_Carolina_-_Upstate/USC_Upstate%3A_CHEM_U109%2C_Chemistry_of_Living_Things_(Mueller)/17%3A_Lipids/17.3%3A_Membranes_and_Membrane_Lipids
Sure, but they are already lipids. I used "magic" to refer to apokrisis' description of the appearance of the membrane, as if it just suddenly appeared without the need for any prior lipids or proteins. if you want to go further and talk about the creation of lipids and proteins, prior to the creation of a membrane I'm still going to ask the same questions, where did the lipids come from, spontaneous generation (magic)?
I’ll take your moving the label “magic” from spontaneous membrane formation to spontaneous lipid formation as a small amount of progress :)
Of course, in the right conditions, molecules like a lipid also spontaneously form through the chemical bonds of their constituent atoms.
At the moment, I am reading Nick Lane’s new book “The Vital Question, Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life.” which I highly recommend if you want to get past looking at this stuff as magic.
Here's what I find in review of the book on Wikipedia:
Notice the quote "speculation far outpaces evidence in many of the book's passages". As I explained to you, it is a waste of time to read speculation which goes in the wrong direction. The evidence is on the side of the non-physical.
Have we put to bed the issue of whether lipids and lipid membranes can spontaneously form in the right conditions through atomic forces?
As for the book review, I’ll let Requarth finish. “But perhaps for a biological theory of everything, that’s to be expected, even welcomed.” Lane's book is also filled with lots of hard science, and to the degree he advances unproven theory, these theories will be arbitrated through the hard work of science, as they should be.
For a moment, I imagined a Requarth critique of your one paragraph metaphysical logic concluding the non-physical did it, but that too is speculation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I am a little surprised a self described Metaphysician would call a textbook flaw in logic “nit picking.” How about we refer to your revision as C2?
A) The living physical body came into existence as an organized structure.
B) Therefore the "organizer" precedes the physical body.
C2) No inanimate physical thing is capable of doing such organizing.
D) Therefore the organizer must be non-physical.
I'll start my critique of C2 by pointing out that “inanimate” can have multiple meanings. I suspect you mean the old school ‘there is no life in an element on the periodic table’ kind of definition, but that does not explain how lipids can spontaneously form, in the right conditions, and then organize themselves into membranes. If you peer into the world of protons and electrons, one finds their actions far from inanimate. So in a very important sense, there is no such thing as an “inanimate physical thing.”
If you are trying to use a strict definition of life as he threshold for animate, Nick Lane points out in his book that life is a spectrum rather than some hard line. Take a mushroom spore, in the right conditions it can can exist indefinitely as a static collection of molecules. Is that spore alive? If so, how?
Every so called “inanimate” component inside a ‘living’ cell physically acts and reacts on its own, in accordance with the atomic forces of the molecules they are comprised of and surrounded by, and the cell itself is acting and reacting with atomic forces in its environment.
I would call that magic.
Quoting Read Parfit
OK, you leave my argument inconclusive due to ambiguity as to the difference between living and non-living. That's fine for the physicalist, but the dualist accepts no such ambiguity. The ambiguity you describe is just the result of a failure of physicalist metaphysics to be able to distinguish between living and not-living through disrespect for the non-physical. So the ambiguity you refer to is just evidence of physicalist deficiencies.
Quoting Read Parfit
But lipids cannot spontaneously form from inanimate matter, and organize themselves into membranes, that's fiction. So you create ambiguity through reference to fiction, then you use that ambiguity to claim my argument is inconclusive.
You could use that ploy against any argument. You could refer to some fiction, and say that the possibility of this fiction being true renders premise X as unsound, therefore we must dismiss the argument. But all you are really doing is pointing out the weakness in inductive reasoning. You are saying that some "instance of occurrence" could happen along to disprove the inductive premise, so we ought to dismiss the premise as unsound. But this "instance of occurrence" is just fiction so it doesn't really serve the purpose you want it to.
Quoting Read Parfit
This is exactly why we need to refer to the non-physical to account for the unity of "being" displayed by a living being.
— Read Parfit
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Seriously? If you are using magic for a metaphor for atomic forces, then you are just playing word games. If you think atomic forces are actual magic, you need to take a high school chemistry class. Your metaphysical argument puts great weight on the term “inanimate physical thing”. The least you could do is brush up on the underlying forces behind physical things before you start making wholesale assumptions reflected in D.
I'm educated in high school chemistry, biology, and physics. The existence of lipids is not caused by "atomic forces". You really don't seem to know what you're talking about.
https://www.ck12.org/c/physical-science/atomic-forces/lesson/Atomic-Forces-MS-PS/
I'm not gonna lie, I meant to refer to molecular forces, which, no doubt, are influenced by atomic forces. I'm obviously not a chemistry expert. Regardless, I think the facts support my assertion that lipids spontaneously form in the right conditions like those that exist in a alkaline hydrothermal vent.
That's why Requarth said "speculation far outpaces evidence" in Lane's book, and why I say you invoke the magical appearance of a membrane.
— Read Parfit
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is interesting that you know Requarth was referring to lipid membrane formation when he said that. To hear Nick Lane tell it, the tougher question about the hydrothermal vent theory is how the CO2 and H2 reaction became mechanized. There is considerable scientific debate on this point. Nick stakes out a position, other prominent scientists disagree. They are all scrambling to be the first to demonstrate their ideas in the lab. I would suspect that Requarth was referring to this speculation, but his sentence is vague.
I find it a little embarrassing for you that you deny that lipids can spontaneously from in the right conditions. While you do posses notable debating skills, no amount of diversion or word twisting can change how the lipid molecule does or does not form.
Who would'a thunk? Science has to generate speculation to give its experiments something to knock down.
I guess some folk still believes science works the other way. First up pops some significant experimental fact, some inconvenient laboratory truth, and everyone gathers around to invent a new theory.
But the efficient way to search for answers is to have formed a clear idea of what you might be looking for.
If you read Lane, you might be impressed by the way science works to narrow the options. It used to be thought that life would have to start with little fatty vesicles - spontaneously developing proto-cells.
But in considering the problems of life beginning on boiling hot ocean floor vents, that narrowed attention to luke-warm alkaline ones. And that in turn threw up the speculative possibility that the porous mineral structure of those vents already gave you the kind of reaction chambers you need. Even before fatty vesicles, the right kind of material constraints would be in place to get the barest form of metabolic reaction going.
Of course the only way to judge the reasonableness of such speculation - which ran ahead of the experiments now being done by Lane and others - would be to actually read his book.
A revolutionary concept, I guess.
Another really important popular science account - maybe even more important as a glimpse into the future of biology - is Peter Hoffman's Life's Ratchet. See http://lifesratchet.com/
Or it could be that Pattee is adopting a useful rhetorical position in which the glass is half-empty rather than half-full.
It is definitely part of his character that he pushes the expected scientific attitude of: "Well, we don't really know yet. And we may never actually know the answer on abiogenesis because we haven't got a time machine to go back and see what may have been some of the accidental steps along some actual sequence of events."
Pattee set himself apart from his mostly far more easy-going theoretical biology colleagues on this score. There are always plenty happy to believe they have the answer - RNA world, or whatever. And Pattee's chosen role was to be the one bringing clarity to the actual question to be answered. So he was always saying, hold up, not yet. You will have to go deeper than that to count as a final theory.
So what you are hearing is the kind of rigour that makes science a metaphysically-responsible exercise worth doing.
It is certainly not any kind of semi-religious wavering - the thought that the causes of life and mind might not have a naturalistic explanation. I never heard Pattee make the faintest nod in that direction. And the subject did come up as others in his circle, like Robert Ulanowicz, were openly theistic.
Pattee would be the most hard-nosed of materialists and so resisted Peircean metaphysics and semiotics pretty strongly - until he was converted and came out with his late flood of papers arguing the case elegantly.
Quoting Wayfarer
But the cut exists. The abiogenetic issue is how could it have evolved as it seems there is a significant gap to leap.
And now - in just the past decade - that gap has shrunk dramatically, as Nick Lane and Peter Hoffman can tell you from their frontline position in experimental biology.
With Hoffman, the gap is pretty much literally not there. At the quasi-quantum nanoscale, where the entropic costs of converting thermal gradients to negentropic work falls effectively to zero, life is left with no choice but to get started.
The epistemic cut simply is lying there on the floor ready to be picked up. It doesn't need to be created anymore. You couldn't avoid stumbling into its grip if you are some passing biochemical process. The likelihood of life not breaking out falls to some improbably tiny number that we might as well call zero.
If it's true, then where is the evidence? Where are all these lipids which are spontaneously forming in the right conditions? Or is it simply the case that "the right conditions" just don't exist and therefore lipids just aren't spontaneously forming? And, "the right conditions" is a convenient fiction which substitutes for "magic".
As I explained to Read Parfit, both the evidence and the logic indicate that the correct direction for speculation is into the nature of the non-physical, and how the non-physical "soul" brings about the existence of living physical bodies. That's why I consider reading books with speculations in an opposing direction to be a waste of time.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If you want evidence of lipids spontaneously forming in the right conditions, just check out the gut of the average American :).
When you ask something like, “where is the evidence?” in hydrothermal vents, or other places, it turns out that your question is very hard answer since Earth is not a sterile lab at this point. Lipids are in about every living organism, and when you find them in these places, it is pretty much impossible to tell if they were assembled from their component elements, or the byproduct of existing life. They have been produced in the lab, but that only gets the science so far. This is just one aspect that makes the science hard, and it is something that scientists will have to sort out, but this difficulty has nothing whatsoever to do with magic.
I find your regularly invoking the term “magic” for any unanswered aspect of a scientific theory both disrespectful and unhelpful. It is disrespectful because science is the opposite of magic, and you must know it gets under the skin of anyone that respects the process of science to be accused of relying on it. I think there is a good argument that your repeated accusations of my relying on magic are a form of taunting.
But past that, it is simply unhelpful in discourse. You use the term as a substitute for making a constructive counter argument. In my view it took way too many exchanges for you to finally say that what you meant by “magic” is that the right conditions do not exist.
So do lipids have eternal souls that bring about their existence in nature? Tell us more.
You don't seem to understand the scientific version of hylomorphism - the kind where global organisation can form "spontaneously" to meet some finality. The word spontaneous is used here to denote that there is no particular local material/efficient cause that produces the global organisation. Instead there is some generalised finality being served which does the trick.
In the case of lipids forming micelles, the finality is the usual one of entropy minimisation. The lipid molecules have no choice but to find the configuration which is the least energy-demanding possible. And any kind of nudge or fluctuation at all is going to be enough of a local material push to set that chain of dominoes falling to its inevitable conclusion - a micelle arrangement with all the hydrophobic tails tuck up inside, safely far from any surrounding water.
So for a modern biological Aristotelian, we have our notions of final/formal cause that make measurable sense. We have a second law of thermodynamics. We can apply it universally in a way that explains micelles and vesicles as spontaneous necessities. They are forms of material organisation that can't not happen as even the most "non-physical" nudge - the faintest possible accidental fluctuation - is going to tumble everything in that direction. The outcome is almost Platonically pre-destined.
But what is the story for your scholastic Aristotelianism? What about nature does it manage to explain in a way that has any pragmatic use these days?
What does the Bible say about the origin of lipids, and hence micelles and vesicles? Point us to the relevant chapter and verse.
You don't seem to understand final cause. Final cause requires intention, the non-physical. So to say that global organisation occurs "spontaneously" to meet some finality, is to say that intention, the non-physical is involved in this process, expressed by being directed to meet some finality.
Quoting apokrisis
But lipids don't form spontaneously, their existence is caused. And that causation is directed toward some purpose. That they have a standard, non-random behaviour is what makes them useful.
Quoting apokrisis
Actually your notion of final cause does not make sense. You claim that organisation occurs "to meet finality" which implies necessarily, "purpose", but then you deny the non-physical, "intent" which is implied by purpose. No physical existent is ever directed to meet some finality without intent. If you remove that non-physical aspect, intent, you do not have a case of a physical existent being directed toward some finality. Intent is the essence of being directed to meet some finality. By removing that non-physical aspect, intent, from finality, you are left with nonsense.
They form membranes spontaneously. You forgot, or never understood, what was said.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Godless nonsense I’m sure. :grin:
Can purpose refer to function or reason instead of intent, and thereby to a strictly physical (as opposed to mental, or non-physical) process?
For example:
1) The purpose (function) of the heart is to pump blood.
2) The purpose of (reason for) photosynthesis is to convert light into chemical energy.
Did Aristotle define telos in terms of reason or intent?
I suppose we need to define "spontaneously" then. Does this mean "without a cause", or does it mean "voluntarily"? If the former, then finality is excluded, as final cause is a cause. If the latter, then we're talking about a non-physical cause.
Quoting Galuchat
If something acts with purpose, there is necessarily intent involved, that's how "intent" is defined. To act with purpose is to act with intent There appears to be a trend in modern scientific thinking to limit the meaning of "intent" to conscious intent. But conscious intent is just one form of intent, as there is still intent in habits and subconscious acts. Limiting "intent" in this way, to conscious intent, would leave all the instances of purpose, such as those in your examples, left ungrounded. When we say "purpose" we imply "for the sake of something". And "for the sake of which" implies the reason for the act. The act is carried out for this reason, for this purpose. So if the act was carried out for this reason, the act was caused to occur for that reason, and that's the purpose of the act. That's what's known as intent, when an act is caused to occur, for a purpose.
So both of your examples, by referring to "purpose", imply intent. If you say that the purpose of the heart is to pump blood, then you imply that the actions of the heart are caused to occur by the intent to pump blood. And if the purpose of photosynthesis is to convert light energy into chemical energy, then you imply that the activity of photosynthesis is caused to occur by the intent to convert energy. That's why it's common for materialists, and physicalists to deny purpose from these acts, saying that they just come about by chance, "spontaneously", without cause. But It's very difficult to deny purpose from the acts of living things because the evidence is overwhelming. We know that there is purpose (intent) behind birds building their nests, and beavers building damns, and all the various activities which we observe of the living creatures.
Quoting Galuchat
I don't think "intent" was a word in Aristotle's Greece. I believe it comes from Latin. In his "Physics" he defined final cause as "that for the sake of which". The example he gave is that if a man walks for his health, then health is the cause of the man walking, in the sense of final cause. The man has an idea, a goal, "health", and this is the cause of him walking. This is commonly called, by us, intent.
"Reason" is a much more vague and ambiguous term. It can be used as "the act of reasoning", or "the reason for". But even as "the reason for", it is very ambiguous, lending itself to all the different types of causation. The cause of something (final, efficient, whatever) is the reason for it. So it's better not to interpret final cause in terms of "reason". And I think if one did interpret it in this way, very strict limitations would need to be put on the definition of "reason".
Yeah. I did. The spontaneous part of "spontaneous symmetry-breaking" refers to the fact that any old material nudge is going to tip everything in some collective symmetry-breaking direction. So it says, yes, you need some kind of material/efficient cause to get things going. But the very least imaginable fluctuation is going to do that.
It doesn't have to be a fluctuation of any particular formed kind. It doesn't have to be a fluctuation with any degree of intention. It is the very opposite of any kind of voluntary act. It is a pure accident. Whatever happened, it would have resulted in the same effect.
A classic example of this is a ball balanced on top of a dome. It is going to roll off one way or another of its own accord. Well, it will need a nudge to get going. But there is always going to be some vibration or other that tips the balance.
So in the physics of symmetry-breaking and self-organisation, the notion of "spontaneous" in regards to material/efficient cause is very well defined.
And likewise, the final/formal cause is well understood. If there is a state of organisation that can lower a system's entropy - like a ball rolling of a dome - then finality will drive that to happen. It so wants to happen, that is the reason any old nudge is going to get you started.
It is the usual reciprocal or dichotomous story. The more powerful the entropic urge, the less material push it takes to get things going. Hence you have this sharp contrast between tiny pushes and outlandish effects.
Continuing with the SEP article (2. The Four Causes):
"Moreover, a teleological explanation of the type sketched above does not crucially depend upon the application of psychological concepts such as desires, beliefs and intentions. This is important because artistic production provides Aristotle with a teleological model for the study of natural processes, whose explanation does not involve beliefs, desires, intentions or anything of this sort. Some have contended that Aristotle explains natural process on the basis of an inappropriately psychological teleological model; that is to say, a teleological model that involves a purposive agent who is somehow sensitive to the end. This objection can be met if the artistic model is understood in non-psychological terms. In other words, Aristotle does not psychologize nature because his study of the natural world is based on a teleological model that is consciously free from psychological factors."
Well that's not really "spontaneous" then. That little nudge is the cause. And so it's just as I say. the lipid's tendency to behave in this way, upon being "nudged" is the reason why they are useful, and are produced.
Quoting apokrisis
It's not pure accident, the lipids have a physical constitution which makes them tend to behave this way. Other things don't behave in this way, this behaviour is proper to, and essential to these lipids. So it really can't be said to be accidental.
Quoting apokrisis
Have you ever tried to balance a ball on a dome? That very nudge (vibration or whatever) which you say will get the ball going, will prevent the ball from being balanced. So the direction the ball rolls depends on how you place it, because it's never going to be balanced. It's a false example. If you do happen to get something balanced in this way, then it will take a cause to unbalance it, and it will move in some direction or another depending on that cause.
That's right, the model doesn't have to be, and should not be taken as "psychological", that's what I explained. Those who restrict "intent", to conscious intent (psychological), necessitate a psychological model of final cause. This will lead to panpsychism when we try to explain all the purpose (intent) in the world in other living things which are not conscious. That's why we must look to something other than the mind as the source of purposeful, or intentional activity. If you read Aristotle's biology you will see that he attributes this immaterial source of purposeful, or intentional activity (which manifests as conscious intent), to "the soul", which all living things have in common. The intellect is a potency of the soul, just like things such as self-nutrition, self-movement, and sensation. All of these being activities produced by final causation (intent), as they are purposeful activities.
As previously noted here:
The intellect (mind) and soul (form of the living body) of the human being are united as one (according to Aquinas, not Aristotle).
So, how is the human soul (mind+form) the source of intentional activity if "...we must look to something other than the mind as the source of purposeful, or intentional activity." (as above)?
Also, if Aristotle's final cause applies to all of nature, it may help if you could explain what the final cause of an inorganic object or process (e.g., a volcano or volcanic eruption) would be.
United as one, does not deny identifiable parts. It means that the two named things exist within one united being. Different attributes are united as one, in one being, but that does not mean that the attributes are not identifiable as distinct.
Quoting Galuchat
I think that this question indicates that you misunderstand the meaning of "united as one". When two things are united as one, each part has a different relation to the one united thing. So "soul" could refer to the source of intentional activity, and "mind" could have a different relation to intentional activity, while the two are united as one in the human being.
Quoting Galuchat
I don't think I said anything to imply that final cause is evident in inanimate things.
If the soul (mind+form of the body) is the source of intentional activity, and we must look to something other than the mind as the source of intentional activity, then is it more accurate to say that the form of the body (and not the soul) is the source of intentional activity?
If so, is physiology an example of nonconscious intentional activity produced by the form of the body independent of the mind?
Do mind and form of the body interact? If so, how?
I don't think I said anything to imply that final cause is evident in inanimate things.
Metaphysician Undercover
You didn't, but if final cause applies to all of nature, and not just living organisms, we should be able to describe it using the same terms (e.g., "nonconscious intent") with reference to inorganic objects and processes.
I'm just trying to determine whether (given Aristotle's avoidance of psychological terms such as "intent") the use of even "nonconscious intent" to describe final cause should be avoided in favour of another, such as "end" (telos). It seems to me that using "intent" with reference to final cause is equivocal, possibly serving an unnecessary theological (as opposed to strictly scientific) end (read: Thomist viewpoint superseding Aristotelian viewpoint).
Continuing with the SEP article (3. The Four Causes in the Science of Nature):
"In the Physics, Aristotle builds on his general account of the four causes by developing explanatory principles that are specific to the study of nature. Here Aristotle insists that all four causes are involved in the explanation of natural phenomena, and that the job of “the student of nature is to bring the why-question back to them all in the way appropriate to the science of nature” (Phys. 198 a 21–23)."
As I understand, the soul is not the form of the body. It is an immaterial form, prior to the body. This is where dualism comes into play, and where the Neo-Platonists, consequently Aquinas, differ from Aristotle,. There are material forms, which are forms of bodies, and also separate immaterial forms.
Quoting Galuchat
I don't see this equivocation. "Intent" and "end" are both applicable terms, one is of the general, the other particular. "End" refers to the particular, best understood as "the good", that which is desired, the particular thing which one is trying to bring about in an intentional act. I'm not sure what "telos" is supposed to mean "Intent" refers to the general, what lies behind the recognition of particular goods. but sometimes "intent" will be used to refer to the particular, as in "what was your intent?". So long as we avoid confusing the particular with the general in terms of usage, there is no equivocation
Quoting Galuchat
Sure, we need to refer to all four causes to understand all aspects of nature, but he clearly indicates that some phenomena do not require application of all four causes in order to understand them. If some phenomena can be understood without applying final cause, then so be it. Aristotle's intent, in defining the four distinct ways in which "cause" is used, was to avoid ambiguity, because "cause" at that time had all these different meanings. So he insists that the appropriate meaning be applied in each situation of usage, "in the way appropriate to the science of nature", to avoid equivocation.
To here:
If your understanding is not contradictory, your explanations certainly are.
And to @apokrisis here:
In my opinion, you have been presenting a view of Final Cause which Aristotle would not have endorsed. So, our discussion ends here.
Quoting Galuchat
Have you never read Aristotle? Final cause is clearly defined in his Physics as "that for the sake of which" 194b. Walking is for the sake of health, so health is the cause of walking, in the sense of "final cause". If you doubt me, look it up.
In his Nicomachean Ethics, "that for the sake of which" is called "the end". Human activities are carried out for a purpose, this is the end. The activity is the means to the end. The problem he addresses is that usually even the end itself is for the sake of something else, a further end. This produces a chain of causation (in the sense of final cause); this is desired for the sake of that, which is desired for something further, etc.. He seeks to put an end to this causal chain, and posits happiness as the ultimate end, what all other ends are sought for the sake of.
I really don't understand what your problem is. What do you think is meant by "final cause"? What makes you think "final cause" ought to be disassociated with intent? You really don't explain yourself very well. Why don't you try?
I've thought about this issue, and I've come to realize that the problem here is not with ambiguity in the word "intent", or "final cause", or the word "end",we're beating around the bush here. Our difficulty in communication stems from ambiguity in the word "form".
This word, "form" has taken on many different meanings from Plato, Aristotle, Neo-Platonists, Christian theologians, through to modern usage. I started with a strictly Aristotelian use of "form" in the definition of "soul", and you responded with a Thomistic understanding of "soul". The point being that the meaning of the word "form" had already gone through a Neo-Platonist transformation between Aristotle and Aquinas, providing the ontology which allows for the independent existence of Forms.
That seems to be where we have disagreement, on the existence of independent Forms. Aristotle did not explicitly develop any ontology of the independent existence of forms, but his metaphysics leaves open the possibility of this, by providing the basic principles which act as a foundation. The ontology of independent Forms was then developed by Neo-Platonists through application of Aristotelian principles and reference to Plato's Timaeus. This ontology was accepted in principle into Christian theology. You seem to hold some atheist prejudice whereby you will not approach these Neo-Platonic principles, which are completely consistent with Aristotelian metaphysics, claiming that these principles are strictly "theological", as if this means unphilosophical.
Quoting Galuchat
The principles of separation of the "One", the "Soul", and the "Intellect", from the material body, were already produced by the Neo-Platonists, who were more "mystical" than "theological", and these principles were received into Christian theology by Augustine and later theologians. The principles were not produced for "theological reasons".
In the first quote, it is someone else's ideas that are being described. The second quote is a declaration of personal belief. In this case the two of them contradict, as you say. Because they are the views (beliefs) of different people; people who disagree. :wink:
Thanks Pattern-chaser, but Galuchat seems to have given up.
The problem with that comment is that "electromagnetic radiation" was never non-physical, it was merely discovered to be physical. Unknown entities/processes do not entail non-physical entities/processes. You're conflating epistemological issues with ontological issues there.
The modern "cloud" for data storage, if maintained forever, would perpetuate your memories, through these writings. It is type of external soul. The DNA is also type of soul, since it is a type of memory storage that is unique to each of us. The DNA was inferred through the concept of reincarnation, where the genes memories of the past, can reappear in the present.
In tradition the soul is static. It is the spirit that animates the soul. The soul is like data on a DVD. You need to use a reader to make it come to life. There are natural spirits, such as instinctive needs and sensory input that animate our memories. There is also the divine spirits, which is more of an internal trigger, connected to choice and will power, which is part of the creative process. Choice and will power, in tradition, made humans like gods; divine spirit.
Relative to the DNA, our DNA by itself cannot assemble a cell or an entire human from a beaker of molecular parts. It is static like the soul. It needs a spirit, such as the organized proteins of a mother cell to feed and shape it. Or in the lab, we may need to add chemical and enzymatic spirits to animate the DNA so it can replicate. By itself it is static like the soul.
The ancient people, who created these concepts, did not have extroverted modern science. Their science was more based on introspection and unconscious projection. Now that we have modern external science, one can use the insight of the past to advance extroverted science. The ancients knew the software side, while modern science is more geared to the hardware. One can infer one from the other, if you know both. Metaphysics complements physics if you know how to translate between the two systems. Philosophy is sort of the bridge.
I rather think metaphysics is what its etymology suggests, something upon which physics is founded or based. In the case of physics as we understand it today, in Western technological society, it is based on subject-object metaphysics. The two topics are certainly complementary, in the sense that they are compatible, and don't really intersect at all. But you can't translate from one to the other, I don't think, simply because they are, as you say, complementary. Not sharing the same intellectual space, but existing alongside one another.
Quoting wellwisher
I'm not at all keen on the computer analogy, but if we are to use it, I think we must consider the soul DVD to contain data and programs, or even executable data.
A good analogy for the contrast between physics and metaphysics and how they relate, is connected to the complementary relationship between software and hardware, but to game software in particular.
In game software, the laws of physics do not necessarily apply. In the game landscape we can have infinite lives or we can levitate as part of the game action. The metaphysical aspect of the game occurs in the imaginary world of software. It is generated, in part, by the brain hardware, but it is also separate from the brain, in terms of the laws of physics. Only the brain has to obey all the laws of physics while the imagination can depart.
Back in ancient times, the physical world was ruled by the metaphysical world of the gods and spirits. The physical world was differentiated by means of the more open structure of meta-reality coming in contact with the practical limits of physical reality. I can hit a 600 foot home run in the game but if I try this in reality the result will be different.
For example, an architect can design a large bridge, made of glass, on paper. It looks fine and beautiful in terms of its structure on paper. The engineers who are commissioned to build the bridge are constrained by the physical limitations of glass. It may not be possible in reality. It may only be possible in the game landscape.
Going from the imagination to reality does not always work. Reality helps to set physicals limits on the output of the imagination. While the imagination creates game scenarios that places one in contact with hard reality, so we can differentiate hard reality, by means of the needs of meta-reality and the results in hard reality. The glass bridge may only work in the realm of the gods; software dreamscape or imagination. In physical reality we may need to change materials from glass and use carbon fiber and epoxy. From that we learn to differentiate reality.
These two concepts are the same thing. Big Foot, for example, is within the realm of possibility. Big foot is not overly magical or overly metaphysically gifted to be written off as purely imaginary. If he/she could fly or pulled trees from the ground, this distinction would be easier. Yet he/she has not been scientifically confirmed in terms of physical reality. This metaphysical projection from the imagination, is close enough to possible physical reality, for big foot to appear real, even if not confirmed as real.
If you ever read historical fiction, a historical time is properly characterized; War and Peace, in terms of historical events. The main fictional characters are given a relatable human side, that is reasonable and interesting. Even though this is fiction, there is sufficient overlap in terms of the imaginary/metaphysical and the physical, for some people to believe it is real. This technique is being used in the Trump mythology, to create a reasonable fictional/metaphysical and reality overlap scenario.
This closeness is what the ancients saw in terms of their mythologies of gods, super heroes, and super villains. They lacked our modern scientific foundation, therefore, what they knew of physical reality was very limited by modern standards. This made these metaphysical systems appear within the realm of possibility, even if not confirmed on demand.
Through the process of seeking to confirm the metaphysical; meet the gods, a distinction gradually appears between the two realms of meta/imagination and matter. Science starts to appear. Natural projection factors from the collective unconscious mind, were driving the metaphysical inductions of the imagination, to create an overlap and contrast for the conscious mind; test things. From these ancient systems and other induced data one can reverse engineer and map out the software side of the brain.
Dark matter and dark energy is a metaphysical system that is within the realm of physical possibility, but like big foot, it has yet to be confirmed in the lab. Even scientists are not immune. They lack knowledge of the software side of the brain to make this distinction.
Trump mythologies are different from dark energy. Unlike ark energy, Trump mythology is not driven by internal factors, but by external factors. It is not natural to the brain, and is causing a problem for many people in terms of unconscious backlash; fear and paranoia. Dark energy is motivating people to explore and seek truth through physical evidence. Trump mythologies is about avoiding physical reality so the induced metaphysical overlap becomes their reality.
No, they are part of a hypothetical physical (as in 'physics') system. Metaphysics, as I understand it, is not what you think.
They start in the imagination, which has a connection to the natural brain firmware. We imagine, and then overlap our imagination with reality, and attempt to build a bridge between the two. This is how we prove or narrow the correlation.
When you read about these things, instead of invent them, the creative process is a little different. The imagination is induced from outside oneself, by the writings. The original starts on the inside. The writings induce it from the outside. The philosophy student will attempt to overlap the external imagination induction with reality, to see if it fits.
Philosophy that perpetuates over time, begins in the imagination of the creator; Plato. This is connected to collective human firmware common to the human species. These are within each of us connected to human DNA. The writings help to induce the same firmware that created it, allowing the same firmware to resonate through time. It is natural output product of the human brain, that can be induced anew in each generation by the original writings. Religions use this affect. Of God means the entire process is natural.
The unconscious mind, where the firmware dwell, is the main frame part of the brain. It can absorb much more data in a subliminal way. The ego may direct the sensory systems, but the firmware is much better at collecting data. It can also integrate and process the higher data density to reach deeper or new conclusions. However, there is a gap between the unconscious mind and conscious awareness, which the unconscious attempts to bridge via the imagination. It uses a different type of language that is more spatial; symbolism. The ego has to help build the bridge from the other side. Plato was a natural bridge builder.
Some philosophy gets very esoteric because translating the 3-D language of the brain, into 2-D; cause and affect, requires a bit of finesse. The esoteric tries to simulate the third dimension.
There are no "underlying principles" behind reality. Reality is the master, the reference, and the principles you refer to are simply the results of human observations (and our analysis of those observations). This may seem like a nit-pick, but it's not. It's important to be crystal clear about what is the reference, and what is derived. The principles you refer to are derived. Reality doesn't need them; it just is, and works without the influence of, or need for, human-formulated 'principles'. Our attempts at understanding are admirable, but they do not bind reality, they reflect it. Reality is the master.
The rest of what you say appears to be a consideration of how humans create their speculations and hypotheses. An interesting topic, I agree, but I'm not quite clear on what it has to do with metaphysics. :chin:
I agree, but it would be helpful to define "physical". I offer the following definition:
The physical includes all objects that are pardigmatically considered physical*, the properties and objects that account for these paradigmatic objects, and all other objects that have those properties or are composed of any of the objects in the account.
* i.e. the stuff of everyday experience, and taken for granted as being "physical". The concept is grounded in our hard-wired perceptual capacities to interact with an external world.
Dark matter and dark energy are similar to the flat earth in the sense it is based on imaginary expectations, which appear to overlap physical observations. It is a theory but it can't be shown to be true in the lab anymore than show big foot can be observed in the lab. We can infer big foot from what appears to be foot prints, but he is elusive.
There is wild card. This is based on which of the firmware is being used to interpret the physical data. The brain has various levels of firmware, which have different natural uses, but which can be used for purposes different from what they are geared for.
There are three basic levels, with variation in each level, as well as overlap of levels. The lowest, in terms of the evolutionary foundation of the firmware, is connected to natural human instinct. The middle level is connected to relationship and the third level is connected to meaning.
Firmware of relationship organize observation based on how things appear to relate to each other. Long standing traditions use this approach. Objects and people are organized in terms of how they are expected to relate, whether this is optimized, rational or not. A family may have a unique holiday tradition in terms of decorating and cooking. This is not necessarily based on reason or optimization but is often connected to emotional connections; sentiment. It may represent a glory day that is being memorialized in hopes of being recreated anew.
Monarchies were big in the past due to this middle level induction. Some monarchies carry forward based on sentiment. Mythological systems were more then likely generated by middle level firmware. The firmware is also in science, such as in biology. Life is assumed to be based on random principles, even though data, 50 years ago, showed that protein folding was deterministic. Protein folding was predicted to be random but was not. In spite of this major flaw; flat earth, biology opted to continue the traditions; old time relationships.
The firmware of meaning is similar to relationship and evolved from it, however, this organization of relationship is organized around logic and spatial reasoning; differential and integral, without using an emotional attachment. The flat earth theory lasted centuries due to being induced by middle level firmware and being a way to induce middle level firmware via learning. This tradition gave a sense of conviction due to a natural reward system in the brain that encourages the use of firmware.
During the flat earth firmware induction, firmware of meaning were also active in some who organized the data in a different way and got closer to reality; round. However, this was not how it was supposed to relate, so this insight was delayed from wide scale acceptance. The reason for the delay was this insight too took away the buzz cased by the older induced middle level firmware. Instead it triggered the lowest level firmware; fear of novelty.
My approach is to show the behind the scenes working of the brain in terms of consciousness.
Quoting wellwisher
Your posts seem to be filled with absolute assertions. You never say "might be" or "seems to be", you say only "is". And yet you offer little in the way of justification. Admittedly, these things are difficult enough to discuss meaningfully, never mind justify. But all you seem to offer is an explanation for those who don't understand as you do, with no indication that you are even aware of alternative views. So let's have a good look at what you think. It may well prove interesting.
But your views seem quite novel, and could do with examination and consideration, not just an assertive exposition. You state above, for example, that meaning is "organised" (?) "without using an emotional attachment". For humans, some things are of moderate significance, and we have little or no emotional attachment to them. But other things are significant to us, and to them we are emotionally attached. And not just a bit either. It's a human thing. I offer no explanation or justification for that; it's just something we humans do. And it can be verified by simple observation. It isn't difficult to see or to find, and it isn't uncommon. So why would you state that there is no emotional attachment associated with meaning? :chin:
Quoting wellwisher
Do you mean to refer to stuff that is within, or without, conscious awareness when you say "behind the scenes working"? :chin:
By firmware, I am speaking of a type of software analogy, where the laws of physical chemistry are used as the programming language, so the line between software and hardware is not clear cut. I call this ambiguous state of affairs; firmware. Computer and human language is manmade, so there is a distinction between the hardware and software, since each works with different principles; human logic for software versus physical chemical logic for the hardware.
As example of the firmware that I speak of, the leaves of certain trees will change color in the fall. With computers, we can design software to change the parameters of the hardware so the monitor will simulate this color change. But wth the tree, changes in light and temperature, will alter the chemical environment so new chemical pathways become engaged. This is what I mean by firmware. It is a natural language, based on the laws of physical chemistry, that can be used to alter the state of the physical system in a logical and directed way.
Neurons expand up to 90% of their energy pumping and exchanging ions. They are pushing the neuron up an energy hill and storing potential energy. This is not a stable steady state since natural systems wish to lower energy. The brain lowers this energy in a controlled manner and uses the energy to alter the physical chemical environment in a logical and directed way so the output affects from the mind and body seem to have a software underlay; firmware.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
I began my interest in the unconscious mind back in the early 1980's. I ran unconscious mind experiments on myself to help explore and map out the psyche. Even though I had good and unique data, I came to realized nobody would believe me. This was not my educational specialty, but more of a hobby, and nobody would listen or take me serious.
I decided I needed to demonstrate a practical application from my research; demonstrate my enhanced creativity due to my rapport with the unconscious. Using this creative edge, I have pondered and written about the entire range of science and knowledge for decades. I have looked at consciousness from many angles in science, religion and philosophy and I have reached a steady state, where my explanations are consistent through all related areas from physical bio-chemistry to psychology to philosophy. It is not that I don't listen, but rather I have already heard, created and considered all these things over the many years of my journey.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
When the brain writes memory to the cerebral matter, aspects of the limbic system, in the core region of the brain, attach emotional tags to the memory. Our memory is composed of sensory content and emotional tagging. This schema is useful to the animal. If the animal sees a similar situation as memory, he will feel the attached feeling and can react to the feeling without thinking. If the animal sees the same food and he feels good about the food; from memory, he does not have to reinvent the wheel before he eats. He reacts to the feeling.
If the emotional tagging was to get very subtle, then one cannot easily react to the stimulus in the same linear ways the animal, since there is not compelling emotion. Mr Spock, by shutting off his emotions, has an impact on the tagging process. The conscious mind will need another way to deal with such data and memory; logic or dogma. If the logic is correct there can still be a bulk tagging, with a feeling tag of conviction. Although the ego may need to use logic for the raw data with subtle tagging, the unconscious mind, via the firmware, can organize this data using basic firmware organizational pattern; firmware of meaning.
Humans collect so much cultural data that the brain does not see the need to tag everything as important to natural survival. However, it still stores the data but with less energy expenditure in the tagging process and organization process. It is subtle and needs practice to read.
About starting threads, I dislike the thought of re-inventing the wheel, rolling it up the hill, only to have to repeat the whole process the next day, ad infinitum. Especially when many put in time, thought, and effort. Not to say that the questions are answered.... to the contrary.
Semi-random thesis / aphorism on the topic of this thread: Everything (which is independent and a singular entity) is also related, interconnected, and interdependent. It is our task to find out how. (cf. holon)
Also, this is a somewhat similar and long thread “The New Dualism”:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/3511/the-new-dualism/p1
(as a side note, it seems that a large number of the participants in this thread have disappeared or been banned. Could this be evidence that this thread is jinxed or haunted, thus giving credence to the existence of non-physical or unexplainable? Hmmm.... )