Platonic Realism and Its Relation to Physical Objects
Copied/moved from here
Quoting alcontali
The question I have is, if language objects have nothing to do with 'the physical world', then how come instructions, specifications, formulas, recipes, architectural designs, programming languages, and many other symbolic systems actually produce real changes in the physical world? How can we communicate information about the world using language, if language has 'nothing to do' with the 'real world'? Because we plainly do communicate information and produce changes.
I agree that ideas are not physical, but I rather prefer a dualist interpretation, whereby humans are able to interface between the Platonic realm of abstractions, and actual objects, to produce neat things like:
Quoting alcontali
In fact, the term "Platonic" is just a figure of speech to refer to an abstraction, i.e. a mere language expression. I just use it to distinguish them from physical, real-world objects. So, a chair is a physical object, but the language expression "chair" is not.
There is a simple litmus test for platonicity of the target of a language expression.
If you can translate it into other languages, then it must be a language object. For example, "5" is a language object, because you can also write "five", "cinque", "fünf", or "101" (binary). Therefore, it has nothing to do with the real, physical world. It is an idea instead of something physical.
The question I have is, if language objects have nothing to do with 'the physical world', then how come instructions, specifications, formulas, recipes, architectural designs, programming languages, and many other symbolic systems actually produce real changes in the physical world? How can we communicate information about the world using language, if language has 'nothing to do' with the 'real world'? Because we plainly do communicate information and produce changes.
I agree that ideas are not physical, but I rather prefer a dualist interpretation, whereby humans are able to interface between the Platonic realm of abstractions, and actual objects, to produce neat things like:
Comments (125)
Part of post-Galileo science is the role of quantification. Remember 'the book of nature is written in mathematics'? The genius of Galileo and the modern scientific method that grew from there, is the emphasis on quantitative analysis. This was greatly expedited by Cartesian algebraic geometry. So those, along with all the other great breakthroughs of early modern science, enabled the precise application of mathematical logic to physical properties. Of course, this also has a huge downside, a shadow, so to speak, which is the bracketing out or rejection of the 'qualitative', although that's a separate issue.
So, I can't see how you can argue that abstraction and symbolic representation do not represent aspects of the real world. The whole success of mathematical physics in the last several hundred years is inextricably connected with the ability to apply mathematical methods to actual experiments and real data. Hence the 'unreasonable efficiency of mathematics in the natural sciences', Eugene Wigner's classic essay on just this point.
I think a legitimate distinction can be made. Indeed in the thread this was copied from, I noted this quotation:
Quoting alcontali
I agree that '5' is a symbol, but what I'm inclined to say is that the symbol is not the thing signified (which roughly corresponds with the 'map is not the territory' analogy).
But what is the thing signified? Why, that's a number! And 5 = 5 (or 4+1, or 3+2, etc) in any language or system, or even in any possible world.
So I'm of the view that numbers (etc) are indeed 'intellectual objects', or ideas, as alcontali says. They're only grasped or known by a mind that capable of counting, but for any such mind, then 5 = 5. It's the symbol that is physical - the symbol is the physical representation of an idea. So there is a kind of dualism there, between (physical) form and (intelligible) meaning. That's what interests me.
But I *don't* agree that '5' has 'nothing to do with the real, physical world', for what I thought would be the obvious reason that applied mathematics is an ubiquitous feature of our day to day life.
Maybe if you folks stopped treating Kant like a religious messiah.
Kant was wrong. Philosophers, including the most famous philosophers, were just people like anyone who posts here. They can and often did say things that were just as wrong, stupid, misconceived, etc. as anyone says on the board, or as anyone says around the watercooler at your place of work, etc.
When someone says something, don't just accept it. Ask, "Is this correct? What's the argument or evidence for it (and what's the argument or evidence for the claims made in the argument for it? And for the argument or evidence for that . . . .) Does this analysis make any sense? Is this coherent/clear/etc.?" And so on.
Because there was a physical world a billion years ago.
You're not a young Earth creationist or something, are you?
You presumably mean that in your current human mind's eye with your current language and current psychological construct of 'time', your sentence 'makes sense' to 'like minded' humans ?
Correct !... for those humans a philosopher might call 'naive realists'.
As for 'creationism', I don't even know what that means except in terms of the imagined actions of a hypothetical anthropomorphic entity.
No, I didn't "mean" anything like that.
Naive realists think that what we humans call 'the physical world' has nothing to do with the active perceptual needs of us as a species. They don't understand that a picture of 'a world devoid of humans' is a current human construction useful for current purposes. As those purposes evolve, our perceptual states evolve, and with them the picture of what we call 'the world' (or 'universe').
Are you prepared to stick your neck out and say that potential solutions to current enigmas, like 'dark matter', will not not radically change are current concept of 'physicality' ? Or do you deny that current research in quantum gravity implies that 'things' are merely 'repetitive events' ?
Remember that what we call 'science' has only been going for a few hundred years...the blink of eye in the history of humanity.
If imagination is simply the mind combining prior sensory data or rearranging it to make up imaginary objects that are not correlated to the real world, then this sort of Platonic realm of abstractions is deflated to simply imagination which is a sort of mechanized reflection of our sensory world by our mind. There would be no Platonic realm more than this. Certainly, the Hard Problem of Consciousness remains, but this in no way proves that the internal/imaginary state is in some way linked to an ethereal realm of Platonic forms and what not.
Drop the labels and maybe we can make some headway. Labeling someone a "naive realist" and then attaching naive realism instead of what someone actually says is not productive.
Our "active perceptual needs" do not create the world ex nihilo. We are each of us born into a world that is not of our own making. It was here before any of us were and will be here after all of us.
What we see, i.e. the input signals we receive, create some kind of model in our heads, i.e. an abstraction of the physical world. With all complex abstractions being leaky, this process inevitably, occasionally produces unexpected results, i.e. situations where the perception as a model is out of sync with what it is trying to model.
We are not necessarily aware of when these perception errors take place. Therefore, I agree with Kant that we have no guarantee that the "appearance" that we see is a faithful representation of the thing-in-itself. In that sense, it is legitimate to declare the thing-in-itself to be an unknown.
Hence, you can even argue in favour of Kant's unknown thing-in-itself view using the law of leaky abstractions, with perception itself being the leaky abstraction.
Prolegomena, § 32.And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I just think that Kant is often surprisingly spot on. I do not believe that he was infallible or so ...
Fine if we discount the fact that 'before' and 'after' are also parochial human constructs.
We were born into a world of concepts which WERE of our own making. Start from there if you want to see 'productivity'.
Ah, the leaky abstraction, which is itself a leaky metaphor. I understand it to mean that abstractions sometimes fail to perfectly hide the complexity, allowing it to occasionally leak through, creating difficulties in understanding.
So if a computer program has a leaky abstraction, that means the low level details matter in some way that might be unknown to the programmer, who's trying to figure out why their program isn't working as expected.
Which makes me wander about the role of metaphor in conceptual schemas and whether Aristotle took that into account. Plato clearly uses a metaphor for sense impressions being shadows on the wall of the cave, and the forms being the objects clearly seen outside. But all that is a non-literal use of visual imagery, and could potentially mislead us.
Can a metaphor be a platonic form? Are platonic forms leaky metaphors, hiding the messy physical details, while sometimes letting them through? Didn't Plato have difficulty deciding whether some things had forms, like mud?
So when someone says something like this, I ask--is this correct? What's the argument or evidence for it? And the answer to that is?
I think it may rather be the case that theories of time are the constructs and time as we experience it and what occurs in time - getting older, for example, are pre-cognitive events, which in time we developed concepts of.
Quoting fresco
We are born into a world in which there is light and noise and motion and, if we are fortunate, a breast to latch onto, although the nipple of a bottle will do.
As Goethe said, and Wittgenstein quotes approvingly:
Concepts come later.
Well, there is that part of Plato's Parmenides where the question was asked if "participation" of a particular being in a form was more like being covered by a sail or happening in the same day. That is quite a range of speculation.
The status of mud is that it is not in danger of not being itself. The "participation" element seems to be related to beings that are in danger of losing themselves.
Umm, there's this thing called 'science'..... :yikes:
Interesting question! The idea of forms is intimately connected with the idea of universals, which in turn underwrite a theory of meaning. But it is hugely complicated by the fact that Plato's dialogues concerning the forms are very unclear in many respects, and littered with aporia; as if he himself had not perfectly intuited what the forms are, but had an overwhelming sense of their reality.
[quote=Kelly Ross]Thus, in the Euthyphro, Socrates, in asking for a definition of piety, says that he does not want to know about individual pious things, but about the "idea itself," so that he may "look upon it" and, using it "as a model [parádeigma, "paradigm" in English]," judge "that any action of yours or another's that is of that kind is pious, and if it is not that it is not" [6e, G.M.A. Grube trans., Hackett, 1986]. Plato concludes that what we "look upon" as a model, and is not an object of experience, is some other kind of real object, which has an existence elsewhere. That "elsewhere" is the "World of Forms," to which we have only had access, as the Myth of Chariot in the Phaedrus says, before birth, and which we are now only remembering. ...
Plato himself realized, as recounted in the Parmenides, that there were some problems and obscurities with his theory. Some of these could be dismissed as misunderstandings; others were more serious. Most important, however, was the nature of the connection between the objects of experience and the Forms. Individual objects "participate" in the Forms and derive their character, even, Plato says in the Republic, their existence, from the Forms, but it is never clear how this is supposed to work if the World of Forms is entirely separate from the world of experience that we have here. In the Timaeus, Plato has a Creator God, the "Demiurge," fashioning the world in the image of the Forms, but this cannot explain the on-going coming-into-being of subsequent objects that will "participate" themselves. Plato's own metaphorical language in describing the relationship, that empirical objects are "shadows" of the Forms, probably suggested the Neoplatonic solution that such objects are attenuated emanations of Being, like dim rays of sunlight at some distance from the source.[/quote]
The way that I interpret forms is revisionist - that the forms represent 'the form of real possibilities'. So, for instance, the 'form' of a wing must have certain attributes if it is to fulfil the function of flying; but this doesn't prohibit the fact of very different evolutionary pathways to the development of wings (i.e. bats, birds, pterosaurs, flying lizards, aeroplanes). So the 'form' of goodness, or of justice, or of vision/seeing, is not for a minute like an actual shape or even an object; it's considerably more abstract than that. Perhaps, then, 'eyes' are instantiations of the 'form of seeing'; not of some 'ethereal eye' object.
But I have no trouble envisaging that the world of real particulars as a reflection or a striving towards ideal forms. The question will come up, 'where do these forms exist'. To which the answer is: they don't exist! They don't need to exist! Things do the hard work of actually existing! The forms inhere in the realm of timeless possibility, above all change and decay. But they're not 'existing things'.
What was lost in the battle between medieval realism and nominalism was just this sense of there being a realm of real possibility. To us, possibilities are something that exists in minds, minds in brains, brains in bodies, and bodies are physical; modernity seeks to 'ground' everything in this narrative. Whereas
[quote=Eve Keneinan]The Platonic ideas are not in our mind; we are in them. They are not our servants; they are our masters. That’s why we experience awe and wonder at them. Most philosophies don’t have that power over our souls. When we speak of "awe" and "wonder" we don’t usually think of modern philosophers.[/quote]
She ain't kidding.
The "in-itself' which gives rise to that factual world is what I would call the "actual Real" ('actual' here has a different sense than the common sense: it should instead be read as 'the indeterminate which acts", kind of like Schopenhauer's "Will"). The actual Real is not a world, it is indeterminate. (It might be thought of it as sheer physicality or the Mind of God, but any definition must be thought to be inapt or merely a matter of taste) We determine the actual Real as world by factualizing it.
You must mean unknowable, right? Otherwise your post reads very oddly. (Which I realised after starting to respond to it.)
Not sure your non-sequitor there. The point is why would imaginary objects be equated with Platonic realm?
Quoting schopenhauer1
What is at issue in all of this is the reality of certain kinds of ideas. As we are discussing, platonism (small 'p') maintains that numbers are real, that is, they exist independently of any particular mind. But at the same time, they're only perceivable by a mind that is capable of counting, namely, a rational intellect. So they are described as 'intelligible objects' - real, but not material. So in that sense, not 'products of the imagination' at all. (Mathematical platonism is controversial and not universally accepted, but it's still maintained amongst at least some current mathematicians - Godel and Penrose often named in this respect.)
So the philosophical question is, what kind of reality or being do numbers have? Are they simply in individual minds, and therefore ultimately explicable in terms of 'what that the brain does'? (which would be the materialist view.) Because if they're both real, and not material, then this is obviously a defeater for materialism, which holds that everything is reducible to, or supervenes on, matter. So there's no room in that view for real numbers.
And they're not 'made up', evidence for which is the uncanny degree to which mathematical logic has advanced physics and science generally in the last several centuries. In other words, it enables real and testable predictions about the real world, which could not be known by other means.
There's quite a good SEP article on mathematical platonism, particularly the paragraph on it's philosophical significance.
I should also add that scholastic philosophy maintains there's a distinction between imagination, perception, sensation, and conception. Ed Feser has a blog post on that which is germane to this discussion.
I see. Certainly this goes to the idea that humans have pattern recognition. Quantification is one of these.
Quoting Wayfarer
I guess the question to you is whether abstractions have to be "Platonic"? What does that mean to be Platonic? What would an abstraction be that is not "Platonic"?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I had a thread going about mathematical realism. The idea that we are sort of patterns seeing the patterns. The patterns cannot help but create pattern-recognizers, sort of thing. This is a sort of neo-Pythagoreanism.
Attributes and numbers are real insofar as recognizable objects are categorizable and numerable, and insofar as we are able to symbolize those generalities and quantities. In that sense attributes and numbers are independent of any particular mind, but of course it is true that it takes a mind to recognize, categorize and enumerate objects. What further reality do you imagine attributes and numbers might have?
But it's not. You can't explain mathematics in terms of patterns, because patterns are by their very nature regular and repeatable. Reason and rational inference are of a completely different order. (There's a guy who posts on this and other forums about epistemology based on pattern recognition.) It's just one of the typical assumptions of naturalism that numerical ability evolved and is therefore understandable in terms of its biological antecedents. It's a lot closer to neo-darwinism than neo-pythagoreanism.
(Actually that book Emperor's New Mind is about this topic. I bought it, but Penrose is way over my head. Anyone wants a copy, they can have mine.)
Quoting schopenhauer1
They're good questions.
Mathematical operations are not "regular and repeatable"? Take the simplest operation: counting, for example...
Recognize the two things versus one can be a pattern.
In the beginning was the INTERACTION.
'Agents' doing 'deeds' are concepts privileging one side of the interaction.
(Note the biblical backcloth which sets up an absolutist axiom)
Actually I'm inclined to agree with Fresco, but I do understand how weird it seems. But when we imagine the Earth before h. sapiens evolved, say, we're picturing 'a world in which there are no minds' - the early earth, drifting silently through the empty void. But that is still an idea which is ordered according to the intuitions of space and time. The point about realism is that it is built around that human perspective and situates the concept in a temporal and spatial matrix - but then it doesn't realise it has done so.
Here's a passage from Bryan Magee's book which discusses this point in relation to Schopenhauer's philosophy:
Bryan Magee Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107
But also bear in mind Kant's claim that he was at once 'an empirical realist and transcendental idealist'. That is, he would not deny the common-sense or empirical perspective of the actual age of the Cosmos etc - after all, his nebular hypothesis forms part of current science - but he's pointing out the usually un-acknowledged role that the mind plays in "constructing" the realist narrative which is generally assumed or taken for granted.
A number is an abstraction that always emerges in a Turing-complete axiomatic system. For example, in the core axiomatization of functions, i.e. the lambda calculus, numbers are functions:
[i]There are several possible ways to define the natural numbers in lambda calculus, but by far the most common are the Church numerals, which can be defined as follows:
0 := ?f.?x.x
1 := ?f.?x.f x
2 := ?f.?x.f (f x)
3 := ?f.?x.f (f (f x))
...
Because the m-th composition of f composed with the n-th composition of f gives the m+n-th composition of f, addition can be defined as follows:
PLUS := ?m.?n.?f.?x.m f (n f x)[/i]
Numbers are also set expressions in set theory, types in type theory, and combinator expressions in combinator calculus.
Whatever you pick as basic building brick for your Turing-complete axiomatization, you will always be able to express numbers as expressions in this brick.
Surprisingly, if you pick numbers themselves as the building brick, your axiomatization will not be Turing-complete. It will be much weaker.
Therefore, numbers are considered an uninteresting type of building brick and rather a byproduct of a better and more interesting building brick.
For example, set theory is much more powerful than number theory. In fact, you can rewrite number theory as some kind of byproduct inside set theory.
In other words, the idea that mathematics would be about quantities, i.e. numbers, is really wrong.
Interesting. What discipline is this from? Computer science?
Your query about 'numbers' is perhaps handled by the Lakoff & Nunez idea that all 'mathematics' can be be related to 'bodily metaphors'. This is a side issue of the 'embodied cognition' movement at Berkeley, which was one reaction to the failure of computer modelling of cognition.
What about the sequence of prime numbers? Is that a pattern?
There is a theory of maths as pattern recognition. What I'm wary of, is the sense we have nowadays that if we can understand the kind of simple antecedents of something like counting as pattern recognition, then we have an in-principle account in evolutionary terms, so it becomes, like everything else, an evolved ability. Simple, eh? Whereas, my take on it is that, when humans evolve to the point of being able to count, reason, and explore mathematical ideas, it is at that point that they transcend the biological. But modern philosophy interprets almost everything about us in biological terms, although there are dissidents. (Even Alfred Russel Wallace was a dissident in respect of this particular issue.)
Quoting fresco
I'm aware of Lakoff and Johnson's book, 'where maths comes from'. Part of the book is about dismissing the 'romance of mathematics', which is not what I want to do. I see their kind of work as part of the naturalised epistemology movement.
'Divisible only by itself and one' is a pattern. Pattern is just recurrence.
Just need the basic inferencing capacity in place and the more advanced calculating becomes cultural learning. Caveman didn't need primes but he did need inferencing.
That is an important point. We produce the idea of a world, a universe, the world existing for a year, ten years, a thousand years, a billion years, etc.. We produce all these ideas from our own experience of time passing. The passing of time is a fundamental aspect of our experience which allows us to produce these ideas. But we haven't even the foggiest notion of what the passing of time actually is. So the situation is that we experience the passing of time, and we create a world, a universe, from this experience, but since we have absolutely no idea of what the passing of time really is, we absolutely cannot establish any real relationship between the proposed existence of the world, the universe, and the passing of time. Until we conceive the true essence of the passing of time, speculations about the world or the universe, billions of years ago, are just projections of one's own experience (if I would have been there at that time, I think I would have experienced things like this), but we do not have the foggiest idea of what it means to be present at a time, so such speculations are not philosophically useful. Before we can make any useful propositions about the world existing at a particular time, we need a determination of what existing at a particular time really means, of which we seem to have absolutely no idea.
The lambda calculus was first described by Alonzo Church:
Alonzo Church (June 14, 1903 – August 11, 1995) was an American mathematician and logician who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer science. He is best known for the lambda calculus, Church–Turing thesis, proving the undecidability of the Entscheidungsproblem, Frege–Church ontology, and the Church–Rosser theorem. He also worked on philosophy of language (see e.g. Church 1970).
Alonzo Church did not have access to computers when he described the lambda calculus:
The lambda calculus was introduced by mathematician Alonzo Church in the 1930s as part of an investigation into the foundations of mathematics.
There were no computers in the 1930s. Alonzo Church was known mostly as a mathematician and for his work in mathematics. There is a connection, however with what would later be termed "computer science":
The lambda calculus influenced the design of the LISP programming language and functional programming languages in general. The Church encoding is named in his honor.
Type theory was first described by Bertrand Russell.
[i]Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM FRS[64] (/?r?s?l/; 18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, essayist, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.
His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science (see type theory and type system) and philosophy, especially the philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics.[/i]
Russell certainly did not have access to computers when he described his type theory:
Between 1902 and 1908 Bertrand Russell proposed various "theories of type" in response to his discovery that Gottlob Frege's version of naive set theory was afflicted with Russell's paradox. By 1908 Russell arrived at a "ramified" theory of types together with an "axiom of reducibility" both of which featured prominently in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica published between 1910 and 1913.
So, I disagree with the mention in his Wikipedia page that Bertrand Russell would have contributed type theory to computer science between 1902 and 1908. At that point in time, computers did not exist, not even on paper as a concept.
Your description is conceptual, but the description is not the doing.
The existence of the earth prior to man and what we imagine or picture or form ideas of what that was like is not the same.
Aside from a quibble about the word "needs" there (which I'll avoid for now as that would be a major tangent), the claim above isn't actually the case. Insofar as we go, insofar as our perceptions go, etc., then of course the physical world has something to do with that, because us, our perceptions, etc. are part of the physical world. We appeared because of what's possible in the physical world, including that life was possible, that life evolves, etc.
Quoting fresco
"A world devoid of humans," in quotation marks, since conventionally the usage of quotation marks is used to denote the phrase, or we could say the idea, certainly would be a human construction. What that phrase refers to without the quotation marks, however, is not a human construction. To think that it is is to commit the most rudimentary of conceptual errors that would suggest no understanding of the use/mention distinction.
Quoting fresco
First, I'm not pledging allegiance to anyone else's concepts. So whether some agreed-upon concept changes, that doesn't affect my views.
At that, it's not at all like I'm simply hanging on to the coattails of science, no matter what the consensus or popular views in the sciences are. I think that the sciences forward a lot of ideas that are nonsense.
Describing is a kind of doing, but it is not the doing of what is described.
Our ability to conceptualize has led some to believe that everything we do must be conceptual or the result of conceptualizing. It is in order to correct this, to start from the other direction, from where concepts originate, that Wittgenstein quotes Goethe.
But with our 'philosophy hats on' we can play such word games ad infinitum. I have called it 'seminaritis' .For me, this one amounts to 'naive realists' squirming on the uncomfortable hook arising from Kant's point about the inaccessibility of noumena and the subsequent ditching of 'noumena' by later phenomenologists.
Obviously, an 'objective world' is useful picture for everyday transactions involving contextual attempts to 'predict and control', (maybe like a 'geocentric world' is useful for farmers). But it perhaps requires a bit of intellectual courage to realize that such 'pictures' are always human constructs, expressed in socially acquired language, and subject to delimitation or revision.
It is not a question of where concepts originate. You are right that biological understanding of languaging as 'behaviour' needs no such 'axioms', that is the point!
Quoting fresco
That there were dinosaurs that roamed the earth long before man has nothing to do with the Kantian distinction between noumena and phenomena or with phenomenology. Mediated understanding does not mean we must reject the existence of what is not mediated by human understanding.
Quoting fresco
Here again you introduce concepts that are not at issue. The universe prior to or in the absence of man or consciousness is not an objective world. The concept of an objective world stands in relation to the concept of a subjective world.
Quoting fresco
Of course the pictures humans construct are human constructs! That there are only human constructs is a human construct, a picture that some have difficulty seeing passed.
Is there anything other than human constructs?
Could there be any interaction within these systems if these entities were human constructs?
Humans are the judge of 'interaction'.
The interaction of what?
Are there entities that are not part of a system of human interaction? Are entities mind dependent? Is the mind interacting with itself or with entities that are not products of the mind? Is there nothing but the mind generating a world ex nihilo?
:up:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
:up:
Quoting Fooloso4
The point I'm trying to make, is that there is an inextricably subjective pole or aspect of all experience. This applies even [s]to[/s] //when we are considering// the objects of scientific analysis. This realisation has been more or less forced on science by the conundrums associated with quantum mechanics. But once you understand the change in perspective that it suggests, it's not nearly so outlandish as it first appears.
Even the scientific picture of the world, which I am not suggesting is fallacious, is still a construct or representation ('vorstellung') in Schopenhauer's sense. But we attribute it a reality which we feel we ourselves don't have. But that is treating ourselves as objects of scientific analysis, as phenomena - which we're not. This was the subject of the 'blind spot' article that we were debating in June.
Quoting Fooloso4
Could I suggest that in saying that, you're positing 'mind' as 'something within the individual' - my mind, or your mind, the conscious cognition of an individual human. Of course, within that picture, the individual is indeed only a phantasm. But that picture itself is but an aspect of the 'lifeworld' of us as modern humans with our scientifically-informed point of view.
[quote=Edmund Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences p108]In whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each "I-the-man" and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this 'living together'. [/quote]
It doesn't mean that 'the world is in the mind'. It's more like, world and mind arise together as objective and subjective poles, we have a shared world of meanings and common facts within which we all dwell. Within that, empirical science is the optimal method for discovering the common facts of phenomena; scientific laws and mathematical regularities hold true. Both 'mind' and 'world' are encompassed by that. But we need to recognise that in this sense, it's not 'mind-independent'; but that's a philosophical, not a scientific, judgement.
Quoting Wayfarer
This reminds me of De Anima where Aristotle says: "In a way, the soul is all things."
Yes, agreed. This problem is ignored and considered unimportant until our perception -- being an abstract model itself -- suffers from a serious abstraction leak, which inevitably, occasionally happens.
In the movie, The Matrix, taking the red pill even causes a permanent abstraction leak.
The individual in the blue-pilled world is, in fact, just a fantasy.
But then again, the world that they consider "real" after getting red-pilled actually has the same problems as the blue-pilled world that they then consider to be fake, the only difference being that they are not aware of that.
They never ask themselves the question if the red-pilled world is also not just a fantasy?
Not asking this question is a weakness in the movie. But then again, the audience which already has to get used to the idea of one fake world, could get badly confused by the idea of having landed in yet another fake world.
The audience watches all of that in a movie theatre screen which is specifically constructed to display pretty much fake worlds only, aka, "fiction".
Yes, that is self-evident.
Quoting Wayfarer
The object is what the analysis is about. The analysis is subjective in so far as (a) there can be no analysis without a subject to analyze, and (b) the analysis is limited by the state of our understanding, our instruments of observation, our methodologies and models, and so on. The object, however, is not subjective. Further, the analysis is not subjective in that it is not independent of the object. (See below on carbon dating). It cannot ignore or contradict the facts as we know them.
Quoting Wayfarer
We simply do not understand quantum mechanics.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, a picture, in so far as it is a picture of something, is a representation.
Quoting Wayfarer
You could suggest that but it is not what I am saying and does not follow from what I said.
Quoting Wayfarer
I cannot accept the notion that world arises together with mind. There is solid evidence that the earth was here prior to any mind that we know of. And here is the claims about the subjectivity of science becomes problematic. Radiocarbon dating works because we know the half-life of the carbon isotope C14. The decay is independent of any subject. It is in this sense objective.
This begs the question. The issue is not our consciousness of the world but whether the world exists independent of our consciousness. Husserl avoids addressing this question via the epoche or bracketing of the question, that is, putting it out of bounds of his investigations.
Profound saying. There's an ancient tradition in philosophy of 'man as microcosm' which is not too far removed from that insight.
Quoting alcontali
Right! Actually when I saw that film, it rankled me a bit because of the high-handed way they dealt with what is really a profound idea.
Years ago, I read a really interesting online article about why movies like Matrix, Inception, and others of that genre are so powerful - that they play to our sense that the world might be an elaborate illusion. I notice that sober scientific types will happily speculate about the 'holographic universe'. It's a theme in many kinds of literature.
But then, the Analogy of the Cave conveys something similar - that the ordinary man - that's us - is entrapped or enchanted in an illusory domain, from which the philosopher has ascended. But in that case, as is also the case with ancient Indian philosophy, there is a sense of a 'domain of reality', compared to which ordinary life is illusory.
Quoting Fooloso4
I understand scientific realism. I already addressed this in this post. We can't ignore facts, and indeed I don't. I'm not questioning scientific method, what I'm doing is questioning the sense in which it conveys or results in or approaches an ultimate truth. Which is, I believe, the purport of the above-mentioned Allegory of the Cave, where the concluding argument says that:
That is one of the ancient sources of what was to become modern science centuries later; but what was lost, meanwhile, was just the sense of the need for a kind of intellectual and moral enlightenment, due first the absorption of Greek philosophy into Christian theology, and then its rejection by scientific materialism.
One can accept all of the empirical facts revealed by the scientific account of existence without however coming to any conclusions about the overall meaning of the same, whether there is one or is not.
Can you provide a reference?
We cannot 'know' anything about the 'ontological status' of the entities we conceptualize other than they are 'useful' in our epistemological quests to 'predict and control'. Now it may be that from a transcendent pov that 'life' per se is part of a macro system, since the 'nesting concept' has no theoretical limit. (See second order cybernetics, but note that at least one 'systems' advocate, Bernard Scott, has proposed a limit that he calls 'God').
From http://www.aquinasonline.com/Topics/cognitn.html
Underline added. This is consistent with the medieval principle that the soul 'receives' knowledge of things:
https://thomasofaquino.blogspot.com/2013/12/sensible-form-and-intelligible-form.html
This is 'hylomorphic' (matter-form) dualism, whereby the material body is perceived by the material senses (e.g. eye, ear etc) but the 'form', which is the thing's species or type is perceived by intellect (nous). It is different to Cartesian dualism.
Quoting alcontali
I will try and explain very briefly how the above applies to what you've been saying:
In hylomorphic (i.e. Aristotelian-Thomistic) dualism, we recognize a chair because it is a form or a type. So there's the gross matter of the chair, the actual physical thing - that is what the material senses absorb. But at the same time, intellect/nous/mind sees and identifies the form, which is how we know what it, or anything, is. And we know that with a kind of mathematical certainty, because the mind knows mathematical truths, and the forms of things, with a far higher degree of certainty than it does mere sense impression.
Now, for the ancients, sense objects and the sensory domain were in some fundamental sense illusory. (In this respect, the Greeks weren't vastly different from the Hindus with the idea of 'maya', the cosmic illusion, for which see Thomas McEvilly, The Shape of Ancient Thought; the Greeks, however, had the vital ingredient of mathematical and a more scientific orientation, as opposed the purely religious mysticism of the Hindus.) So while the ordinary man mistakes illusion for reality, the 'philosopher', i.e. one who has been trained through the exercise of reason, sees the 'essential' nature of things, 'what makes things as they are'. In Aristotle, this was expressed as the fourfold scheme of material, efficient, formal and final causes, which was what was required to say what anything really is (what it was made from, what made it, what form it took, what it was for.) But since the 'scientific revolution', then the whole schema was changed to the 'primary objects' which could be quantified in terms of Cartesian algebraic geometry and Galileo's and Newton's new sciences; hence the origin of modern scientific materialism/naturalism.
Quoting alcontali
So, it's not as if the ancients didn't go through this same kind of analysis, albeit from a perspective which we now regard as archaic. BUT, I think they were far more aware of the sense in which the mind misconstrues the nature of reality/experience than we might give them credit for.
Modern naturalism, by contrast, more or less starts with the assumption that 'the sensory domain' is basically real. For example:
https://www.iep.utm.edu/indimath/#SH2a
But naturalism is not at all critically self-aware in the sense that traditional philosophy actually was*. And it's also forgotten what it has excluded. This was one of the consequences of the attempt in the Enlightenment to discard metaphysics in favour of what was purportedly "really there", the so-called 'real world' as object of scientific enquiry. But in so doing, the West abandoned some essential and fundamental aspect of their intellectual heritage.
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* Kant definitely was critically self-aware in that sense. But that's a whole other thread. I'm trying here to create a kind of thumbnail sketch of what is actually a vast issue in history of ideas.
De Anima, 431b20
If you accept facts then I assume you accept the fact that the world existed prior to man. But if you accept Forms then those facts are just images. And yet in the Theaetetus, the Platonic dialogue about knowledge, there is no mention of Forms. In the Republic, a dialogue about the politics of the soul that requires the mythologies of the poets to be replaced by a philosophical poetry, the Forms play a central part in the education of philosopher; but if one takes the image of image of that education seriously then it is only those who have actually ascended from the cave who know anything about ultimate truth. The image of the cave we read about is just another image on the cave wall.
What reason do you have to doubt the abundance of evidence of life before man? Do you doubt the fossil record? Radiocarbon dating? Do you think the dinosaurs are products of the imagination?
In what way is a paleontologist on an epistemological quest to 'predict and control'? The desire to know is not the desire to predict and control, although that may be one motivation and end.
I know nothing about second order cybernetics and cannot comment.
Thanks.
I suppose that what reminded you of this is the idea that things are not in the mind in the sense that the actual physical object is in the mind, but as I read it Aristotle is not claiming, as Wayfarer is, that world and mind arise together as objective and subjective poles.
You don't understand. I am not 'denying' common human scenarios like 'dinosaurs before humans'. I am saying that the act of constructing such scenarios is part of a cognitive process which is particular to the needs of humans In their quest to 'predict (or retrodict) and control' what constitutes their 'lives'. Such a quest involves concepts like 'causality' and 'time' which have dubious 'physical status' from a scientific pov. Maybe they are Kantian a priori's i.e. 'hard wired' aspects of our cognitive processes, but from a philosophical pov, it raises the issue of anthropocentrism colouring what we like to call 'reality'.
That is where non-anthropocentric 'systems theory', for example, could offer an alternative approach to ontology and epistemology, or indeed completely deconstruct them.
Well, it does seem to be particular to humans but I don't buy this stuff about predict and control as it pertains to all endeavours to know.
Okay...define 'knowledge' without reference to 'prediction and control'.
Tell me what the paleontologist expects to predict and control. Seems a little late for that.
There are some who desire to know in the same way that others desire to create music or art or poetry. There is for them nothing pragmatic about it. It is, rather, aesthetic or spiritual, a sense of wonder.
But you have avoided my question. The 'desire to know' is clearly advantageous in potential control of one's life, even from the trivial povs of 'being respected' or 'self confidence'. And I suggest 'objects or processes of aesthetic value' always have an element of organizational complexity associated with them which by definition involves 'control'.
You'd have to de-Matrix yourself to see that dinosaurs are fictional. Your opponent also lacks a vantage point to allow any more than conditional confidence. Think of science as a gigantic if-then statement. If blah blah blah, then there were dinosaurs.
Heidegger takes care of this vantage point issue (in What is Metaphysics?), doesn't he?
Yes, it can be but that does not mean that one desires to know in order to control her life. It may be the case that one sacrifices control of one's life in order to follow the evidence.
Quoting fresco
Making music or art need not be for the sake of control. It is often the other way around, one exerts control in order to make music or art, but as every accomplished musician and artist knows once the technique is mastered one must relinquish control. The sheer joy of play is an end in itself.
The term "mathematical truth", with the term "true" being defined by the correspondence theory (CT) of truth, is actually an oxymoron. A mathematical theorem will be "provable" from its axiomatic context, but never CT-true (about the real, physical world). Therefore, "provable" necessarily implies: not CT-true.
Mathematics is not CT-true by design.
Logically true (L-true) is also not CT-true, because L-true is just an arbitrary value in an algebraic lattice that represents a particular axiomatization of logic. Gödel's incompleteness proves the existence of knowledge that is L-true but not provable from any sufficiently-complex arbitrary axiomatic context. Hawking therefore says that this implies that there exists knowledge in the ToE that is CT-true but not provable from the ToE.
Quine's naturalist's approach is actually epistemologically sound. If the purpose of some type of knowledge is to say anything about the real world, then it can only be justified by correspondence with the real world. A mathematical theorem does not seek to say anything about the real world, but only about its abstract-Platonic context, and is therefore entirely exempt from this requirement.
Hence, mathematics is not CT-true but is certainly provable.
The terms "true" and the term "provable" uncannily exclude each other.
Not all knowledge is about the real world (a posteriori). Kant already pointed that out by deriving the existence of synthetic statements a priori.
Quoting Wayfarer
Science, which is the exponent of naturalism, is by design, not possibly critically self-aware. The reason for this, is merely formal, and even purely mechanical.
We can define the term "science" as statements about (physical) observations, for which we can look for counterexample (physical) observations.
So, statements about (physical) observations (=science) can never be statements about statements about observations (=statements about science).
Therefore, statements about science are necessarily not scientific.
Hence, science cannot possibly say anything about itself, while such ability to say things about oneself is a prerequisite for critical self-awareness.
What about applied maths, and what Eugene Wigner calls the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences'? On a really basic level, how come maths works in the real world, if it has nothing to do with it?
"Applied math" is not math.
If the object of mathematical language is the real world, it is not math. It is something else that merely uses mathematical formalisms to maintain consistency in its own statements, such as for example science.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, mathematics is unreasonably effective in maintaining the consistency of natural-science theories.
However, math is not natural science itself. As soon as you say something about the real world, it is not math, but something else.
Quoting Wayfarer
Math is consistent by design. The real world is consistent by assumption.
If you use math in modeling the real world, mathematical consistency and assumed real-world consistency will tend to be isomorphic with each other. The semantics of the rules with which you model the real world will have to come from elsewhere than math, but the syntax will indeed be guarded effectively by math.
In that context, math is just a set of bureaucratic formalisms that prevents the real world modeler from contradicting himself or otherwise making inconsistent claims. However, the real world modeler will have to provide the semantic "meat" from a non-math source. Math simply does not provide semantic "meat" about the real world.
Well, according to the definition:
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Quoting alcontali
Thanks, that's very instructive, but I think it's an artificial distinction. It glosses over most of what I find philosophically interesting about it.
Quoting Fooloso4
The expression 'co-arising' is Buddhist rather than Aristotelian. However, I would argue that the modern notion of there being a 'mind-independent reality' was alien to pre-modern philosophy.
Again, I am not arguing that 'the world exists in your mind'. What I'm arguing, however, is that there is an ineluctably subjective pole or aspect to all of our knowledge of the world, including scientific theories about the age of the world, and so on. The belief that scientific naturalism depicts the world 'as it is in itself' independent of any act of observation, is fallacious, as explained in detail in the essay The Blind Spot of Science:
Quoting Fooloso4
In the matter of Aristotle saying " Actual knowledge is identical with its object" (431a1), the "potential" knowing is the absence of the object until it is present. In the comparing of perception and knowledge, Aristotle focuses on our capacity for the actuality of the object to be the cause of perception in time:
"It is clear that the object of perception makes that which can perceive actively so instead of potentially so; for it is not affected or altered." (431a4)
If this wasn't the case, perception would not help the ensouled being survive. The universe would just be fake news.
Building on the element of being actualized, Aristotle says:
"To the thinking soul images serve as sense-perceptions (aisthemeta). And when it asserts or denies good or bad, it avoids or pursues it. Hence the soul never thinks without an image. " (431a8)
To complete the comparison, Aristotle says:
"Knowledge and perception are divided to correspond to their objects, the potential to the potential, the actual to the actual. In the soul that which can perceive and that which can know are potentially these things, the one the object of knowledge, the other the object of perception. These must either be the things themselves or their forms. Not the things themselves; for it is not the stone which is in the soul but its form. Hence the soul is as the hand is; for the hand is a tool of tools, and the intellect is a form of forms and sense a form objects of perception. (431b24) All above translated by D.W. Hamlyn.
The distinction between objective and subjective is treated here as the illusion. The range from living with only the capacity to feel touch to knowing other beings as they really exist points to our capacity in a different way than reflecting upon limits we cannot be on both sides of.
I agree with this, but I also maintain that the world is as it is independent of our knowledge of it. We do not know the world as it is but as it is for us. It is here, the world as it is for us that we find the two poles. Most of what is going on in the universe we know nothing of. Some of those things we will come to discover but others we will never know anything of given the vastness of the universe.
One question that remains is whether our knowledge must always be as it is because we are as we are. Is it possible to know at least some things as they are? We know, for example, the results of what happens when chemicals combine. A chemistry text book will tell us about atoms and molecules and chemical bonds, but is this just "our ways of seeing and acting on things"? We have images of molecules breaking chemical bonds. These images would not be possible without our instrumentation but are they merely artifacts of it or does the image capture what is really going on at the molecular level?
I saw this when I found the other passage. I wonder how far he intends for us to push the analogy. The tool requires the hand to manipulate it. If the intellect is analogous that suggests that the reception of forms by the intellect and senses is not passive.
The term "mathematical science" is an oxymoron.
A theorem is either mathematics or science but can never be both simultaneously. The two epistemic methods are so diametrically opposed that it would not be possible.
In mathematics, claiming anything at all about the real world is a constructivist heresy.
Quoting Wayfarer
That is unfortunate, because the problem is caused at the level of epistemology, i.e. the theory of knowledge, which is in my opinion the most interesting subject in philosophy.
The existence of different epistemic methods gives rise to the existence of different epistemic domains: mathematics, science, and history. Other subjects may not even be powered nor delimited by an epistemic method, and therefore, have no standard justification method. Such subjects are therefore not even knowledge.
For example, what is the epistemic method of sociology or economics? If there isn't one, these subjects can be suspected to be mere conjectures.
The theory of knowledge is a powerful tool.
It suggests that 90% of what the academic world is doing, is not knowledge but just a haphazard collection of worthless conjectures. The national education systems are globally wasting trillions of dollars on teaching matters that are inherently worthless. Only the theory of knowledge is able to give us that important insight.
Quoting Fooloso4
The oft trotted out 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences' would seem to suggest the latter. :wink:
So, be careful what you cite:
Quoting Wayfarer
it may show that you are, despite and unbeknownst to, yourself, a realist after all.
I've never denied it. I've said already a number of times, I don't assert that the world "exists in the mind". What I argue is that all knowledge has a subjective pole or aspect which is itself never visible to empirical observation but which is still fundamental to the act of knowing. That's how I read Kant. I think Kant's insights are fundamentally true, but in my experience most scientific realists don't understand him. Kant himself was also a lecturer in science, a practical man, but he well understood the ethical implications of the scientific revolution in a way that many others seem not to.
Remember the thread on 'eliminative materialism' - the point I was trying to make there, even though nobody seemed to get it, was that it's because of the fact that the subjective pole of knowledge/experience can never be made an object of knowledge that 'eliminative materialism' is able to deny its reality in the first place. 'The mind' is not something known to empirical science at all! This leads to the so-called 'hard problem' and all the interminable blather that those academic philosophers carry on with about a pseudo-problem that they have created purely as a consequence of the inherent contradiction in their attitude. (They're at it again in a new thread now.) Basically they're terrified of the mystery of existence; they would rather believe they're animals, machines or robots than face up to that.
Quoting alcontali
All part of a larger whole, in my view.
Quoting Valentinus
I think it's more that such a distinction was not part of Aristotle's lexicon. No philosophers of his day expressed their ideas in terms of "objective" and "subjective", it's much more characteristic of the modern period, although the significance is more than just lexical.
Quoting Fooloso4
I think the subtle point you're not seeing here, is that even 'this vast universe' you speak of, is still considered here from an implicitly human perspective. After all, science measures time in units relative to the rotation of the earth around the sun and distances of kilometers and so on. So that provides the framework, as it were, within which we picture the 'vast numbers of forever unseen things'. But the reality is vaster than even that, because it is not constrained by our human sensory and intellectual faculties. It's 'vast' in a way that even science can't imagine!
Key passages from Kant:
[quote=Critique of Pure Reason A369-370][i] I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensibility). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding.
The transcendental idealist, on the contrary, can be an empirical realist, hence, as he is called, a dualist, i.e., he can concede the existence of matter without going beyond mere self-consciousness and assuming something more than the certainty of representations in me, hence the [/i]cogito ergo sum[i]. For because he allows this matter and even its inner possibility to be valid only for appearance – which, separated from our sensibility, is nothing – matter for him is only a species of representations (intuition), which are called 'external', not as if they related to objects that are external in themselves but because they relate perceptions to space, where all things are external to one another - but that space itself is in us. [/quote]
Emphasis added to draw out the point that Kant sees empirical realism and transcendental idealism as compatible and not contradictory. I know this is a really counter-intuitive point but I think it's really important. (Incidentally there's a really good short essay on the continuing relevance of Kant that I like to draw attention to from time to time.)
Quoting Fooloso4
I'm not sceptical in the sense of doubting scientifically-established facts as we rely on them every day. So for example, if I were studying chemistry, then text books on that subject would be the authoritative source and what I would endeavour to learn and understand. We apply such knowledge and pragmatically benefit from it. So I really don't want to disparage science. But philosophically speaking, the issue is rather different. What I'm drawing attention to is the distinction between scientific and philosophical analyses, because the latter encompasses value, meaning and purpose, which are generally omitted in scientific discourse.
Nowadays it is a widespread belief that evolutionary processes are physical in nature, that humans are a kind of by-product of a random process in an inherently and factually meaningless cosmos. This is supported with reference to scientific knowledge; but I'm questioning that, by pointing out the sense in which even so-called objective or value-free scientific knowledge is still ultimately a human endeavour (among other reasons). Scientific materialism tends to 'absolutize' the scientific perspective, whereas I can accept it as a pragmatic fact, but whilst being aware of the continuing mystery of existence.
And it's the fundamental ambiguity that turned up at the 'heart of matter' via the discoveries of quantum mechanics that has really driven this point home. The main difference between Bohr and Einstein seemed to me that the former was accepting of it in a way the latter couldn't be.
Good analysis !
(...irrespective of my reservations about putting 'existence' on a pedestal !)
I don't think the point is subtle at all.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is simply not true. Physicists use light. The geological time scale is based on prior events of earth's history.
Quoting Wayfarer
And this shows the limits of the subjective pole and why it is only related to our limited understanding and not to what is.
Quoting Wayfarer
What I am getting at is whether these facts are artifacts. Do molecules break atomic bonds or is it this just a "mere representation"?
The Latin for construct is 'construo'. Facere means more generally to act or do, and by extension to make or construct. Regardless of the etymology the question remains whether a fact is an artifact.
Quoting fresco
I am not going to get into the debate of the Copenhagen interpretation. I know enough to know that I am not properly equipped to enter into such a discussion. Although there are some who think it has been settled, the debate continues between those who are so equipped.
Quoting fresco
I used representation in response to the quote by Kant cited by Wayfarer. The images of molecules breaking chemical bonds is not simply a concept useful to predict further observation it is itself something observed happening, the observation of a process. The process is real.
Added:
The description of the process may be incomplete or inaccurate but the history of science shows that we are capable of providing more accurate descriptions over time. The more accurate the description the closer it is to the way things are, not simply from the human conceptual and observational perspective, but in relation to the events themselves.
As a pragmatist I would think you would be concerned with what works. Let's, as you suggest:
Quoting fresco
It either exists or does not exist, or, given your aversion to the term, it is either present and plays a role in the physical world or does not. The assumption of its presence played an important role in the advancement of our understanding of light and gravity. The wave theory of light, was based on the theory of the luminiferous aether.
Einstein concludes an address in 1920 "Ether and the Theory of Relativity":
With regard to the classical notion of the aether Einstein retained only the notion that space has physical properties. Part of the progress of science is through its mistakes, but another part is through the correction of its mistakes. But there can be no mistakes or corrections if there is no accuracy of description and explanation.
I'm referring to the units of measurement. Of course the geological time scale is concerned with the age of the earth. But the units in which it is measured are devised by humans and settled by convention. And again, for there to be a scale, a perspective, then the act of measurement.
I have previously quoted this passage in relation to this issue, but it's worth re-stating:
(Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271. Linde is one of the originators of 'inflation theory' of the Big Bang.)
Quoting Fooloso4
When LaPlace's daemon held sway, then science was happy to shout it from the rooftops. When Copenhagen comes along, the whole issue is kicked into the long grass. :yikes:
I know that I can't 'do the math', but I've read a lot about the Einstein-Bohr debates and interpretations of quantum physics, and I think from a strictly philosophical perspective, a few cogent observations can be made.
One of them is how many of the books and articles on these issues talk about it being a debate about 'the nature of reality'. The nature of the wave function collapse is a vexed philosophical question, it's not strictly speaking a scientific question at all so much as a metaphysical one - not science, but the implications of science. And one of the currently preferred resolutions is the many-worlds interpretation. I have joined Physics Forum and asked questions about this issue, one of which was this: if the Everett relative state formulation is a solution, then what problem is it attempting to solve? The answers to this question were not at all clear, and it generated a lot of controversy (which is given short shrift on that forum). I think I have an insight into why, but many of those considered 'properly qualified' are not able to adjudicate it. So I feel quite comfortable to draw my own conclusions on that basis.
Quoting Fooloso4
The same question can be asked of all manner of principles in physics and chemistry. As I already replied these are practically and pragmatically sound; as pointed out, one can accept empirical realism without conceding that it represents the ultimate facts of the Universe, which is what is at issue.
You quote that a lot, but you never emphasise that it describes an ontic (real) conception of time immanently rather than an ontological (ideal) conception of time transcendentally. Observers are even characterised as "interacting systems" and one system coupling to another creates a relational time through their reciprocity, no human 'observer' involved at all.
Does this sound vaguely familiar to you, @Wayfarer?
Well of course all knowledge "has a subjective pole": this is so obvious that I think you are grossly underestimating the intelligence of scientific realists.
Of course empirical reality has both objective and subjective elements, the salient question is whether the Real (or the noumenal if you like) has a fundamental "subjective pole", and then if you want to say it does, what that could possibly mean.
Which systems are not created by human observers? This point is addressed in various places in Davies' text - there are those who argue that if you set up a measuring system and leave it unattended, then it is still performing measurements, but there are others who say that until the measurement is interpreted by a scientist, then it's not valid to speak of it as 'a measurement'.
We might imagine one of those spacecraft that has been sent out into the far reaches of the solar system, when it looses contact with the base station; it is still collecting data, but nobody is being informed by that data. And the precise meaning of the distinction between 'data' and 'information' is that 'when data are processed, interpreted, organized, structured or presented so as to make them meaningful or useful, they are called information. Information provides context for data.'
Quoting Janus
But this subjective pole is inextricably a part of scientific observation, which hitherto has been implicit or 'bracketed out'. That is the point of 'mind-independence' - the assertion that these measured entities exist whether they are being observed or not. That is the crux of the debate about quantum physics and philosophy. So I'm arguing against the mind-independent nature of the knowledge even of those entities which are customarily said to be completely independent of observation. I'm saying that knowledge of those objects is also subject-dependent, as per the essay that was being discussed in June on the 'blind spot in science'.
Quoting Janus
Means a lot! In theistic philosophy, that 'ultimate subject' is conceived as 'God' or 'supreme being'. But I think the reality is more quotidian - that the subjective nature of reality manifests in the form of human beings, who then forget to take account of the role that the mind plays:
[quote=Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation]Materialism is the attempt to explain what is immediately given us by what is given us indirectly. All that is objective, extended, active— that is to say, all that is material — is regarded by materialism as affording so solid a basis for its explanation, that a reduction of everything to this can leave nothing to be desired (especially if in ultimate analysis this reduction should resolve itself into action and reaction). But we have shown that all this is given indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and active in time. From such an indirectly given object, materialism seeks to explain what is immediately given, the idea (in which alone the object that materialism starts with exists), and finally even the will from which all those fundamental forces, that manifest themselves, under the guidance of causes, and therefore according to law, are in truth to be explained.[/quote]
Quoting Wallows
:roll: All I know about positivism, is that they wish to declare metaphysics meaningless and validate every proposition against observable states of affairs.
True, I should have just left it as logical space.
It is rightly bracketed out by science, though, just as the question of the existence of the external world is rightly bracketed out by Husserl. Science deals with the world as it is discovered via the senses. Subjectivity and objectivity don't come into it, apart from the requirement that observers be objective (in the sense of trying to be aware of and eliminating subjective biases).
Quoting Wayfarer
The problem with this idea is that we know the universe existed long before humans, so what was the "subjective nature of reality" prior to us appearing on the scene?
Light is used as a unit of measurement.
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course. There is no human activities, including measurements, that are not devised by humans
Quoting Wayfarer
Our understanding of time, the quantum world, and the universe as a whole are based on inadequate theoretical models. Trying to draw conclusions based on what we do not understand is fraught with problems.
Quoting Wayfarer
Both are very much alive for scientists and philosophers, and both lead to questionable speculative conclusions.
Quoting Wayfarer
It is not about the math. We simply do not understand what is going on. We do not even have agreement as to what the theories mean.
Quoting Wayfarer
You overstate the case. It is not about ultimate facts. We plod along. Some are committed to explanations in terms of the stuff of the world, others claim that this is not sufficient. My position is that a great deal of progress has been made by those who are committed to the former, while the nay-sayers chase a moving target.
.
[quote=Paul Davies]The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time loses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect.[/quote]
That's all for now.
Plenty. Most of them, in fact. Most of nature does not resemble a city. You will probably equivocate here on the concept, but the concept is not the thing. Taking an empirically realist stance towards scientific objects means those which are discovered do indeed exist, regardless of how they impress upon our understanding (IE, how we express their nature in concepts), it is still a fact that they exist. There really are molecular interactions, chemical interactions, quantum interactions, that our eyes do not grace. This does not make them less real.
You make it sound as if Lovecraft's Azathoth is real, dreaming reality, let us hope he does not wake and destroy us all.
[quote=Wikipedia]In the International System of Units (SI), the unit of time is the second (symbol: s ) . It is a SI base unit, and it has been defined since 1967 as "the duration of 9?192?631?770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom".[12] This definition is based on the operation of a caesium atomic clock. These clocks became practical for use as primary reference standards after about 1955 and have been in use ever since. [/quote]
You are trying point out to 'absolutists' what to me seems the obvious untenability of their position. It seems to me the substantive problem here is that generally pulling the rug away from fixed axioms (In the spirit of the Incompleteness Theorem) is inevitably iconoclastic of 'philosphical debate' per se.
In short, 'turkeys are not going to vote for Christmas' !
Here is an interesting discussion between Davies and scientists from several different disciplines entitled "The Reality Club": https://www.edge.org/discourse/science_faith.html
But furthermore, I don't think science will ever explain why f=ma or e=mc[sup]2[/sup]. I think one of the vast confusions of our age comes from the notion that science is going to, as Hawking put it in his Brief History of Time, 'see into the mind of God', although of course Hawking was fiercely atheistic. So I think Paul Davies' search for 'deeper laws' that explain the laws we see is misplaced. It comes out of the Enlightenment or positivist notion of science superseding religious metaphysics. It leads to a lot of disingenuous and completely meaningless speculation in my view.
(Another book I read recently was Jim Baggott's 'Farewell to Reality - Fairytale Physics Betrays the Search for Scientific Truth' (tough read, but worthwhile.) If more nitwit scientistic commentators like Coyne read that book, we'd all be better off for it.)
In any case, I'm not denying empirical facts of science, but pointing out the role of the observing mind in the scientific account. Reality includes the observer, it is not something that exists from no point of view. Or rather, the manner of the world's existence, or what the word 'existence' means or entails is meaningless without a point of view (which is the drift of the Linde quote). It is within the mind or a mind that perspective, duration, relation, and phenomena are synthesized into what we experience as 'the world'. (Interesting etymological fact: the word 'world' is derived from Old English woruld, worold "human existence, the affairs of life.") This is where idealism makes an important point: knowledge relies on a brain, which interprets percepts in accordance with logic, mathematics, and so on. But all of that takes place in a brain/mind. There is no 'light inside the skull', only the appearance of light. But as Schopenhauer says, we forget the role of the mind, having 'bracketed it out' of the reckoning, and then forgotten that we've done it.
Modern culture tends to view the mind as a product or outcome of a physical process. I think that's incorrect, but not because there is something called 'mind' that exists in any empirical sense. Put another way, given the approach of modern science, then it's correct to say that there is nothing called mind, because it's not measurable, quantifiable or objectifiable. You can't prove or show there is a reality or an object called 'mind' according to the criteria of empirical science, because the mind is never an object of experience (which is why Dennett gets a hearing). The modern understanding is that the natural world pre-exists the mind, based on the evolutionary perspective, meaning that judgements of meaning and purpose (among other things) are ultimately to be categorised alongside the other 'secondary qualities', and as derivative of the physical laws which gave rise to living organisms and then finally intelligent life (as the cherry on top of the cake). But this background understanding is why the whole argument about 'the mysterious nature of consciousness' exists in the first place:
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, pp. 35-36] 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 spatiotemporal 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 spatio-temporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.[/quote]
So the way I'm attempting to argue against that, is not by trying to prove or show that 'mind' or 'spirit' or 'God' exists, but by showing that science relies on reason, and that reason itself cannot be explained as an outcome of natural processes, as the very analysis of natural processes relies on reason, in other words, what it is trying to explain. (This is one of the major points from Husserl's criticism of naturalism.)
Or put another way, 'naturalism assumes reason'; that is how I would rather express Davies' point. It's not faith, but the simple fact that in order to engage in any kind of reasoned inference, to say why something happens, then we're relying both on the rational nature of the world, and on the mind's ability to grasp it. That's a properly philosophical argument, not one based on faith. (A lot of the emphasis on faith comes from the particular history of Christian dogma and especially Protestant fideism.)
Now, actually, there's an apologist argument, called the Argument from Reason, which is generally deployed along these lines, to argue for the existence of God. But I don't think you need to argue for the existence of God; I think you only need to understand how reason works, and where it stops, instead of trying to peer into ultimate causes. We have to learn to live with not knowing.
I take your point regarding distinctions made then and now. In the context of the Platonic discussion of how beings "participate" in the forms, Aristotle is giving weight toward the cosmos shaping the conditions of knowledge over seeing the intellect as something that is primarily about the centrality of any individual thinker. Both views are pertinent and discussed. It comes down to what is the ground of what that tips Aristotle's hand.
In the discussion on this thread and looking generally at the "history of philosophy" point of view, it seems how time is framed as an experience ends up being a big change between then and now.
Quoting Fooloso4
Aristotle agreed with that. That is an element in him saying that the influence of the sensed/known thing is not like setting another thing into motion. The receptivity of the ensouled being to become other things than itself at the same time it was being itself is not explained but presented as a phenomenon. And that element relates to the problem of presenting "forms" shaping "passive" matter. If the imagination is like this passive stuff, why is it so darn busy? The begged question was about figuring what is dead.
I don't think that's what's going on here at all. @Wayfarer is not really saying anything cogent at all; which is revealed by his inability to answer questions like this in any coherent way;
Quoting Janus
The way I see it philosophical debates are not about 'how thing are' in any absolute sense, but about what it is reasonable to say. What Wayfarer says is not reasonable or even coherent because he will say that he does not disagree with what science tells us about the world, but...and the problem for his position is that he can never articulate just what that caveat, that "but" is.
It's not clear what you think you mean by "pulling the rug away from fixed axioms" (or how you think that relates to Godel's incompleteness theorems), and it's even less clear how or why you think that would be "iconoclastic of 'philosophical debate' per se".
How about some more sense and less nonsense? Or else act in accordance with your faith, and keep quiet...
How is that approach better than others?
I presume you will need to refer to this "other thing" to go forward.
I suggest you use the word 'nonsense' as a response the demise of 'the given' identified by pragmatists like Rorty (which equates to 'the 'pulling the rug from axioms'). This implies that 'philosophers' have nothing authoritative to say about the content of 'epistemology' other than why they have nothing to say! So questions like 'Is it reasonable to believe that the universe is 14 billion years old ?' are rendered vacuous, because they are predicated on particular views of 'time' and 'the universe' which are not given, they are human constructs whose reasonable use is contextually bound.
So as for what is 'reasonable' to say, I suggest that 'philosophers' might confine their remarks as to the ethics involved in control aspects of epistemology.
(NB My use of the phrase 'in the spirit of the Incompleteness Theorem' should be self evident. If not, ignore it !)
The question of the age of the universe cannot be dismissed as vacuous by invoking Sellars' "myth of the given". Of course the determination of the age of the universe is not a given. I don't think anyone here has said otherwise. The question of the reasonableness of accepting the age of the universe can be turned around - is it reasonable to deny the age of the universe? And if so then on what basis? The age of the universe represents our best estimate given the current state of our understanding, methods of calculation, instrumentation, principle assumptions, and so on, all of which are subject to change, resulted in a revised estimate.
As far as I know, relative to some of the issues involving 'time' and 'matter' in frontier physics (Rovelli, for example), 'the age of the universe' has zero status in terms of 'interest value'. And when discussing 'vacuity' of philosophical questions in physics, we might bear in mind Richard Feynman's riposte to such questions..'Shut up and calculate !'
No, it is that you do not get it, and you don't seem to be aware of what 'it' is.
The only straw men are of your making - your attack on non-present 'absolutists' and axioms.
Quoting fresco
It is not that the age of the universe is of no great importance. Any lack of interest is due to the fact that there is general agreement as to its age. Despite Rovelli's claim that the nature of time is “perhaps the greatest remaining mystery”, he does not think that the universe is atemporal. He may not be involved with the question of its age but does not dismiss the question as vacuous.
Quoting fresco
Rovelli wrote a paper published in Scientific American entitled: "Physics Needs Philosophy / Philosophy Needs Physics". https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/physics-needs-philosophy-philosophy-needs-physics/
Sean Carroll, Ray Smolin, and others stress the importance of cross-disciplinary work between philosophy and physics. Feynman, who said, "“philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds” is not the final word on this.
'genetic epistemology' seemed to give a more succinct account of a state transition process between 'consensual knowledge' and 'world' without the need to name specific swayers of zeitgeist, 'philosophical' or otherwise.
I recommend you read Rovelli's 'The Order of Time' before you give judgement on his opinion on 'temporality', especially when he devotes part of it to show how 'time' can be eliminated from the fundamental equations of physics.
What are you going on about? There is nothing commercial or reactionary about what he says. He points to Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohr and Einstein for acknowledging the importance of philosophy. Are you going to accuse them of commercial reactionary posturing as well?
Quoting fresco
You completely miss the point he makes with regard to the fundamental equations of physics. Simply put, they are inadequate as an explanation of the universe, precisely because they cannot account for time.
Rather than pointing to books that some of us have not read, and apparently others have not read carefully enough, I will quote from a couple of interviews with Rovelli that everyone can read.
When asked in an interview about the biggest unanswered question about time, he responded:
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/what-time-physicist-carlo-rovelli-ponders-enigmatic-fourth-dimension-ncna895226
When asked about the atemporality of the universe he said:
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.20190219a/full/
The first three were quite philosophically sophisticated thinkers. Not that Einstein wasn’t also, but Heisenberg gently accused him of ‘dogmatic realism’ as explained below.
I’m mining some chapters from Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy for insights.
He says:
This underwrites my arguments in this thread; it's pretty well behind everything I'm saying. I think we have a habit of thought, that this separation is in fact real, and that 'the world' exists 'out there' totally separate from us; but this is what has been called into question by the 'observer problem'. And that leads to a shift in perspective.
He then goes on:
Here, I believe that 'practical realism' equates with ‘methodological naturalism’. This is the assumption of naturalistic principles as natural part of scientific method, that we can't take into account anything that can be understood within the naturalistic framework - which is perfectly fine as far as it goes. When this becomes dogmatic or metaphysical naturalism, is when such assumptions are then held to apply beyond the scope of science itself, when they're taken as a statement about 'what the world is really like' (a la pop science intellectuals, some of whom referred to by Rovelli). That is what I call 'metaphysical' or 'dogmatic naturalism' which is highly influential in secular philosophy and culture (often tacitly).
As for the use of quotes around 'exist' - Heisenberg had acute insight into the sense in which sub-atomic objects straddled the borderline between actual and potential. 'In particular, “real” should not be restricted to “actual” objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or “potential” realities, that have not yet become “actual.” These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are “ontological” — that is, real components of existence. 2' So in this sense, Heisenberg asks 'whether the smallest units are ordinary physical objects, whether they exist in the same way as stones or flowers 3. '. So I think the suggestion of whether they exist 'in the same way' as objects is extraordinarily important; because to most of us, 'existence' has only one value: something either exists or it doesn't. The idea of something on the borderline of existence and non-existence means that it possess a degree of reality.
Quoting Fooloso4
Great column! I was particularly struck by this:
[quote=Rovelli]Space, time, particles and fields get fused into a single entity: a quantum field that does not live in space or time. The variables of this field acquire definiteness only in interactions between subsystems. The fundamental equations of the theory have no explicit space or time variables. Geometry appears only in approximations. Objects exist within approximations. Realism is tempered by a strong dose of relationalism. I think we physicists need to discuss with philosophers, because I think we need help in making sense of all this.[/quote]
[quote=Rovelli]The main point of the book is that there isn’t a single notion of time that is either true or false.[/quote]
Time is not absolute but also observer-dependent:
If our understanding of time, and the universe, are open to revision, then how is it inappropriate to question the age of the universe? Unless we question this, we will not derive those necessary revisions.
With regard to Rovelli's comment about realism and relationalism, I have the same problem I do with all theories of quantum mechanics.
It seems to me that the single word most resistant to discussion is 'understanding'.
In that respect it seems ridiculous not to include 'observer states' as a crucial issue.
This illustrates the problem of arguments about reality based on our lack of understanding of the quantum world.
I don't see how it follows from the fact that questions are contextual that they are vacuous. What it is reasonable to say is simply what coheres and is consistent with our whole body of knowledge and about which we seem to have insufficient reason for doubt,
Quoting fresco
How would you, for example, go about including, in the sense of factoring in "observer states" in the study of chemistry, geology or biology, or even psychology, economics or history? Do you envisage it being something like trying to play music while consciously and continuously watching yourself play in a mirror. Sounds like it would be a ridiculously cumbersome approach that even if possible would not add anything significant, and to the contrary, would only produce unnecessary confusion and ineptitude!
Can there be a transcendent 'vantage point' from which this epistemological evolution can be 'observed'? I suggest 'philosophy' could and should fulfil that role and in particular examine the 'human forces' which drive that evolution like 'enhanced control' and 'rivalry'.