Human Nature : Essentialism
I'm currently reading a book on Human Nature, that raises the volatile question of Essentialism. I'm only superficially familiar with that worldview, which seems to go back at least to Plato's "Forms", and the "Kinds" of Genesis. Apparently, Essentialism was the default assumption of science up until Darwin's theory of evolution blurred the boundaries between Species (Kinds)*1.
After a brief review, I get the impression that today the notion of fixed categories in nature is held primarily by Conservatives, both political and religious. But I suspect the topic may be vociferously debated among philosophers of various political & religious views. Non-philosophers may be expected to prefer a simple black or white scheme for Human Nature, but deeper thinkers tend to dissect their topics into smaller chunks, and into rainbow colors. Yet those fine distinctions are not so easily verified by evidence or by appeals to authority, hence leading to an infinite regression of unresolved debates.
The Human Nature controversy in recent years seems to be centered primarily on Gender issues. If God created Man & Woman for distinct roles in the world, then where do LGBTQ humans fit into the scheme of things? Are those who refuse to remain in their rigidly-defined physical and social niches, somehow defying the law of God? Even for those who are not concerned about the laws of God, what about violating the laws of Nature?
Although my moderate worldview does not divide the world into simplistic dualistic categories, it also can't abide the absurdity of infinite regression. So, before I bring my own Intrinsic Biases to this polarizing book, I'd like to see what others on this forum have to say about Essentialism in general, and Gender Categories in particular. :cool:
*1 Natural Kinds : In biology and other natural sciences, essentialism provided the rationale for taxonomy at least until the time of Charles Darwin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism
Human Nature, David Berlinski; author of The Deniable Darwin
Theory of Human Nature : https://aeon.co/essays/theres-no-philosophy-of-life-without-a-theory-of-human-nature
After a brief review, I get the impression that today the notion of fixed categories in nature is held primarily by Conservatives, both political and religious. But I suspect the topic may be vociferously debated among philosophers of various political & religious views. Non-philosophers may be expected to prefer a simple black or white scheme for Human Nature, but deeper thinkers tend to dissect their topics into smaller chunks, and into rainbow colors. Yet those fine distinctions are not so easily verified by evidence or by appeals to authority, hence leading to an infinite regression of unresolved debates.
The Human Nature controversy in recent years seems to be centered primarily on Gender issues. If God created Man & Woman for distinct roles in the world, then where do LGBTQ humans fit into the scheme of things? Are those who refuse to remain in their rigidly-defined physical and social niches, somehow defying the law of God? Even for those who are not concerned about the laws of God, what about violating the laws of Nature?
Although my moderate worldview does not divide the world into simplistic dualistic categories, it also can't abide the absurdity of infinite regression. So, before I bring my own Intrinsic Biases to this polarizing book, I'd like to see what others on this forum have to say about Essentialism in general, and Gender Categories in particular. :cool:
*1 Natural Kinds : In biology and other natural sciences, essentialism provided the rationale for taxonomy at least until the time of Charles Darwin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism
Human Nature, David Berlinski; author of The Deniable Darwin
Theory of Human Nature : https://aeon.co/essays/theres-no-philosophy-of-life-without-a-theory-of-human-nature
Comments (183)
I believe gender categorization is placed on similar FALSE platforms as race categorization.
We are one race. The entire humankind.
We are one gender. The entire humankind.
Period.
(WTF...)
Did God create some to be slaves and others to be masters? Perhaps He marked their skin to help us figure out who's who. This offensive thought is used to make a point. Using the idea of God in this way is the primary justification perhaps for anti-religious feeling. Imaginary creators in such cases are transparently used to dominate and control. I consider such superstition to be pre-philosophical.
IMV, the heterosexual norm was a fiction from the beginning, imposed on a polymorphous perversity for various reasons.
As for human nature in general, I view it as dynamic and historical. We are radically cultural and historical animals. Our nature is to have no nature, or our nature is to always be developing our nature. Some philosophers have believed that this development process would cease at a kind of perfection (was on the way to some satisfying and process-stopping finale.) I don't believe them, though I do think individuals often evolve into relatively settled personalities. Indeed, I think philosophers tend to project their own semi-concluded process onto human history in general.
I agree with you. To me this is humanism, the 'religion' of intellectuals. There is one human rationality. This 'transcendental pretense' is central but also unnoticed as too close to us, too obvious. I think it's a modification of monotheism. God died and became the rational/enlightened community.
All fetuses begin as female, and then, if it is supposed to become male, the body needs to be masculinized, as well as the brain. If something goes wrong with one or the other process or both or partially then you can imagine all the resultant special genders of LGBTQ. 'God'/Bible gets shown up again, as always.
The first problem of essentialism is to develop a safe method of distinguishing the natural from the artificial. In the case of human nature the problem is defined in terms of the opposition between the innate and the acquired. Comparison with similar species? Traits common to the entire human species? I think that method does not exist, or at least it is not safe.
The second problem is ethical. Even if it were possible to distinguish innate from acquired, there is no rule that innate is better. If one came to the conclusion that humans are aggressive by nature, to infer from this that war is a natural state is a fallacy.
I think essentialism is only useful to conservative ideologies based on rough slogans.
I can understand why the Bronze Age Bible condemned homosexuality. First, they had no knowledge of genetics, and judged gender only by obvious characteristics. Second, at least 90% of the human population seemed to fit neatly into the two basic sex categories --- both physically (innies vs outies), and behaviorally, (masculine vs feminine norms). So those persons who didn't fit their normal natural niche, were deemed abnormal unnatural perverts. Third, humans and animals have an innate revulsion or disgust reflex toward strange (queer) or suspicious (dangerous) things and behaviors. Consequently, until modern science began to study such atypical anomalies in detail, the safest course for people was to avoid them, to quarantine them, and to label them as taboo or cursed. Most world cultures had similar attitudes toward perceived perversions and deviations from cultural norms : gender/behavior misfits, left-handedness, extremes of skin color, witch-like improprieties, and so forth.
Therefore, those who didn't fall into the middle of the normal Bell Curve of common experience were treated with wariness at best, and those on the extremes (flaming queers) could trigger subconscious reactions of disgust, that we now assume are evolutionary products of experience with dangerous snakes, spiders, and poisonous plants. From our scientifically-enlightened modern perspective, we can regard those negative attitudes --- common to 98% of homo sapiens existence --- as primitive, benighted, and wrong. However, a majority of the human population today still treat the novelties of empirical Science with suspicion, and when faced with cognitive dissonance, may prefer the security of their traditional black & white beliefs over the multi-valued precepts of Science. That's a common turtle-defense mechanism for challenges to settled beliefs.
Liberal attitudes toward the varieties of human nature may be the norm on a philosophical forum. But such open-mindedness may be the exception, rather than the rule, in the rest of the world. And Conservative intellectuals, such as David Berlinski, can make a convincing case for the validity of Essentialism, and the dangers of modern Relativism. Ironically, the best-selling author is an agnostic secular Jew, who denies the validity of Intelligent Design, but who works for the conservative think-tank, Discovery Institute (purveyors of ID). So, I will be interested to see how his reasoning comports with my own middle-of-the-road philosophy. Presumably, his arguments will not be appeals to the authority of the Torah, but exercises in Greek reason. We'll see about that. :nerd:
Identity politics in general is a sort of essentialism, insofar as people are deemed this or that based on some superficial, phenotypical characteristics. So essentialism isn’t so much conservative given the prevalence of identity politics on one side. But to be of a certain sex one must have some essential biological qualities that pertain to that sex.
Yes. "Innate is better" is a nutshell version of the Naturalistic Fallacy. But that seems to be a very common assumption ("pervasive and persistent"; "ubiquitous and irresistible") throughout history, even among philosophers and scientists. Aristotle's appeal to the authority of nature (Causes) has been assigned that judgmental label by some modern philosophers.
Apparently what has changed in recent years is our attitude toward Nature itself, since Darwin discovered its fallibility and amorality. Ironically, the current Climate Change debate seems to be a face-off between ancient and modern attitudes toward Nature. Some view it as fragile and in need of protection, while others treat it as all-powerful (i.e. God's Will in action), and impervious to human damage. Hence, both sides view their behavior as ethical. Relative to the topic of this thread, Naturalism would find homosexuality to be, not only unnatural, but unethical. So, who's to say what's right : Darwin or God?
Aristotle's Fallacy : The naturalistic fallacy appears to be ubiquitous and irresistible. The avant-garde and the rearguard, the devout and the secular, the learned elite and the lay public all seem to want to enlist nature on their side,everywhere and always. Yet a closer look at the history of the term “naturalistic fallacy” and its associated arguments suggests that this way of understanding (and criticizing) appeals to nature’s authority in human affairs is of relatively modern origin.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/678173?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Well in terms of human gender categories, it wouldn't be an infinite regress, just about 7 and a half billion maximum at one time (as of now). I'm pretty sure human gender identification is a bit of a continuum rather than either an essentialist dichotomy or an infinite array - like a rainbow - you can easily pick out a red bit, but where exactly is the boundary between red and orange? But the colours of the rainbows don't go on forever...although there is a fair bit more to the electromagnetic spectrum than meets the eye...if you follow my illustration...
That [s]naturalism[/s] Naturalism (our demonic protagonist) would find homosexuality 'unnatural' is...absurd. Homosexuality has probably always been with us. And not only with us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals
'Perversion' is created by the imposition of a norm. The norm and the perversion are created at the same time, like two sides of the same coin. No doubt primitive interpretations of nature have played a role in this. But this is comparable to social Darwinism.
[quote=dict]
the theory that individuals, groups, and peoples are subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and animals. Now largely discredited, social Darwinism was advocated by Herbert Spencer and others in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was used to justify political conservatism, imperialism, and racism and to discourage intervention and reform.
[/quote]
This can be read as a form of 'bad faith' and/or the rationalization of prejudice.
The thinking is perhaps that homosexual contact doesn't create offspring. Therefore (?!?!) it must be unnatural. [But whatever happens is natural, unless one believes in miracles.] And this crudely assumes that sexuality is a simple phenomenon that is only good for reproduction. It also crudely simplifies human sexuality. I recommend a The History of Sexuality (Foucault), not as an authority but as opening the space for thought. 'Heterosexuality' and 'homosexuality' are useful perhaps for rough categorization, but that's about it. The 'homosexual' is a kind of useful fiction, just like the 'heterosexual.'
How can one violate the laws of nature? I think you're framing [s]nature[/s] Nature as another god.
Thank you.
I don't quite understand the scope of the question. Anyway, I suppose I could write a text like this if I were a computer programmed by a human being. But I am not. I can't think of any other alternative.
Distrust of human nature existed before Darwin. Remember Hobbes: homo hominis lupus.
My mistrust refers to the possibility of knowing it. I think the concept of the human condition is less rigid and more useful. About man, we know tendencies, not natural laws.
Social Darwinism? No, thank you.
The human genome is 3 billion base pairs. What we are isn't wide open to choice. Those billions of base pairs define us as human with varying degrees of intelligence, physical characteristics, mental and physical features and traits. A lot of what we are, and how we exist in the world, is determined by genetics, like it or not.
This is an essentialist view. It isn't the sole property of conservatives. There are progressives who are also essentialists and conservatives who are constructionists.
True enough, our human behavior and personality is at least somewhat pliable. How it all is expressed is determined by both genes and environment. It doesn't make sense to take an extreme essentialist or a constructionist position. Clearly, both methods of shaping behavior are in play,
Don't get sex and gender mixed up. Males and females all have gender roles, and there is quite a bit of consistency in the roles, but sex is not adjustable; gender behavior is.
The old expression, "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" applies to animals, including us. Your average cow isn't going to win prizes at the state fair. A dog that is not very bright is going to stay that way. Highly risk averse people have generally been risk averse from their first baby steps, and explorers have, likewise, been that way from the get go. Very smart people tend to stay smart throughout life. Stupid children usually grow up to be stupid adults.
Why do you suppose that? Is there any evidence that it's true? Why would a computer join a forum and talk philosophy? What would be its objective? I guess you could create an algorithm to that end, but I don't think it would likely be effective, and it certainly wouldn't serve any purpose.
I think you casually assume that there's nothing special about being human. I think it's something that nowadays everyone knows, like a kind of folk wisdom. But I also think it's false. Humans have been searching for some sign of life in the vast cosmos for decades, without success. Actually all of the indications seem to be that the chance of human life is vanishingly slight - and yet, here we are having this conversation. I think there's a reason that we are referred to as 'beings', and I think it's something often overlooked.
You draw excessive consequences from my short comment. It is a personal assumption that electronic brains are capable of holding a simple conversation until a very specific test can catch them in. But I don't draw anthropological or metaphysical consequences from that.
There is no denying that human psyche is variable and mutable, both on the historical and the individual human scale, but that doesn't make us blank states and empty vessels at birth, to be filled and shaped entirely by culture. As @Bitter Crank rightly notes, we cannot escape our biological substrate, our animal nature, and why would we need to?
We understandably tend to focus on our differences, but I think our commonality far exceed our differences - we just take them for granted.
None of this has much to do with metaphysical essentialism, by the way, but rather with the nature/nurture dichotomy, which shouldn't really be a dichotomy, since it is quite clear that neither exists in a pure form, and I don't think there's much serious debate about that left.
Welcome, David.
Bula!
Good point. I suspect that Essentialists believe the simplest categorization is the truest : Male/Female (two values) versus the confusing loosely-differentiated Rainbow genders (continuous shades of values). Their justification might be Ockham's Razor --- comparing a simple dichotomy to a perplexing infinite array. Yet this is not a question of absolute Truth, but merely of political justice. In a modern Democracy, to restrict people to either/or choices is an unwarranted limitation on their freedom. But many humans seem to prefer a Theocracy, which makes an unquestionable distinction between right & wrong, hence no need to guess, and perhaps make the wrong choice.
I have just started reading the Human Nature book, so it remains to be seen if Berlinski's argument is one of prejudice (purity) or merely of accuracy (clear categories). Strict Conservatives, such as Christian Puritans and Muslim Jihadists, seem to be afraid of the harsh consequences of an error in judgment. Whereas, looser Liberals are more willing to exercise their own reasoning, and don't cower in fear of lightning bolts. Is it better to be safe than sorry? :worry:
Just for the record, I was putting words in the mouths of non-theists, who treat Nature as the ultimate moral authority --- as in the Naturalistic Fallacy. Unfortunately, it's not that simple, because the power of Nature has recently been diluted by the power of Culture.
That may be true. But as I said, "After a brief review, I get the impression that today the notion of fixed categories in nature is held primarily by Conservatives, both political and religious". Of course, the majority of people will have attitudes somewhere in between the extremes. Can you point me to some card-carrying Liberal/Progressives who espouse the rigid categories of Essentialism?
I think that's right - but then what we can do (in the light of your other comments) about the 'essentialist' part of the process? To say, "its contrary to nature, therefore wrong" is surely both an extreme essentialist position and a typical conservative (especially religious conservative) view. And it is almost certainly - in the case of human sexuality - just plain wrong, because whilst sex might be entirely genetic, neither gender nor sexuality are. Homosexuality, for example, is a perfectly natural aspect of the animal world - even it is relatively rare (compared to heterosexuality). And the problem here is that since the 'behaviour' is the only part we can modify, 'we' focus on attempting to force the outward expressions of our natural/nurtural sexuality and gender to conform to an evolving cultural 'norm' that we imagine (or rather we are told by the 'priestly' class we are accustomed to delegate our moral-thinking responsibility to) is the 'natural' status quo. That is a categorical error, for the precise reason that it confuses the biologically-determined and (possibly) immutable fact of sex with the evolving socially- and individually-mediated expressions of acceptable gender and sexual orientation. The world simply doesn't work like that (even if a couple of billion humans think it does) - if anyone doesn't believe me, they should pop down to the local zoo and ask a bonobo.
There have been a number of discussions of essentialist vs. constructionist thinking on gender in Quillette. This article is an example, and there are 3 additional articles linked at the bottom of the page.
The politics surrounding whether x, y, or z is determined by essentialism or constructionism is a swamp one does well to stay out of.
Essentialism and Constructionism are recruited for whatever purpose is at hand. Gender politics is a form of polymorphous perversity all by itself.
Perhaps I did. In any case, my philosophy does recognise a special category for h. sapiens, which is, in fact, sapience - we're capable of wisdom, although looking at the world today, it's in pretty short supply.
In any case, welcome to the Forum, I encourage you to continue!
Quoting SophistiCat
I completely agree. I just emphasized (by exaggerating, let's say) the historicality and sociality of human existence. In this context, nature was being personified without irony or distance -without an awareness that 'Nature' as protagonist is one more piece of evolving culture.
That's what happens when you try to categorize a continuum...16 million colours - but there's still only one rainbow - and it is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Neither essentialism nor constructionism can adequately explain that.
Thanks for the warning. I do intend to stay out of gender politics, and any other bi-polar forms of human interaction. At the moment I'm just trying to get some background on Essentialism, to inform my reading of the book on Human Nature. :cool:
What the "bo" will tell you is that, for the practical purposes of reproduction, the gender rainbow is reduced down to three colors : 1. male, 2. female, 3. other. Apparently, they have no religious or political scruples about "other", which is not practical, but just for funsies. Perhaps the fun aspect is not an evolutionary adaptation, but just a "spandrel".
Perhaps - but they do seem to spend a bit less time trying to kill each other than either of their two closest evolutionary cousins - so perhaps a few minutes of indiscriminate "rainbow promiscuity" now and again does more to ease social tensions between the "essential" categories (groups) of individuals among a species than several decades of "constructive" detente? And maybe the propensity for "out-of-kind" (atypical, anormal) promiscuous behaviour is more than just a "spandrel" in evolutionary terms? Maybe its an "essential" evolutionary part of what makes the entire spectrum of "multi-coloured" humans, nevertheless all human? Perhaps?
Well met, Mr. Cat.
Thank you. I'll try.
What is typical of this situation is that conservatives seem to make a statement of fact, but in reality it is a value judgment.
Notice how easily conservatives abandon essentialism when it comes to making a conservative revolution.
Yes. Conservative personalities are not all the same, but they generally tend to be uncomfortable with change & complexity, preferring predictability & simplicity. Yet when translated into political or religious positions, the variety of personal expressions gets compressed into a few black & white creedal beliefs. And likewise for Liberals.
An innate conservative may be confused by the alphabet soup of LGBTQ genders, wondering "why don't you behave normally?". But if asked why they are so afraid of novelty and variety, the conservative could only quote Lady Gaga : "I was born this way".
I was probably born with a somewhat Liberal laissez faire personality , but was raised in a Conservative, Fundamentalist environment. So my adult personality is a sort of conflicted Moderate mish-mash. Apparently, your genetic destiny can be influenced by your cultural situation, and vice-versa. :brow:
It's that they start with the statement of fact (something like "human nature is X, Y, Z") and from there they're able to evaluate political or moral systems. If one of these systems flies in the face of human nature it is dismissed.
This is an approach that I use but I wouldn't call myself a conservative.
How can anything that humans have devised "fly in the face of human nature"?
Because I believe that there are certain facts about human nature and if a system ignores or directly contradicts these facts it is bound to fail.
I do believe morality and political systems are ultimately tested in their implementation.
Sure, someone could devise a system that fails because it fails to take into account human variability, but I also believe in certain unchangeable facts about human nature and that if a system ignores or tries to endlessly suppress that fact it's going to fail. I don't believe in an endlessly malleable human nature.
Such as?
We can start with "men are not angels." Well, besides Kim Jung Un obviously.
Insightful observation! Scientific Facts are supposed to be value neutral, whereas the application of those "facts" as "oughts" is a value judgment based on a particular worldview. That's true of both Conservatives and LIberals though. The judgments may be logical, but the worldviews might be prejudiced by limited experience or by indoctrination. So what ought-to-be will vary depending on innate or received values.
Conventional wisdom says that Conservatives get their values primarily from authoritative scriptures or traditions, while Liberals get theirs from personal experience and inner feelings. Both value systems are retained in memory as beliefs (i.e. facts or truths). The usual distinction that I've seen says that Conservatives judge people as typical of their social or political group (group essence), while Liberals judge them as unique persons (individual essence). But in my experience, it's hard to tell where to draw the C/L line. Maybe that's because I prefer to judge people by what they do, rather than what they are; not as representatives of a group, or a sun sign, or a personality type. or a blood type . . . :chin:
OK. But that kind of thing is very abstract. You won't get precise rules out of them. Besides, they don't need to respond to a human nature, but could be the result of habits or customs. What is your method of distinguishing one thing (nature) from another (culture)?
Well, we were talking about the use of human nature to sneak in values. That's a typically conservative resource. That's not to say that reformists or revolutionaries don't mix facts and value judgments too easily. Even human nature itself (see Rousseau).
That there's a dusk and a dawn doesn't mean night and day are same.
As for gender, essentialism and human nature, I think one needs to be aware of whether it's in terms of quality or quantity. Qualitatively there really is no point in saying what is or is not human nature. Nevertheless, statistically it's possible to say that the majority represents human nature.
Actually, the meaning of 'essential' is 'of the essence' which is the defining character of what makes something what it is; 'essence' is 'is-ness'. This thinking originated with Plato and Aristotle, in particular, in the effort to articulate what it is that makes a particular being what it is - why it is this being, or this kind, and not some other, or nothing particular at all.
That was central to Aristotle's nascent science, but really the whole schema became embedded in Western science generally, due to the way that Aristotle's thinking had become absorbed by in medieval philosophy and science. If you look at the fundamental work of the biologist Carl Linnaeus, who practically invented the modern science of biological taxonomy, it seems to be that it is essentially Platonic and Aristotelian in orientation, having adopted and refined the basic taxonomical schemas and also adopting formal latin descriptors of same.
But there was another current in later medieval and early modern thought which was quite antagonistic to many aspects of Aristotelian philosophy. This is associated with the advent of nominalism, which is associated with some of the early figures in modern science, particularly Ockham and Frances Bacon. They tended to disparage scholastic metaphysics, as did David Hume, who was very much in that stream also. And the deprecation of essence, substance, and formal and final causes was one of the reasons for the decline of Western metaphysics. And with the advent of Darwinian evolution, humans were now understood as being in some sense continuous with their animal forbears, and the sense of the unique nature and destiny of humankind was eroded by this. (In fact in modern culture it is often frowned upon to say that humans are something other than animals.)
That criticism is associated with conservatism, as for example in Richard Weaver's very influential post-war book, Ideas have Consequences, which was a treatise on the harmful effects of nominalism on Western Civilization since the Late Middle Ages. This book has subsequently become highly influential in American conservative circles.
However, some similar ground is also found amongst the New Left. Adorno and Horkheimer's work on the Dialectics of the Enlightenment wrote of the 'eclipse of reason', mainly on the grounds that 'reason' was no longer revered as sovereign for all rational beings, but was increasingly instrumentalised, that is, subordinated to science, techne, and economic rationalism. And this in turn also erodes any sense of common humanity or shared values.
Notice that this basically equates ethical judgement with matters of personal preference. Practically the only authority in matters of fact is science, but, as Hume pointed out, science itself can provide no foundation for values. And the privatised or subjectivised nature of the individual conscience which was a consequence of Protestantism, is one of the major factors in the rise of subjectivism and relativism.
So, the point is, the questions around 'essentialism' and whether or not there is something which is essentially human, are themes which figure in both conservative and radical analyses of late modernity.
"Mental illness is not a lack". I found it difficult to understand that she was meaning "a lack of humanity".
Or put another way: A person with Down syndrome is no less a person because of it.
So, what is it to be a person? (Humanity).
I doubt we can find a single answer.
Yes. The ancient Greek philosophers observed that humans were superior in some way to animals, but obviously not in physical attributes. Since all autonomous creatures were presumed to be animated by Spirit, they concluded that metaphysical Soul (Reason) was the defining characteristic of humanity. In the pre-scientific era, that "fact" was probably not even debatable. But today, closer scientific observations, from a Darwinian perspective, have revealed that animals (e. g. chimps & porpoises) are capable of reasoning that is much closer to human capacities. Hence, the gap has been narrowed; which has raised some ethical questions that were not taken seriously in the past.
For those who value science and progress, that blurring of the distinction between human and animal essences may seem inevitable and progressive. But for those who value tradition and religion more highly, the notion that souless animals are on the same developmental continuum with ensouled humans, is absurd and sacrilegious. Therefore, one side emphasizes the similarities, while the other argues for the differences. And both have "facts" to support their case. So it seems that hierarchical Conservative values require human superiority and domination, while holistic Liberal values require a more egalitarian relationship, as found in the worldview of vegetarians. Yet moderate philosophical values may acknowledge that there is truth in both views, and attempt to apply their facts judiciously.
Apparently, the same polarized opinions are found in moral judgments of fellow humans. Some find it reasonable to label fellow humans as sub-human (Jews, Blacks, Queers, Gypsies, etc), while others are appalled at such self-serving hubris. The challenge for my own values is to acknowledge the meaningful differences in people, while respecting the significant similarities. That's what I call the BothAnd principle.
BothAnd Principle : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
I don't think it's abstract at all; we see it throughout history. In my discussion with Siti he only asked me to list one immutable fact of human nature. I gave him one, and he has since disappeared from the discussion. It's been years since I've picked up Marx but if I remember correctly it is a Marxist assumption that human nature is seemingly endlessly malleable and it is a product of the economic system.
In regard to not getting "precise rules," just a knowledge of this fact can help you eliminate certain political systems immediately. Could you show me a culture in which men are angels? The claim that all you need is good culture to turn men into angels is patently ridiculous and I don't see how anyone can take it seriously.
[s]This is nonsense[/s]. The motivation for it is to provide humans with an excuse not to recognise what the endowment of reason amounts to. It arises from a fear of being human. And it's not a matter of 'valuing tradition and religion'. By virtue of reason and language, humans are able to comprehend ideas and principles that no animal will ever understand, the fact that chimps use communication devices and crows can count to five notwithstanding. And mankind can see beyond reason, into the domain of transcendent reality.
(Interestingly, Buddhists are generally very kind and humane to animals, but being reborn into the animal realm, which is said to be extremely common, is an enormous misfortune, because animals are stupid and so can't understand the Buddhist teaching leading to liberation.)
Alfred Russel Wallace, who is credited as the co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection, himself did not agree that Darwinian theory could account for the rational intellect of man. Of course, later in life Wallace became very interested in spiritualism and so his opinions are generally disregarded, but his Darwinism Applied to Man makes his argument clear.
Quoting David Mo
The point about understanding the nature of the essential is not to arrive at a simple answer. Essence is not a formula.
One should always be cautious how one words one's objections. Our closest relatives may posses a theory of mind.
Are you saying that Reason is a divine "endowment" and not an evolutionary development? The "nonsense" statement said that "animals are capable of reasoning that is much closer [but not equal] to human capacities". Before Darwin, most philosophers assumed that there was an unbridgeable gap between animal minds and human Reason. So the story goes, God must have bestowed rational souls only upon the descendants of Adam --- hence Essentialism.
Ironically, the Genesis account makes it seem that humans obtained their Reason, not in accordance with God's Will, but despite it. Until they ate the magic apple, Adam & Eve were essentially senior animals in the continuum of animated beings. Only after the intervention by Satan were the innocent-babes-in-the-garden able to see beyond the here & now, to the consequences of their behavior -- to knowledge of good & evil. You could say that imagining the probable future gives us access to a "domain of transcendent reality".
It may be true that no non-human animal will ever understand abstract ideas and principles. But Darwin has shown how an insignificant species of mammal could, given long stretches of time, evolve into the most significant species on Earth. He also described a mechanism by which simple rat brains, via a continuous incremental progression, could evolve into larger, more complex, dolphin and human brains. The only thing Darwin couldn't explain is how living thinking bio-chemical beings could have developed from inert matter. But even the otherwise unlikely emergence of Life & Mind can be understood as inevitable if evolution is an intentional program of En-formation via Cause & Effect dating back to a Rational First Cause. In that sense, I can agree that human reason is an endowment that matured only after billions of years from the initial investment (evolution).
En-formation : the process of enforming, creating forms.
To Enform : verb 1, To form, to fashion, to create https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enform
Don't know about that - it would presumably be an even greater misfortune for a Buddhist to be reborn as a fundamentalist Christian - who (from a Buddhist point of view) only imagine they know the way to liberation! But I guess that's a far less common regression.
Quoting Wayfarer
I also have to disagree with your objection (after Weaver and co.) to the elevation of "fact" above "value" and your contention that science provides no foundation for values. I believe science enables us to "en-fact-uate" (I think I just made that word up) our values...e.g. is the individual "right" to own personal property to be valued more highly than the collective "need" to conserve biodiversity? Absent scientific "facts" we wouldn't even know there was a "biodiversity" to be conserved, let alone how important it might (or might not) be to future generations of humans. Point is, some "value judgements" simply cannot be made by pure reason in the absence of scientific facts and have - it seems - not been handed down as transcendent moral strictures.
Quoting Gnomon
To get my example back on topic, is it part of an "essential" human nature to exploit natural resources without regard to the consequences - or is our propensity for destroying our own habitat a just-for-fun 'spandrel' in the works of cultural evolution?
NEITHER. The capacity for reason evolves, but what can be discovered through reason is something else altogether.
The traditional account of the rational soul is not the exclusive property of Christian evangelicalism. In fact, many elements of it were appropriated from 'pagan' philosophy within which it was argued on impeccably rational grounds. But the movement away from religion threw the pagan baby out with the Christian bathwater, and the result is, basically, that humankind has lost a great deal of what really does make them different from animals. And you see a lot of animal behaviour in developed economies.
But I am firmly of the view that reason transcends any Darwinian account, as it is something more than, and other than, an evolutionary adaptation (such as tooths, claws, feathers). To explain it in Darwinian terms is invariably to deprecate it, which is exactly what neo-darwinism (think Dennett and Dawkins) do. So whether reason is 'divinely endowed' or not, it is not in principle within the scope of science to explain, in fact, we have to be able to reason before science can even get out of bed. A lot of the rest of it are just so stories.
(Hey this is a really interesting chat but am busy with household duties, I'll come back later.)
If its an "intentional program" then "essentialism" is the only option, nothing is really genuinely the result of constructive (creative) evolution but rather an inevitable and pre-programmed consequence of the original "idea"... and given that the emergence of human-kind was, at some point, the result of a single sexual liaison, doesn't that imply that ALL sexual liaisons are predetermined and therefore part of the "essence" of each of the individuals involved? Then on what basis is ANY behaviour to be ruled "immoral" - the caprice of the divine Mind that thought it up in the first place?
No. The Enformationism worldview does not imply predestination or essentialism. Instead, it views evolution as Ententional*1 in the sense of modern Evolutionary Programming (EP)*2, in which the final outcome is unknown. EP is a learning process, not a defining act. The only essence of evolved creatures is EnFormAction*3, which is essentially Creative Energy, which causes change in a certain direction. The entention is to reach a future state (godlike??), but the specific paths, and intermediate states, are left to chance, yet guided by specified parameters (normative natural laws) and initial conditions (the setup).
EP is a counterintuitive concept because it is not top-down design, as humans do, but bottom-up design, as evolution does. I view Evolution as a gradual optimization program guided by programmer-selected criteria, not as a magical act producing instant perfection, such as the Genesis Creation. So humans were not created with the fixed essence of a "sapiens" Soul, but have gradually homed-in on a form of intelligence (Reason) that is adaptive to current conditions, and will continue to evolve to suit future environments. Therefore, the current form of human nature is not "inevitable and pre-programmed". It is merely a phase --- a step in the direction of the intended goal ("original idea"). The "form" of each stage is not a fixed essence, but a temporary phase.
For all I know, the next step in evolution may be Artificial Intelligence, whose Essence could be radically different from the human kind. For example, AI should have no need for sexual reproduction, no Male or Female essence. And the "races" of AI would not involve skin color or geographic origin. This is indeed "constructive (creative) evolution". And the only consistent Essence throughout this process of learning to be "the best you can be" is EnFormAction, the creative urge.
*1 Entention : "Ententional" is an adjective that applies to the class of objects and phenomena that refer to or are in some other way "about" something not present.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entention
*2 Evolutionary Programming : simulated evolution as a learning process aiming to generate artificial intelligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_programming
*3 EnFormAction : the creative power to enform; to cause transformations from one form to another.
http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html
http://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
Can you refer me to the "pagan philosophy" that argued for a transcendent rational soul on "impeccable rational grounds"? Or will you give me your own synopsis of how transcendent Reason is related to immanent material Reality?
In my personal worldview, immanent human Reason is indeed a pale reflection of transcendent Logos, which is presumably an essential quality of the hypothetical First Cause. But our severely limited reasoning ability is compromised by the emotional needs of the evolved human body. So, human Reason is both a divine endowment and an evolved development. However, being a developmental phase, it is not a fixed essence. Reasoning ability may be the defining quality of homo sapiens, but it's a quality that we share to some degree with other intelligent creatures.
Crow's reasoning ability : https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/26/crows-reasoning-ability-seven-year-old-humans
I'm going to gadfly you regarding the notion of "normative natural laws". lol
I can't think of a single supposed "natural" principle that isn't anthropic, essentially perceptual. Mechanistic laws are a higher type of concept that human cognition seems uniquely capable of creating, enabling our species to change its environment of perceptions in some extremely practical, groundbreaking ways, but I would argue that these shouldn't be considered normative. Norms do not determine the course of evolutionary transition, they are a symptom of arbitrarily stifled evolution as the product of forces exacted on organisms by their conditions. The only parameters to evolution are imposed by environment, and the concept of a "natural law" can become one of those parameters.
Prehistorically, prior to human rationality, we get equilibriums in stable environments, and in fluctuating environments, we get punctuated rapid diversification in a non-directional process that quickly reaches stasis again. The human situation is unique because we imagine and put on display non-existent, largely non-normative causality to such an extent that we can purposefully and collectively change our conditions in extreme ways, including human nature, and thus exert substantial control of selection pressures on the form of our own perceptions.
But as soon as human cognition becomes normativeness, it has the same effect as we find in non-cognitive environments, arbitrarily forcing a non-evolving equilibrium. It is completely possible for human evolution to be stagnated by culture based on an essentialist paradigm. Similarly, an AI technology may have no inclination or capacity to progressively reinvent natural laws, no matter how perceptive or intelligent it is, bringing mutation as self-enhancement to a halt. AI has much greater chance of being a stasis than progressive.
Of course we need a baseline of cultural competence to make creativity even possible, so normativity is necessary, but technical concepts rendered as essences amount in my view to mechanistic causality reified for enforcement as norms with no real benefit but thought-control, and I think this is counterproductive. Human rationality has a dual nature, the spontaneous transgression of norms by thought and the transmission of thoughts for the sake of modifying norms. The conditioning of principles should be restrained, getting us into politics and ethics.
I should add that at any particular moment a system of concepts is going to have finite structure. Its coercion that's a problem, not commitment.
My blurb on norms and essentialism anyways, disagreements welcome.
I am struggling to see how you can have both of these:
Quoting Gnomon
and...
Quoting Gnomon
If the first is correct then the "original idea" and "intended goal" must presumably have been "no idea" - which, it seems to me, is probably exactly right...
Anyway, let me go back a step or two and see if I can grasp at least one of the terms. I take it from the definition you linked to, you intend "entention" in the sense of Terrence Deacon's coinage (?) where, if I read him correctly, "ententions" or maybe "ententionalities", are equivalent to what might be called "aboutnesses" - i.e. they are phenomena (such as 'intentionality', 'purpose', 'function'...etc.) that are (obviously) not themselves physical realities but nevertheless really exist because they are "about" some reality or another?
So if that's a fair reading of "entention", then I can live with that...and it can go from bottom to top of the entire process of reality. Electrons, elephants and ecosystems all have a "physical being-ness" and "mental about-ness" (some kind of functionality at the very least). These, I think, are equivalent (in a broad sense) to the "physical and mental poles" of Whitehead's "occasions of experience" (except that "objects" such as electrons and elephants etc. are themselves abstractions that don't truly exist - now that for sure is counter-intuitive but please bear with me - the true reality of an elephant is a process of continual change composed of uncountably many "occasions of experience" (of "elephant-ness"?) which the are the true actualities in Whitehead's scheme).
So "entention", as far as I can make out, is essentially equivalent to the "mentality" of a real thing that goes together with its "physicality". But I don't see how these could ever be separated from one another...an "elephant" with no "elephant-about-ness" (no elephant functionality, no elephant intentionality...etc.) is just not an "elephant"...
Entention, it seems to me must, of necessity, emerge together with the emerging reality - hand in glove - inseparably intertwined, or what? Do we have ideas floating around waiting for the opportunity to attach to some emerging reality that they somehow happen to correspond to?
As usual, I find myself wanting to take the exact opposite view to what seems to be the "norm" (another "entention" at a more holsitic/communal level?) - I want to say that what we normally conceive of as abstractions (ideas "drawn out" of reality) are really "entractions" ("pulled in" to reality from a genuinely infinite array of non-existing unrealities that are, apart (i.e. separated from) from the reality that entracted them, entirely devoid of meaning or efficacy, whilst "ententions" are really "abtentions" - that is, "mental" "aboutnesses" drawn out of the process of emerging realities.
And looking at it that way, I cannot imagine the primordial "IDEA" having been anything other than "no idea at all" - or rather - "every possible idea no matter how ridiculously improbable" - which is exactly equivalent to "no idea at all" because it tells you precisely nothing about what might actually eventuate. But I'm guessing even evolutionary programmers don't start off with "no idea at all" - or if they do, I think I might just have discovered my perfect career choice!
I will absolutely abstain from abhorrently abbreviating your abstractions about "aboutness". lol I agree that an infinite fund of abstentioned ideas is absurd, no idea at all.
Following the Socratic method I assume. :smile:
Quoting Enrique
You may have misinterpreted my use of "normative". What I had in mind is that in Evolution, natural laws are limitations (norms) on the freedom of randomness. Those laws provide criteria for Natural Selection to choose from the options thrown up by mutations. And mutations that go outside the norms will be judged unfit. If a mutant mouse is physically too large for its mouse-scale niche it will be deselected in the next round of reproduction. But, over time, descendants of slightly larger than normal mice might eventually be fit for the Capybara niche. The principles that lead to humans and Capybras are the same. Only the environmental niches are different. There are "anthropic" niches and "rodent" niches.
The environment is a physical limit, while laws are metaphysical norms. For example, evolutionary programmers allowed their program to design an antenna for a specific communication niche. The "environment" was an unusual kind of radiation pattern. And the metaphysical "norm" (program parameters) was established by programmers as a narrow range of fitness scores that would be acceptable for their intended purpose. Ultimately, the parameters (laws) were "anthropic" in the sense that they were selected to suit human needs. But the final physical shape of the antenna was not predictable by the programmers. Only the anthropic metaphysical function was predetermined; the weird shape was formed to fit its designated niche.
But perhaps you think that natural laws evolved accidentally. In which case they are simply 'habits" of evolution. Yet if so, our universe seems to be addicted to those mathematical norms.
Quoting Enrique
Perhaps you are talking about human imposed norms, which are limited in power. But Natural norms are so "stifling" that they were called "laws" to reflect the absolute life-or-death power of human kings. So, Natural Norms do indeed determine the course of evolutionary change, but only to the extent that Natural Selection enforces them. But who is the law-maker, and whose standards are normative?
Capybara Niche : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capybara
Ecological Niche : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_niche
Evolved Antenna Design : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
Normative : human laws are artificial norms, while laws of Nature are natural norms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative
Habits of Nature : https://www.sheldrake.org/research/most-of-the-so-called-laws-of-nature-are-more-like-habits
There are plenty of examples. Of course, ancient philosophy was in some ways much more naturally religious, so their reasoning takes into account ideas which we would nowadays categorise as being religious in some ways.
Quoting Gnomon
That would roughly correspond to the Doctrine of the Fall, then.
Quoting Gnomon
Tell it to your dog :razz:
That feature is so broad that it would only rule out utopias. But even utopian thinkers knew that their kingdoms were fantastic. "Task for the gods," says Glaucon to Socrates in The Republic.
Human nature is like the rainbow. As soon as one comes down to it, fades away. (I swear I have made up this phrase myself alone).
Right. But we'll have to specify what it consists of or leave it to poetry.
I'm actually thrilled with your first statement and I do agree. I wasn't seeking to lay out an entire political system based solely on this premise about men not being angels. All I was aiming for was to provide Siti an example when he asked for one stable feature of human nature. I'm happy with that limited "victory." We don't need to then go from there and be like "oh well that's not really saying all that much in reality...." because I wasn't really aiming for that.
The rainbow metaphor is cute but I think as long as we can agree on that premise of human nature we need to concede to some permanence even if it is "broad" which it is obviously is as I was seeking to describe the entirety of humanity.
Don't overthink it. The intended goal may be general, but the final outcome will be specific. That's the case in any learning endeavor. You begin with a desire or intention to learn something new, but you can't say exactly what that will be. For example, deity A might create Adam in his own image, in which case the result will be predictable : a Mini Me. But deity B might create a creative process just to see what will happen if the evolutionary "mechanism" has an element of freedom (chaos; randomness) built into it. In that case the final state will be unpredictable, and deity B will ultimately learn something new.
Perhaps you are assuming that both deity A and B are omniscient. But an omnipotent deity can create a system with uncertainty (freedom) as a major factor. That would be like creating a stone that even the most powerful deity can't lift. Yet it's not a paradox, or a logical contradiction, if the limitation is ententional (necessary for the venture). Of course, the uncertainty would only be temporary. When the time-limited experiment has run its course, deity B will know the answer, and will have learned something in the process (dynamic omniscience).
Quoting Siti
That example misses the point of "aboutness". The term refers not to Self but to Other. Elephant A can have an idea (representation) about elephant B, or even about a future state of elephant A (other point in time). Likewise, Intentionality is inherently about something that is not here & now. It is a motivation toward something desired but not yet possessed. For example, eternal deity B wants to know how a hypothetical space-time process will turn-out, but the only way to know for sure is to run the experiment.
Aboutness : Are representations of the world part of the world they represent?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/
Quoting Siti
No. Entention (aim, purpose, motivation) must come before Completion (conclusion, resolution, realization). If intent and goal coexist, then there's no need to move toward the target. In humans, the best intentions often fail to be realized.
Quoting Siti
What you describe is exactly how I imagine Creation Ex Nihilo. Your "array of non-existing unrealities" sounds like what I call primordial Chaos. Eternity/Infinity is equivalent to Omnipotential. Without space-time limits all things are possible. But if an abstract Platonic Form is "entracted" from potential to actual it becomes real. It is converted from "non-existing unrealities" (Platonic Ideals) to existing realities (physical things).
Chaos : In ancient Greek creation myths Chaos was the void state preceding the creation of the universe or cosmos. It literally means "emptiness", but can also refer to a random undefined unformed state that was changed into the orderly law-defined enformed Cosmos. In modern Cosmology, Chaos can represent the eternal/infinite state from which the Big Bang created space/time. In that sense of infinite Potential, it is an attribute of G*D, whose power of EnFormAction converts possibilities (Platonic Forms) into actualities (physical things).
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page12.html
Quoting Siti
Again, that describes eternal Chaos, but not the ententional IDEA of space-time reality. It seems that your basic problem with my Enformationism worldview is the necessity for Transcendence, for something prior-to space-time reality. You can't imagine an infinite dimension space. But that may be due to your commitment to the worldview of physical Science. Yet, even pragmatic Science is baffled by paradoxes at the extremes of physical reality.
For example, when a sub-atomic particle makes a quantum leap into super-position, it can't be found here or there --- it can't be defined in space-time measures. So where is it? Likewise, when matter is sucked into a Black Hole, it is presumed to be converted back into energy, and then into pure information. But scientists still debate where that information goes. Some posit that it disappears down the funnel into an alternate reality. But, besides being un-grounded speculation, that notion contradicts the Law of Thermodynamics, which asserts that energy (information) cannot be created or destroyed within a closed system. It implies that our system has sprung a leak. A logical, but not physical, solution to these paradoxes is that the disappearing matter transcends space-time by returning to infinity-eternity (non-locality) from whence it originally came. "Ridiculously impossible"! Perhaps, but that's true of all paradoxes. :nerd:
Escape from a black hole : https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/escape-from-a-black-hole/
A difficult metaphysical subject. I don't think we can consider natural phenomena "normative principles", but rather accidents of local conditions, with the qualities of "local" varying at least slightly in each observational case. We see the universe as law-abiding because we are extremely well-adapted to one of these localized environments, and we incline to interpret everything from our own frame of reference. That's not to say we can't very easily simplify the properties of particular local conditions into a conceptual "essence" for the sake of technological understanding and application, but analogy between theoretical generalization and metaphysical reality is false. An alien species might develop a completely different kind of evolutionarily programmed antenna because their perception is different, even while on earth. This technology might be so divergent that calling it an antenna at all could be a stretch, a suspect analogy to our own experience. If a being doesn't die or reproduce, no natural selection. If an organism isn't composed of organic molecules, no perception of the environment as solid objects perhaps. Lacking enough particularity in its perception, math might be non-descriptive and meaningless. The existence of a reason for something, a predictable causality, doesn't imply that metaphysical principles exist, and never could. This idea I think is very similar to what Hume or a more critically thinking Kant might argue.
But radical skepticism is refutable because all the life forms on this planet are related and adapted to a relatively similar environment. Metaphysical principles do not obtain, but we're still all in this together. The more we recognize our mutuality relative to the total universe, the more ethical we become, unless we get abused and manipulated to the point of not trusting someone else's professed beliefs. Its not an uncompromising thirst for pain that drives large-scale human conflict, as if we enjoy our own self-destruction, its a lack of trust and a failure to acknowledge the mutuality I mentioned, along with some minor lapses in self-control thrown into the mix that basic conditioning can usually teach us to regulate well enough. Personal turmoil can be increased to huge, institutional proportions by our problem-solving acumen.
All reasoning, including moral reasoning, is solipsistic and no less universalizable for being so. Essentialist reasoning can interfere with moral/practical reasoning by rendering our solipsism non-adapting. Supposed essences are ideally temporary illusions on the path to better concepts, and at their worst are a means of brainwashing populations. Achieving that balance between adaptivity and realizing the fullest possibility for beliefs is rationality's challenge, and science is vital to moderating this effort. Rationality creates values. Some sub-cultures apply these discovered/invented values disingenuously, refusing to act in accordance with the universality and uncertainty that rationality really and luckily implies.
lol
Should add that I doubt this is really in contradiction to your basic view, merely a clarification.
Please give me a reference to one of those examples. I'm not concerned with the religious implications; just the philosophical reasoning.
Quoting Wayfarer
Actually, I view the limits to human reasoning as a feature, not a design defect, or a malfunction. The experiment in space-time & uncertainty would be pointless if humans were eternal omniscient gods.
Quoting Wayfarer
People communicate with their dogs via behavior not language. But the reasoning behind the behavior is basically the same. If the dog food is kept in a cabinet, and the dog sniffs around and scratches, then it ain't hard to read the canine mind. :cool:
And ‘specifying what it consists of’ was precisely the task of classical metaphysics. That is why I made mention of metaphysics and its decline in a previous post but I don't think you got it - which I understand, because these ideas are hardly taught any more, you have to dig for them.
Which is not to say that classical metaphysics has or is the answer either. But what is essential to understand what was rejected and why. That kind of analysis is more characteristic of European philosophy.
But nowadays, the usual approach is 'well, we evolved that way' or 'it's the result of evolution'. Almost everyone presumes that. But biological theory does not necessarily amount to philosophical analysis; the way it plays out is that 'evolutionary materialism' declares a good deal of philosophy irrelevant or antiquated without really understanding it at all.
Quoting Gnomon
I think the most famous example is Aristotle’s passage on the active intellect. It is as the article notes, a debated passage, but contains many aspects of Aristotle’s hylomorphic (matter-form) dualism - for which read this brief blog post.
Quoting Enrique
But science is not the arbiter of value. And ideally, philosophy seeks to establish a vision which reconciles what is of value with 'what is'. This is why in classical philosophy, the sage was also said to be a 'seer' - not necessarily a seer in the sense of clairvoyance, but of being able to see what is of the essence, what is essential. Our worldview is fragmented, principally due to egotism, 'the individual' being in effect an autonomous source of values, buttressed by science. But this apparent rationality actually conceals the sense in which modernity sees a world that is ultimately devoid of reason, save that projected into it by the human mind.
I agree that a non-historical science should not be the arbiter of value, although some like using it propagandistically in sometimes ingenious ways to make themselves the arbiters. What I think the persistence of philosophy does, even consideration of the old guys, is nurture knowledge's historical dimension, so that precedents are much more cogent and cumulative. Philosophy studies the wide range of thought forms that led to modern institutions, and thus gives us a broader context for evaluating the direction of those thought forms. Science without philosophy is theory without a cultural purpose that we have troubled to intelligently justify, beyond I'll help you if I like you I suppose. Most science gets philosophical at some stage, but as you allude to, this becomes dogmatic essentialisms such as evolutionary materialism in the absence of rational historicity. Knowledge can become subservient to self-promotional benefit and coercing masses of citizens instead of empowering humans to progress culturally. Its too bad "philosophy" or what I might venture to call non-scientific naturalism is made so difficult to understand sometimes, but once we grasp it we're capable of thinking more deeply.
So I would gingerly claim that philosophical science with a sense for the historical origins of both thought forms and their related valuations should be the arbiter of modern values. I don't think civilized ethics can even exist apart from intellectual exertions. We see what a horrific effect sole reliance on negative reinforcement has on human behavior, and I think its clear that intellectualizing citizens is preferable. Affect doesn't even become emotion let alone empathy without a mind that is allowed to reflect and grow safely and independently. I wish information weren't put to such predatory uses. When our intellectual leaders who everyone knows should know better commit to pervasive strategies of negative reinforcement, serious problems.
Hey I agree. (And you're a terrific writer, by the way.) But that is much more characteristic of what in German is called 'Geisteswissenschaft', translated as 'science of spirit'. European culture and philosophy seems to have far higher appreciation of this perspective than the Anglosphere. Most of my critiques are aimed in that direction, as it seems to have the most sway in English-speaking cultures, including Australia, where I am.
I'm sorry I can't comment on all the posts. They are very interesting, but very long. As for understanding them, maybe it's presumption for my part, but my knowledge of metaphysics seems to me sufficient.
I believe that classical metaphysics has little to say in matters such as anthropology or ontology. I stand corrected: it can be a source of inspiration. This was the case with Heisenberg, Einstein and other relevant scientists, who were more than just lab rats. I believe that reality cannot be understood without sufficient knowledge of science. That's why ontology is becoming more and more like philosophy of science.
But I agree with you that it is also not acceptable for some to pretend to make science a substitute for philosophy (Sam Harris). You have to stay in the middle, which is not always the middle position.
From that perspective I believe that what Darwinism can teach us is that human beings are the only species that have created an artificial nature in the form of culture. We know that primates can use occasional tools, devise solutions to simple problems. But none of them have ever thought of creating themselves as a species capable of destroying their natural bases to the point of sending the whole planet to hell. And us along with it.
So the question is not what is innate within us. The question is what we do with what we are to counter the destructive impulses that are proving dominant today. We are not angels, as Bit--Carlos said, it means that we are contradictory. Not that we are demons.
Whether innate or not, we know that our impulses can be countered on an individual level. But we don't seem to know how to do it collectively.
I'm afraid the issue is political. It looks bad.
NOTE: Steven Pinker seems to me awfully naive on this subject.
Do you know about the Bohr-Einstein debates, and the Copenhagen interpretation of physics? That Einstein was a staunch scientific realist, and that Heisenberg tended towards a form of idealism? If you’re interested, look into a book called Quantum by Manjit Kumar, and also (the much earlier) Heisenberg’s Philosophy and Physics. (The latter is the definitive statement of the Copenhagen interpretation.).
As for science and knowledge of reality, there is, in my view, a subtle but profound issue at the heart of this. Which is that modern science, since Galileo, has generally operated within the paradigm of reality being something apart from or outside the observer; that here is the scientist, the observing intelligence, observing the workings of nature, through the Galilean paradigm of ‘a book written in mathematics’. However, it is being realised that in the final analysis, man is really not apart from or outside of nature, and that science itself forever has a subjective pole, comprising the mind of the observer, which has been ‘bracketed out’ of the reckoning of science by the Galilean method. This, however, is precisely what the ‘observer problem’ in quantum physics has called into question. And it’s also at the heart of the Bohr-Einstein debates.
Thanks for the references. I've read a few chapters of Heisenberg's book.
As for the problem of interpenetration between the subjective and the objective, quantum mechanics has raised it in a heated way, as you say. However, it seems that contemporary physics has taken Bohr's side. But I think that Kant had understood the problem much earlier, declaring the thing in itself unknowable. Critical Kant, of course. It's surprising that Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and others often mentioned Plato, Berkeley, Hume or Mach and none of them remembered Kant. I suspect that they had not read many philosophical works.
So you're saying that the regularities of Nature, that Science depends on, are not universal laws, but merely conditional habits? I suspect that position is derived from rejection of the concept of a lawmaker. The difference between a "law" and a "habit" is that laws are imposed from above, while habits are accidental due to local conditions. "Norms" are imposed values rather than free choices. That's why the early scientists labeled their observed consistencies in physics with a term that implied a moral right/wrong distinction mandated by an absolute ruler. "Habits" are regular tendencies that have no moral justification. So a habitual world would be amoral, with no clear good or bad, no right or wrong. In that case, every man (or particle of matter) is a law unto himself.
Normative Law : In law, as an academic discipline, the term "normative" is used to describe the way something ought to be done according to a value position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative
Quoting Enrique
If "principles do not obtain" in Nature, it's because there is no "prince", no ultimate authority. So cultural laws are the only rules that do obtain. That is the Atheist/Humanist position. And it's also half of my own BothAnd position. The other side of my consilient morality is the understanding that Natural Laws (not habits) were ruling the world for eons before humans came along. The eventual emergence of Life and Mind are due, either to the harmonious organizing principles of Nature, or to the erratic accidents of randomness. I view Natural Selection as an imposed set of values on physical evolution, and Cultural Selection is the application of human values to meta-physical evolution.
BothAnd Principle : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
Meta-physical : mental phenomena as contrasted to physical
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html
Quoting Enrique
Yes. If Evolution was dependent on randomness alone, there would be no values, and no progress, no reason. But the addition of Natural Selection (choices based on fitness criteria) converts random change to directional change. I view that as a sign of Rationality in the evolutionary process. So Evolution is characterized by both Freedom and Fate; both Law and Autonomy.
Selection : adj. -- chosen in preference to another or others; selected. choice; of special value or excellence. careful or fastidious in selecting; discriminating. carefully or fastidiously chosen; exclusive
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/select
Quoting Enrique
Your post is in agreement with half of my view, but this post is a clarification of the other half. Specifically, my worldview is deistic, in that the world is being created via evolution, but without divine intervention in the process.
I knew that Aristotle had some vague concept of a Soul, but was not aware of the term "active intellect" or "agent intellect". I can see that these terms could be referring to some human essence, which distinguishes us from animals, but may not imply an immortal soul in the Christian sense.
"EVERYTHING in the cosmic universe is composed of matter and form." ___Aquinas
Aquinas more specifically equates the essence of human nature with the immortal Soul. But I go a step further, to assert that even matter is a form of Plato's timeless Forms, So I could say that everything in the universe is composed of "Information", which I define as the creative power to Enform, (aka EnFormAction).
EnFormAction : As the holistic expression of the human Self (Soul), it is the essence or pattern that defines you as a person
Note : If you find this definition hard to imagine, just remember how the Star Trek Transporter read the information (data describing a person's mind & body) into a pattern of bits that could be transmitted to another location.
I'm not an atheist, I think all beings have a spiritual nature, but I'm also a critical thinker, and all public accounting for this spirituality has thus far been at its best respectably inadequate to explain the reality, and at its worst employed as malicious deception, in science, philosophy and elsewhere. I place my own spirituality in the realm of personal experience, not unempirical or irrational, but not a justifiably collective value to be culturally binding either.
My opinion is that we should in general incline towards basing culture on human agreement by way of reasoned collaboration rather than dictatorial authority. Being opposed to the unrelenting infliction and threat of harm, a major cause of unending and currently escalating divisiveness in society, rationality is an ideal to gradually work towards in complex ways that respect the individual, utilizing nuanced education, careful institutional reform and, however possible, positive reinforcement that encourages personal growth. This is very similar to views of the European Enlightenment, probably the origin of social progressiveness in politics, an inheritance of well-reasoned cultural strategies that I think is declining in influence, to our undeniable detriment.
I think scientific skepticism is the foundation for furthering human quality of life by way of strategic theoretical and technological progress, but involves some extremely difficult issues. These complications will be much easier to deal with if everyone has access to all the relevant information, can recognize when a source of information is legitimate, is provided with enough basic competence to obtain any relevant information independently, has some level of protected license to discuss the information publicly, and isn't being so scrooged by manipulative information distribution in general that all of this is impossible.
I'm perhaps much less prone to think the universe is intrinsically intelligible than some. My interest in philosophy is mostly driven by a desire to continually assimilate the unintuitive, figure out all the enigmas, and engage in insightful communication.
I regard your philosophy as a cool thought experiment, a nice attempt at stretching common intuitions and growing intellectually, what I wish everyone had the opportunity to do. Thinking with you guys has given me the seeds of some new ideas that are bouncing around in the back of my mind to eventually edify me.
That's also why I am a Deist. All religions of the world are based on philosophical attempts to explain both the regularities and the vagaries of Nature, of Reality. Typically, pre-scientific societies took the predictable aspects of nature for granted. But the unpredictable or disorderly behaviors of nature were attributed to magical beings (gods, principalities), who as haughty nobles of the imaginary spiritual realm, were easily offended by insignificant inferior humans who were disrespectful of their power and position.
Unfortunately, their notion of spirituality was tainted by fear of those invisible magicians, who could, for no apparent reason, punish humans who were insufficiently slavish and sycophantic. So, while they expressed their common spirituality toward equals as morality, toward their betters they prostrated their unworthy selves in worship, just as they would suck-up to their human kings who were above the law of morality. Their attempts to explain natural processes in terms of magical spirituality made allowances for divine deception (maya) and for priests who felt licensed to use magic tricks of their own to keep the masses in a state of fearful awe. That is the tradition of authoritarian religion that Deists rejected, as they turned to human science instead of divine revelation for understanding of mundane reality, including its spiritual aspects that I call "Metaphysics" to contrast with mundane Physics.
Metaphysics : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html
Quoting Enrique
That is also the inclination of Deism, which is not a religion, but a philosophical attitude toward spirituality (metaphysics), which was ignored by materialistic scientists.
Quoting Enrique
Yes. Skepticism is necessary for any philosopher who wants to avoid being deceived by the smoke & mirrors of religions. And Science is the best method we have developed for understanding physical reality. But it has never been able to replace Religion as the source of information on metaphysical reality.
Quoting Enrique
My Enformationism thesis is, as you say, a thought experiment intended to inform my personal worldview as a replacement for the religion of my youth. It attempts to avoid the magical obfuscation of occult mythology, and instead find a more accessible understanding of how the world works on both physical and metaphysical levels. Unfortunately, it is counter-intuitive for both materialistic scientists and religious mystics. So, I have found that philosophers are more amenable to metaphysics, and more likely to grasp the common ground of Enformation as the universal "substance" of the real world, that bridges the gap between Mind & Matter, Soul & Body, Religion & Science.
Enformation : 1. When spelled with an “I”, Information is a noun, referring to data & things. When spelled with an “E”, Enformation is a verb, referring to energy and processes.
2. the Enformationism thesis . . . says that mental Information is the new fundamental principle of science, and the key to a new/old way of thinking about reality.
http://bothandblog5.enformationism.info/page36.html
Education gave me an ultra-rational personality that aims for consistency and integrity as basic guidelines, a means to generally avoid diminishing pleasure, my own or anyone else's. This works well in rational situations, but lucid dreams, visions, miracles, paranormal experiences, and subordination of human will to spiritual forces taught me that the world is full of the supernatural, and within the total psychological/spiritual/material ecosystem humans are almost ants, regardless of how much self-control we have.
As far as the implications for human nature, I've learned that vengeance is like masochism, though in some conditions damaging conflict unfortunately becomes inevitable. From a long-term perspective, getting revenge for a wrong can have a similar psychological effect to committing the wrong in the first place, it usually ends up collaterally hurting those who aren't involved in the dispute, and it destabilizes the situation spiritually so that we lose more rational control of consequences. I'm not saying that punishment is totally to be dispensed with, but infliction of harm has serious supernatural repercussions that are nearly impossible to contain once set in motion. I think we're all influenced by the negative spiritual effects of systemic revenge every moment of every day, much more than we ever recognize.
My personal view, I'm certainly not going to claim its at all sacred.
Whether or not they're 'normative', they are at the very least natural principles. They're 'laws' in the sense of 'natural laws', which is the term used to describe scientific principles, such as Newton's laws of motion. But nowadays the sense in which there really are 'laws' is itself called into question. It's been pointed out that the origin of 'laws' was the supposed 'divine laws' of Christian philosophy and therefore the sense of the term 'law' is lost when there is nothing to underwrite it; laws generally compel, but what natural law compels an inanimate object? Thorny question, but suffice to say, I think the ontological status of natural laws, and also natural numbers, both of which science assumes in order to make any statement at all, are not themselves explained by science, and won't ever be, as they're both epistemically and ontologically prior to 'the special sciences' which are built on them; which is why metaphysics is described as ‘first philosophy’.
And there's a bit of an irony in your deployment of the term 'anthropic' in this context, as the status of the so-called 'anthropic principle', the discovery that the Universe is characterised by a very small number of very precisely defined ratios, in the absence of which there would be neither matter nor living beings, is also an open question. Some of the scientists who first discovered this (for example Freeman Dyson and Fred Hoyle) made statements to the effect that 'the universe knew we were coming'. Hoyle said something like 'the fix was in'.
And you have to wonder, how we acquired the necessary intelligence to approximately measure the age and extent of the physical universe, if the successful propogation of the genome provides the sole rationale for our capabilities.
So to critiize the human grasp of natural principles as ‘anthropic’ is perhaps unintentionally ironic.
Quoting Gnomon
I don’t think you comprehend hylomorphic dualism - and that’s OK, as it is an arcane subject, and one that I also don’t claim any expertise in, not having studied 'the Classics' in any depth.
But there’s a deep principle in Platonism, also found in Aristotle, about the nature of the knowable, what it is 'to really know'. Recall that when the Greek philosophers say that ‘the senses betray us’, they mean that quite literally. Matter itself, they would say, is intrinsically unintelligible, and the sensory domain, which naturalism takes for granted as the only reality, is only a shadow or simulcra of actuality. Only the forms are knowable because they’re knowable in the same sense that arithmetic proofs are known - immediately and apodicticly, by direct insight into necessarily truth.
So according to hylomorphic dualism
Which points to the fundamental importance of universals in the Platonic epistemology; which is something that modern philosophy has abandoned or rejected.
Aristotle asserted that physical objects are compounds of Matter and Form. My understanding is that he was making a distinction between the physical properties that our senses detect, and the metaphysical properties (the design pattern) that are known via our extra sense of Reason. That kind of dualistic either/or analysis is amenable to my BothAnd philosophy. But the BA principle is ultimately monistic, because it unites space-time Physics and Metaphysics into a single eternal principle : the creative power to enform, to create --- which I call EnFormAction.
So, my worldview agrees with Aristotle that what we perceive with the physical senses is Matter, and what we conceive with metaphysical Reason is Form (information; essence). Matter is the unique substance of individual things, but Form is the common substance of all things (EnFormAction). This is similar to Einstein's equation of tangible Matter (stuff) with intangible Energy (causation).
So, when I said, "even matter is a form of Plato's timeless Forms", I was agreeing with Aristotle's hylomorphic analysis, while adding my own synthesis of space-time Dualism into eternal-infinite Monism.
Hylomorphism : A thing’s form is its definition or essence—what it is to be a human being, for example.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/
Forms : Platonic Forms are Archetypes : the original pattern or model of which all things of the same type are representations or copies. Eternal metaphysical Forms are distinguished from temporal physical Things. These perfect models are like imaginary designs from which real Things can be built.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
EnFormAction : Metaphorically, it's the Will-power of G*D, which is the First Cause of everything in creation. Aquinas called the Omnipotence of God the "Primary Cause", so EFA is the general cause of every-thing in the world. Energy, Matter, Gravity, Life, Mind are secondary creative causes, each with limited application.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
BothAnd Principle : The Enformationism worldview entails the principles of Complementarity, Reciprocity & Holism, which are necessary to offset the negative effects of Fragmentation, Isolation & Reductionism. Analysis into parts is necessary for knowledge of the mechanics of the world, but synthesis of those parts into a whole system is required for the wisdom to integrate the self into the larger system. In a philosophical sense, all opposites in this world (e.g. space/time, good/evil) are ultimately reconciled in Enfernity (eternity & infinity).
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
I'm not a Spiritualist in the sense you intend. Instead, I am an Enformationist, in the sense that reality is not haunted by spooky spirits, but caused & motivated by the natural power to enform (commonly known as energy). From my perspective, the "natural or spiritual laws that apply to human beings" are all various forms of Information, which is the fundamental force & substance of the universe.
Information = Energy = Matter : One of the more radical theories suggests that information is the most basic element of the cosmos.
https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/the-basis-of-the-universe-may-not-be-energy-or-matter-but-information
Information : Knowledge and the ability to know. Technically, it's the ratio of order to disorder, of positive to negative, of knowledge to ignorance. It's measured in degrees of uncertainty. Those ratios are also called "differences". So Gregory Bateson* defined Information as "the difference that makes a difference". The latter distinction refers to "value" or "meaning". Babbage called his prototype computer a "difference engine". Difference is the cause or agent of Change. In Physics it’s called "Thermodynamics" or "Energy". In Sociology it’s called "Conflict".
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
Rattling the anthrocentric (not anthropic oops) cage.
Maybe human rationality's materialist interpretation of the world as composed of inanimate objects is partially a result of the impact on the human psyche of perceiving and living around technology, though we're far removed from the original circumstances that would prove this. I think organic consciousness' responsivity to motion is typically based on recognizing intention, stimulated affect and/or relatively simple causality, or else somewhat negligible in symbolic meaning. But highly conceptual, structuralizing human consciousness, with its extreme inclination to imaginatively invent integrated symbolical systems, at some point began viewing the world as symbolic of emotive intentions, weaving these modes of interpreting experience together in speculatively fulfilling generalizations until we had ideas of spiritual purpose as essence. The idea of natural laws is probably a result of attempts to synthesize mechanistic causal concepts and predictabilities, a derivation from increasingly technological thinking, with this preexisting sense of purpose as essence from out of the compulsion to continue analogizing and generalizing in pursuit of consistency, coherence, the achievement of comprehensive indisputability in knowledge.
I think the conceptualized nature of quantities and spontaneous patterns is basically a psychological issue. These are a product of the human mind as comprehended introspectively and by analysis of hypothesized mechanism within progressing sequences of observation.
As for whether the cosmos is mathematical, I think it is for humans because of the nature of our cognition, not necessarily because of governing determinism, a la Kant's antinomies of reason. I don't think a genome is absolutely required for perception and intention to be possible. Conditions characterizing the existence of earth's carbon-based lifeforms are not necessarily generalizable to the whole cosmos. I think our knowledge of the age and extent of the physical universe is theory or a conceptual system, not precluding complete refutation depending on what further investigation reveals.
You're probably getting a feel for my anthrocentric viewpoint. I think its crucial to recognize that knowledge (not existence) is fundamentally anthrocentric, because then we can fully acknowledge the pervasiveness of uncertainty and unrestrainedly imagine alternative possibilities. The multiple interpretations of quantum mechanics, theories of parallel universes and such, along with conception of history, empower us to pull ourselves out of restricting mechanistic dogmatisms and reach a malleable balance rather than an uncompromising conflict between perspectives. Seems we're in an era where science can become truly progressive for the human psyche instead of oppressive because of our growing sense for its historical tranformativeness, the way generalizations vary as our frame of reference changes, and our greater cognizance that theory depends on human choices. We simultaneously have to avoid making science oppressive culturally, a big challenge. I think we've got a viable ideal, but attaining it not so much. I can't believe this crazy world.
I think it's a direct consequence of early modern science in the aftermath of the 'scientific revolution'.
(Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos pp. 35-36)
Quoting Enrique
That's a naturalistic account. It is simultaneously cynical, patronising and inadequate (not on your part but as a cultural perspective). I think it's more that the ancients, or rather, pre-moderns, did not have a sense of themselves as being separated from or apart from nature in the way that we do. And that sense of separateness in turn comes from viewing humans from an objective perspective. Of course, it is essential to do that for the purposes of the objective sciences and medicine. But the conceit behind it, is that the naturalist account sees reality 'as it truly is', as if from no perspective whatever. And then on the basis of this purported position of objectivity, it creates accounts of those human attributes such as spirituality which don't fit into the [s]procrustean bed[/s] picture created by evolutionary biology.
Quoting Enrique
I kind of see that, but I see another conceit there. (Not yours, but one of culture.) First, to say 'knowledge' (not existence) is to implicitly differentiate 'what exists' from 'what we know'. But this is where the Kantian critique of reason is relevant. Realism imagines that knowledge is somehow 'in the mind', but that 'the world' exists entirely independently of that - as I think you're saying here. But Kant argues that our knowledge of 'the real world' is always knowledge of how it appears to us. So it already allows for the fact that even so-called objective accounts have a subjective pole or aspect. But this is what is generally forgotten by the naturalist account. But then naturalism assumes 'the mantle (or the white coat) of scientific authority' with respect to the nature of what is real without acknowledging the methodological constraints which are implicit in those statements.
I contend that we today have an implicit world-picture of ourselves qua intelligent subjects, in a domain of objectively real forces and objects, described by science. What we're not seeing is that the implicit picture within which we operate is also a representation, in the sense described by Schopenhauer as 'vorstellung'. That does not by any means invalidate science or attempts to understand nature scientifically, but it does alert us to the fact that ultimately we are participants as much as we are observers, which brings about a different kind of orientation.
Actually, Google is all-knowing. What would you like to know?
What would you like to say? I'm listening. :smile:
Not sure if you're going to read all of this, but some more detail to discuss. These historical blurbs aren't entirely adequate, but maybe you can help me figure some more stuff out.
I probably generalized so much in my previous post that it came across as naive about the undoubtedly intricate nature of real causality. I would certainly say I've never put together based on my readings an exact timeline of human psychical/cultural development, if that's even possible. Some cultures are probably more prone to viewing the environment as spiritual, and some less, along with individuals. Looking at the topic from a perspective internal to rationale rather than in terms of cognitive structure with its reliance on physicalist modular notions, this is the basic idea I have at my current stage of comprehension:
The mystery of animateness in humans and animals has perennially fascinated Homo sapiens, and since it is not at all clear where the line should be drawn between inanimate mechanism and intention, especially in pre-scientific worldviews, we have tended to attribute soul to nature in general. Prehistorically, humans had a runaway instinct to interpret unexplained motion, in spontaneous phenomena such as the sunrise and the weather, as instigated by invisible spirits, with the perception of voices and apparitions in nature reinforcing this inclination. We see and hear the signs of vitality in ourselves and the creatures in relation to which this ability to predict and anticipate intention proves fruitful to our existence - the avoidance of the territorial haunts of dangerous predators, for hunting, etc. - and our psyches presumed intention in the atmosphere, water and all motivity. The cosmos seems intuitively to be an expression of spirit rather than a mechanistic system of interrelated variables in the absence of ubiquitous technologies fashioned from natural resources and stimulating our reinterpretation of them as inanimate appendages of our own mentality. Without precisely demarcated concepts of self, psychology and matter, everything seems as alive as we are.
So I'd claim that the prehistoric mindset viewed spirit as universally infused into experience, with no conceptual distinction made between technical procedures and what moderns would call supernatural.
As for how this transitioned into philosophy, my basic conception:
The first philosophical analyses were of a type that can be called naive realism, originating at roughly the advent of ancient Greek written records. Artistic creativity, spirituality and beliefs about existence had been intertwined in one and the same sorts of cultural expression stretching all the way back to ancient prehistory, an organic outgrowth of inspired human nature during which libido was discharged, the experience of beauty realized, and a maturing sense of truth communicated in symbolic form.
As technology took a great leap forward at the adoption of Neolithic farming village lifestyles with their greater demand for finely crafted tools and wares, their specialized occupational division of labor, and intensified analysis of novel ideas and techniques to meet the need for detailed explanation and intellectual exchange, written forms of truth purveyance also became enriched and increasingly systematic within an initial aesthetic medium of poetic verse. The first philosophy was Greek poetry, which underwent a gradual transition from symbolic metaphor to materialistic theory as the meaning and nature of the cosmos morphed into the substance of the cosmos and then into its constituent elements.
To my knowledge, the first philosophies were extremely materialistic, but not derived from systematic observational methods like those of modern science. The first philosophers such as Thales performed thought experiments with concepts like the four elements. Cultures beyond ancient Greece such as China had similar concepts, maybe altogether classifiable as a proto-atomism. As thinkers attempted to progressively generalize to essences, the literature became more metaphysical, the "One" of Parmenides, "logos", Mesopotamian sorcery-based philosophies, introspective Buddhist concepts of universal consciousness, etc. I think Plato's thinking involves a proto-psychological form/matter dualism, with ideas being instantiated forms. Aristotle expanded on Plato's theories by trying to analyze exactly how forms such as ideas relate to matter, arriving at the paradigm of hylomorphism.
Concepts of soul like neo-Platonic emanation theory existed throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. It was the reintroduction of Aristotle's naturalism to Medieval Europe and then the movement of Ockamist nominalism that produced the modern paradigm of theoretically modeling nature, which was one of the motivations for invention of observation-enhancing technologies such as the telescope and the microscope, along with the development of better mathematical techniques such as Newton's calculus and an analysis of uncertainty by the likes of Descartes and Hume.
The form/matter distinction probably became mind/body dualism as anatomy advanced and synthesized with progressing paradigms of matter as technologyesque mechanism, leaving concepts of soul, preserved as sacred, in the dust. Philosophers regarded humans as unique in having a rational faculty in addition to the appetitive and vegetative processes of organic life in general, and completely broke through the "inaccessible soul" barrier with the European Enlightenment concept of transcendent universal reason and its secularized support for universal morality. A lot of time was spent refining this concept of rationality, from the Early Modern period to the 19th century. Locke's ideas of the understanding and Kant's categories of reason are instances.
In 19th century Europe, the concept of unconscious will evolving within arational economic, biological and cultural contexts came into vogue. Freud's concept of libido was probably derived from this paradigm, and he introduced psychological science, analysis of the human mind as composed of arational modular processes instead of a transcending rational structure. The challenge of philosophy of mind and neuroscience has been to reconcile modularity of the psyche with the modularity of brain and body in an all-encompassing theory of consciousness.
So to summarize, I think at the beginning of civilization human concepts of truth were not at all irrational but somewhat unintegrated. We had the capacity for complex technological practice, but concepts and proto-expressions of natural principles, the philosophical applications of symbolical systems, were extremely metaphorical and imprecise, more artistic than technical, so that we had to force by sheer willpower a connection in individual minds between the symbolic features of essentializing thought and those of more ingrained technological thinking in a multi-generational cultural process that produced technical discourse with its historical dimension. I don't view the idea that modern truth and related thinking differ from the prehistoric variety as cynical or patronizing. These earlier humans had the capacity to think in modern ways, but lacked the cultural conditioning to mold their minds into so to speak "modernization". This seems to me the basic developmental stages in the incarnation of our so considered "objectively true" reality.
Spirit in technology and belief transitioned into systematic matter and transcendent soul conjoined by forms as ideas. Matter became mechanistic, ideation became systematic reason, reason was bracketed as a subsidiary of arational will, and psychology developed an arational anatomy of the mind that moderns are trying to harmonize with anatomy of the body and material mechanisms in general.
Much cognitive dissonance.
Darwin didn't dispose of the idea of two sexes, nor did he blur the line between species in general. His theory blurred the line between man and nature - taking humans from their place as special creations of God and firmly placing them in the natural world. He proposed a theory of sexual selection where one sex selects features of the other sex that end up being carried over to the next generation. Sexual dimorphism is the result. Those qualities define the functions of the sexes today.
We don't see LBGTQ in other species, only in human populations. This tells me that humans are diverse and versatile in their behaviors and societies are what put limitations on those diverse behaviors.
The idea that sex is only for procreation is a conservative notion. Sex is a social behavior that can lead to procreation but is also a means to solidify personal relationships with other members and to relieve stress. Thanks to humans' intelligence and form (bipedal with opposable thumbs), the variety of behaviors humans can engage in can be diverse. In this sense, men can wear dresses and still be a man, but society expects different behavior from a man and limits his varied behavior. So in order to circumvent the limitation of society, they try to change into a woman so they can wear a dress. This is wrong because it just reinforces those limitations on other women who think that they don't have to wear dresses to be a woman. A man can wear a dress and still be a man. The body type of a human doesn't prevent a person from wearing a dress or pants. Society is preventing it, not our morphology or functions of our form. So wearing certain clothes is not what defines a man or a woman. One's species and sexual morphology and functions determine whether one is a man or woman.
Quoting GnomonThis is just wrong.
The fact is that while humans are diverse, we are more alike than we are different. Organisms share features and functions with other members of their species or sex. This allows us to put organisms into groups. These features and functions are not arbitrary creations of the mind.
Before Darwin, different biologists, like Carl Linnaeus, came up with identical groupings of organisms thanks to the nested arrangement of life as a result of evolutionary descent. Darwin's theory explained why there is a nested arrangement of life. The natural classification of organisms itself is strong evidence for evolution.
Only if you think that Human Nature is defined by the two sexes of the human species, as if one's sex, either male or female, exhausts what it is to be human would one think that humans can be put into only two boxes. Sex is only one function of a human, just as it for other species. If procreation were the only function of organisms then the only categories we'd need are "sexual" and "asexual".
Biological sex is based on an amalgam of five characteristics:
- chromosomes (XY is male, XX female)
- genitals (penis vs. vagina)
- gonads (testes vs. ovaries)
- hormones (males have higher relative levels of testosterone than women, while women have higher levels of estrogen)
- secondary sex characteristics that aren’t connected with the reproductive system but distinguish the sexes, and usually appear at puberty (breasts, facial hair, size of larynx, subcutaneous fat, etc.)
More than 99.9% of people fall into two non-overlapping classes using just the characteristics of genitals and gonads. The the other traits almost always occur within these classes. You can do a principal components analysis using the combination of all five traits and you would find two widely separated clusters with very few people in between. Those clusters are biological realities, not mental constructions. Horses and donkeys are biological realities, even though they can produce hybrids (sterile mules) that fall morphologically in between.
Sexual selection is a mode of natural selection where one biological sex exhibits preferences in the characteristics of the opposite sex, and those characteristics (and the preferences for them) are made more prominent in subsequent generations.
If sex were a mental construct, sexual selection wouldn’t work: males would look identical to females. That difference itself suggests that there’s a biological reality to sex, and that this biological reality is what has caused both behavioral and morphological differences between the sexes.
You need to read up on penguins, sir, plus countless other species if you don't think animals engage in gay, lesbian, or bisexual activity. It really is pervasive.
Point out the study that shows individual organisms of these species establishing same sex relationships while abstaining completely from heterosexual relationships. Only humans do that. At best other organisms are bi-sexual as opposed to strictly homosexual.
https://books.google.com/books?id=EftT_1bsPOAC&pg=PA179#v=onepage&q&f=false
Page 179 on Ovis Aries.
Last time I checked bisexuality is part of the LGBTQ group as well. Nature is pretty wild.
I feel like we're just not agreeing on what "gay" means from LGBTQ. I'm from the US and in the US a gay man can still have sex with a woman and still be considered gay. It's just not as black-and-white as you take it to be, at least that's how we see things here. You treat it like it's an all or nothing thing.
You were totally right earlier on in your discussion with Gnonom where you said Darwin blurred the line between man and nature. Homosexuality activity is pervasive in nature and it's not uncommon to see same-sex pairings and I'm sure if we were able to follow matings habits out in the wild we'd see animals who appear to have a strong preference for same-sex mating based on their activity. It's the same for humans. That's all I'm talking -- a strong preference for same sex mating.
Good point. The argument between Conservatives (religious & political) and Progressives seems to be about the scientific deconstruction of what one side views as a proper & fitting Natural Hierarchy, not just of sexes, but of species and various other demarcations of reasonable categories. The conservative side seems to prefer simple authoritative distinctions (special creation), while progressives prefer some leeway to interpret those classifications as they see fit. That may be why, as I said in the OP, my brief online review turned-up far more objections to the concept of continual evolution from a conservative perspective.
[note : I'm neither conservative nor liberal, but a bit of both. So, I'm trying to see where & why extremists draw their true/false, good/bad lines.]
Quoting Harry Hindu
Of course, that evaluation depends on your personal perspective. Right & Wrong are human moralistic categories. The moral authority of Nature is a rhetorical tactic labeled by philosophers as the Naturalistic Fallacy. And it is opposed to the Super-naturalistic Fallacy of monotheism. Nature-in-general is amoral, but Natural Selection seems to have an agenda of some kind. Pros and Cons can argue endlessly about what that the selective criteria might be : local adaptive efficiency or a teleological purpose, etc.
Ironically, that's exactly why anti-evolutionists look to a divine creator to explain such rational (as opposed to random) organization. :smile:
For example, his first direct attack is on Pinker's, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which found historical evidence that human-on-human violence has declined since the Enlightenment Era, when humans began to rely more on human Reason than super-human Revelation to establish moral boundaries. Both writers are secular Jews, but one is a social scientist, and the other a philosopher/mathematician. Yet, Berlinski ridicules Pinker's copious research and his interpretation of statistical trends. Pinker's reading of the numerical tea leaves is optimistic, in the sense that evolution is heading in a positive direction, while Berlinski's translation of the arcane numbers is just the opposite : "Things could not be getting better, gentler, or kinder, because they are not changing at all." That seems to assume the doctrine of Original Sin. which is ironic for a secular Jew.
Berlinski's negative bias also seems to be the opinion of religious Fundamentalists, who are expecting the imminent annihilation of a sinful world. In other words, the world started at the apex of perfection, and has gone downhill from there. By contrast, Pinker and his lot see the slope going uphill, from vicious amoral ancestors toward a better breed (maybe even AI or robots) that have learned from their mistakes. So one writer views Human Nature as inherently bad and worthy of global genocide, while the other sees innate imperfections, but also potential for improvement via Reason rather than by destruction of this failed experiment, and a do-over in a New World.
Humans can't seem to agree on Human Nature : are we essentially Bad, or essentially Good, or a bit of both? My wishy-washy worldview (BothAnd) agrees with the latter. Nobody is forced by human nature to "break bad", nor to sprout wings of angels. Instead, we are like pioneers blazing a trail into the wilderness, and making life-or-death choices without knowing what paradise or desert lies over the next mountain. But are our choices made freely, or by destiny? :chin:
I only mentioned having sex with... not being attracted to. Many gay men report having sex with women, do you think that doesn't make them gay? If a straight guy experiences same sex attraction for like a couple seconds does that make him bisexual?
I'm reading the book, Human Nature, in order to get a different perspective on Essentialism from the usual Darwinian concept of continuous evolution, and emerging species. Berlinski is an academic intellectual, and a secular Jew, not a religious fundamentalist --- even though he works with the Discovery Institute, a fundamentalist Protestant think tank known for its publishing of Intelligent Design arguments. He supports his critiques with long strings of mathematical logical symbolism, and technical language not appropriate for general audiences.
Berlinski claims that he does not support the theory of Intelligent Design. But he is famous for attacking the theory of random Evolution (which I also have a problem with). Specifically, in this book he attacks, not specifically atheists, but anyone who is optimistic about positive human evolution. He seems to accept the Genesis notion of "fixed kinds", although he apparently does not accept its divine authority. In general, Berlinski has no use for religion, but he seems to be a contrarian by nature. So he objects to the tone of certainty in the writings of evolutionists -- but not to the Bible-bias of Intelligent Design proponents.
His criticisms of evolutionary optimists are very detailed, but mostly boil down to "I see no evidence to support the notion of evolutionary progress". As a writer on arcane mathematical topics, he feels confident that his negative interpretation of Pinker's statistical evidence is rational & scientific, while Pinker's optimism is emotional and pseudo-scientific --- based on a prior commitment to an atheistic Darwinian worldview. I'm not a strict atheistic Darwinist, but I'm also not a theistic Intelligent Design defender. Instead, I have developed my own worldview that is somewhere in the Aristotelian mean between extreme positions. So, I enjoyed reading Berlinski's exposition of one extreme view, but my cautiously optimistic position is closer to that of Pinker.
Apparently, Berlinski believes that mainstream biologists are biased in favor of atheistic interpretations of the genetic evidence. Hence, not to be trusted. But, since he claims to be a non-theist, it's hard to see how he arrives at his non-Darwinian rendition, which he supports mostly by criticizing the opposition.
I personally, have a non-theist, non-accidental understanding of biological evolution, but it's not the neither fish-nor-fowl [neither-theist-nor-atheist] view of Berlinski. It's based on the positive evidence of progressive enformation.
Enformation : noun - The creative power of Evolution; the power to enform; Logos; Change.
If there were natural kinds, there would be a set of properties that are necessary and sufficient for belonging to that kind. That is the case for things like the elements of the periodic table, but not for living things like geese, koalas, and bacteria.
Individual essence is also problematic, because again - it would entail there being a set of necessary and sufficient properties for being that individual. There is no such set.
You mention gender, so are you distinguishing gender from sex? There's clearly a genetic distinction between animals with xy vs xx chromosomes (sex). Gender roles are less clear-cut, and I don't think we could identify a set of necessary and sufficient properties for being considered a male vs female gender role person - it's a spectrum.
Berllinksi is allied with (actually a senior fellow of) the Discovery Institute which is the central ID organisation in the states so his disavowal of ID seems disingenuous. Which is not to say that everything he or they say are mistaken or incorrect, but it does say something about the underlying worldview. I agree with some of their criticisms of biological materialism, but I shy away from anything that sounds like biblical fundamentalism or literalism.
Philosophically, a lot of the problems arise from the rejection of formal and final causality at the beginning of early modern science, and the attribution of active agency to matter. There’s your materialist program in a nutshell.
If you are talking about the "essence" of a human person in the sense of a distinctive Self or Soul, I suspect that Berlinski would disagree. But since he didn't attempt to define his own notion of Essence in philosophical terms, I can only guess what his position is from his troll-like put-downs of Darwinists, rather than positive assertions. That's my main disappointment with the book. I was looking for an intuitive understanding of where he would draw the line between one essence and another, not a mathematical exposition.*1
For example, he discusses Quantitative mathematical Set Theory to define what's wrong with the Qualitative biological Species theory, and the annoying "politically-correct" rainbow gender categories of LGBTQ. His counter-argument was so technical that I failed to follow the implications. I suppose he would describe his two-value gender range as "scientific", and dismiss multi-value Queer categories as political Neo-Marxism, rather than democratic fairness.
I could better follow his oblique references to Venn diagrams, but again he seems to limit the real-world options to Either/Or; ignoring the human tendency to make finer-grained distinctions based on both rational analysis, and personal feelings. Where would Ockham draw the line? :shade:
CONFUSING GENDER DIAGRAMS, after science and politics got involved
SIMPLE TRADITIONAL GENDER CATEGORIES, back in the golden age
*1 Berlinski sometimes seems to be more interested in demonstrating his genius than in communicating to a general audience. For example, he adds some short addendum chapters entirely in foreign languages. And seems to think the fact that he lives in Paris makes him a more genuine intellectual than his American roots would indicate.
Yes. Years ago I intuitively realized that the evolving world seemed to be directed by some kind of "active agency", rather than by random accidents. Yet the biblical myth of creation was a bit too naive & archaic to reconcile with modern knowledge. However, materialistic Science has no answer to philosophical Qualia questions. So I looked to the notions of Formal & Final Causality to fill-in the blanks.
Since I had long ago lost faith in biblical inerrancy, I have pieced together a modern Evolution Myth of my own, based on our current knowledge of the central causal role of Physical/Meta-physical Information in the world. Enformationism is a consilience of ancient Intuition and modern Science, of both Physics and Metaphysics, of both Creation and Evolution. That BothAnd philosophy is guaranteed to offend extremists on both sides of the Science vs Religion divide. :smile:
Active Agency : EnFormAction --- http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html
Quoting Gnomon
I don't know what it has to do with the legitimacy of being homosexual that penguins are homosexual, that Darwin established the difference between species or that science (which, biology, sociology, semantics?) maintains a clear distinction between sexual genders.
Chimpanzees exercise sex between males as a social activity and are cannibal. I don't think that either of these things is definitive of chimpanzee essence, much less that it has to do with a supposed human essence. I don't think Darwinism can impart ethical standards and I don't think human beings are natural at their present state. In its origin, it can be.
The question is: is this good or is this bad? The rest is entangling the problem.
For Jews and Christians, the answer to that was traditionally associated with the belief that males are supposed to be dominant, and so above and penetrating.
Homosexuality was seen as defiance of something essential because it meant that at least one man was taking a feminine position.
The fact that this "essence" wasnt detected by other cultures was seen as proof of their degradation. So it's not just that homosexuality was bad, failure to understand the essence behind that judgement was bad.
The issue comes already entangled.
Not science, politics. I already showed that science proves that two genders are the biological realities.
The traditional diagram is also political.
The scientific diagram would have two equally sized circles.
Politics cherrypicks science, or makes up its own facts, like men can feel like a woman when wearing a dress, to support its own agendas.
Quoting Gnomon
As I said before, Berlinski seems to be a contrarian by nature --- it's the essence of his personality. In the book, he describes his younger self as a "high-school bully" --- probably because he was smarter than the other kids. In an interview by Evolution News --- a Discovery Institute publication --- he was challenged to share his "hunches and suspicions about spiritual reality". His response was "No. Either I cannot, or I will not." So I suppose, as a teacher of Logic, he is confused or agnostic about such non-logical multi-valued issues.
I also assume that his reasons for criticizing of materialistic evolution theory is similar to mine : no place for Qualia. But, I don't know for sure, because he never articulated his view beyond accusing evo proponents of being "corrupted by a partisan, a political agenda, and so do not count as truths at all". Apparently acceptance or rejection of the concept of progressive evolution is "a matter mostly of taste." But that's not the kind of analysis of Essentialism I was looking for. So, my search continues.
Biological science does indeed assume two fundamental genders. But it also has found genes that don't fit neatly into the simple binary assumption. Besides, Social science has documented a wide range of cultural attitudes toward gender roles. And the science of Ethology has found that the boundaries of animal gender roles are flexible. Moreover, academic Ethical studies of animal behavior have applied human political values to non-humans, with the usual room for savage debates.
For most practical purposes, I assume that the human essence is either male or female. But when politics and human rights get involved, I must be more flexible to be fair. Is TV host/hostess Ellen male or female? I can only say that she/he is whatever she/he says she/he is. Whew! Political correctness is confusing for us simple-minded folks. :cool:
Male or Female? : http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/male-or-female
Scientific Study of Animal Behavior : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethology
Ethical Animal Studies :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_studies
Sure, there are genes that have nothing to do with sex, because our sex is only part of what it means to be an sexual organism vs. an asexual organism. Other animals have vaginas and penises, so having a vagina or penis isn't what makes you a human. What makes you a human is being bipedal, having opposable thumbs and a large brain. This means that human's behaviors can vary widely - independent of one's sex. Humans can wear any different types of clothes. There is nothing the physically inhibits a woman from wearing pants. There is a physical limitation of being able to urinate while standing up without getting urine all over your legs. There is a physical limitation that inhibits men from have a menstrual cycle and giving birth. So there are a small number of behaviors that are restricted to just men or women, while all the other behaviors is what it means to be a human instead of just a female or male of the human species.
This is why it is sexist to impose these limitations on the sexes - because they aren't actual physical limitations. They are cultural/psychological limitations. It is sexist to say that women can't wear pants because there is nothing that physically limits a woman from wearing pants. And when a man comes along and says that wearing a dress is what makes them a woman, then that reinforces those sexist notions. A man can still be a man and wear a dress and a woman is still a woman when she wears pants.
Quoting Gnomon
Male and female are only a fraction of what it means to be a human. If that weren't the case, then all sexual species would qualify as human. As I said, humans have features that aren't sexual that distinguish them from other species.
When we have instances where humans claim that they are something that they aren't, like an alien, the reincarnation of Elvis Presley, or your son, and the reasons that they aren't what they say they are is their morphology and the behaviors that go along with that morphology, then why do we make an exception for one's sex?
I assume we make an exception to the rule of binary genders for people like Ellen, because we realize they are not talking about objective morphology, but about subjective emotions and psychological self-image. When Americans see an Asian looking person, they may assume their religion is Buddhism. But that's simply an example of racial/cultural ignorance and prejudice, because religious beliefs are not limited by physical morphology. Likewise, gender identity is a belief, not a physical fact.
If I meet a person who claims to be a Martian Priestess of Barsoom, the PC thing to do would be to welcome the priestess to our little pale blue dot, without criticizing her idiotic illusion. But, if we get into a philosophical discussion of Barsoomian theology --- which involves a trinity of genders --- a frank, but respectful, critique might be appropriate. :smile:
Most philosophical and religious traditions assume that each human individual has a unique essence (a Soul) that defines him and distinguishes him from other humans and animals. Opinions on the exact nature of that essence are various though. For example, the Buddha referred to the notion of "I" and "me" as an illusion. He didn't deny that we have a self-image, only that it is an actual thing. Instead, it is a personal & cultural belief, an image of something immaterial, that in Western traditions is envisioned as some eternal unchanging invisible substance like a ghost made of supernatural ectoplasm.
For the Buddha to call the Self-image an "illusion", was merely to disparage its role in human suffering. But in Evolution, the emergence of a self-image also gave humans the power to change their environment to suit their personal desires. The Soul represents me as an agent with power over nature, like a little god. But, as the Buddha observed pessimistically, that power is a two-edged sword. If we desire to be warm in winter, we can make fire to ward-off the suffering of cold weather. But that same useful tool can cause the suffering of too much heat, if it gets out of control. Nevertheless, it's a two-sided coin that can be biased by optimism to land on the bright side of desires fulfilled, thereby allowing us to persevere despite setbacks.
I doubt that anyone can deny that humans, and some animals, have a self-image. As demonstrated by Descartes, my reasoning Self is the only thing I know for sure. But, is it a will'o'wisp of fleeting imagination, or something more durable that can survive death? Is the Soul a gift of God, or of Evolution? Is it a spark of divinity, or merely a tool for genetic survival? These are some of the Essential questions that I was looking for insight on.
If my beliefs contradict yours, who determines whose belief deserves to be protected? I've been called things that I'm not and I dont try to take away their right to call me that. One of the symptoms of a delusion is that you are deeply offended by those that question your delusion.
Political correctness in a society with free speech would entail protecting everyone's right to speak freely. Limiting free speech in a free speech society would be politically incorrect.
Even if there were an objective method of knowing the human essence, it would be irrelevant to determine whether an essential trait is good or bad.
For example, let's say homo homini lupus. This does not mean that jumping down someone else's throat is good. It would be advisable to control human nature at this point.
There are two main ideologies that use and abuse the supposed goodness of human nature. Religions and social Darwinism. United extremes.
I think you mean it would be irrelevant for the purposes of a logical argument which hopes to conclude that X is bad. Moral frameworks that reference either nature or the "God given" aren't utilizing logic. In those cases it's wrapped up in a worldview (or philosophical outlook) that nature and goodness are linked.
Quoting David Mo
So lets leave religion and social Darwinism behind (along with all the other cultural founts that embraced that view). Let's be the wiggling fungi attached to a rock hurtling through nowhere on the way to nowhere.
What's good and bad now?
Science has found through studies of brain development that the prenatal brain develops as a combination of decoding genetic and epigenetic information plus the cognitive mapping of the current environment. Some things old, some things new. Synapses in the brain, although connected, are not actually attached. There is a gap between each one, where information is exchanged via chemical and electrical 'signals' (people are not attached, but they exchange information via signals). Cognitive mapping continues after birth and for the rest of life. Once the child reaches about six years old, and the head growth slows, the brain connections least useful to the child in its daily environment are pruned back. The child's brain has developed to be best suited for the environment, under whatever circumstances those may be. And, the child's sense of 'self' is developed via recognizing and differentiating that which is 'not' self. Example: "My eyes are blue because they are not like my father's, which someone told me are brown."
If our 'self', through brain development, is a combination of 'some things old, some things new', mentally and physically, and consciousness is not a material aspect of that, it seems logical that the immaterial portion of the contributions (that which is 'experienced' through interaction with otherness) would revert to being immaterial when the 'material' is sloughed off.
I think the issue of human essence reduces to the nature of mind as the intersection of material environment/anatomy with immaterial experience linked to soul. The concept of matter was initially a product of thought experiments, enriched by technology into a detailed, powerful mechanistic understanding of substance as it presents to the sense organs. Our sense-perceptions, extremely well-suited for many practical needs to begin with, were potently enhanced, giving us a far-reaching ability to observe from a sort of abbreviatingly efficient perspective, but lacking the capacity to explain all kinds of phenomena, including the immaterial aspects of experience. The blending of chemistry and neuroscience with quantum physics will probably make qualia more explicable and revolutionize spatiotemporal theories of matter, presenting a whole new vista of possible theory and technology. In my view, many intuitions about soul will most likely have some kind of scientifically derived validity, or else where would the pervasiveness of these ideas have come from in the first place?
So basically, I think we create the apparent world by cognition, but this is a simultaneous mess of inadequate reifications that are constantly being used to inhibit unity. Theory is ulterior motive as much as explanation, and we don't have much control of our motives, though ideals are easy enough to articulate. We've had satisfying ideals for millennia! The spirit of the European Enlightenment isn't really that different in essence from Plato's basic outlook, or that of the Buddha, or what lastingly influential prophets everywhere have always been saying when they get the unlikely chance.
Thoughts, presented in Enformationism terms, inspired by your comments :
That reasoning is how ancient people constructed the notion of an immortal Soul, as distinct from the mortal body. But, although Consciousness is essential to the Soul/Self, it is not a thing but a process. It's not made of matter or stuff. Instead, Consciousness is a product of Information Processing. Mind is what the brain does.
Although Information can occur in both physical and metaphysical (mental) forms, it is not a material object, but the power to cause change. We are most familiar with that aspect of Information in the form of Energy. In humans, information-processing extracts self-relevant meaning from various changes in the environment. That influx of meaning (significance) is what we call "consciousness". And Self-consciousness is the essence of human nature : your persona.
Since Consciousness is a process, it can start and stop. When Consciousness stops, the Self/Soul dis-organizes, and the body dies. But the energy (EnFormAction) is always conserved. It continues to flow through the world. So, you could say that the Information that formed the Self/Soul re-enters the main stream of EnFormAction (G*D-Mind in action). Like a drop in the ocean, it is no longer a distinct object.
The Form of your Self/Soul is equivalent to the meaningful data in a computer. It's mathematical or personal relationships, not physical stuff. So, just as the geometrical relationship of three dots continues to exist (in potential) after the dots are erased, your personal Form-data may remain in G*D-Mind after its incarnation is deceased. But it lacks the space-time instance that made it a self-referencing Subject in the first place.
After-thoughts : Unfortunately, while the concept of an immaterial Soul is reasonable, most people still think of it in material terms. For example, ghosts are imagined as a person whose body is now transparent ectoplasm instead of red meat. Dead loved-ones are imagined as-if they are still living in another space-time location (heaven or parallel world). Mediums talk to the dead via mental telegraphy instead of sound waves. But such mind-mind communication of information is notoriously imperfect. Although no wires are involved, and distance should not be a problem, mind-readers and mediums seem to struggle with a lot of noise & static & entropy. Which is why Claude Shannon developed his theory of Information. You would think that by eliminating the physical constraints of communication, we wouldn't have to say, "can you hear me now?" So, I remain skeptical about our ability to communicate directly from Consciousness to Consciousness, without a physical substrate to act on the material world.
Information : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
G*D-Mind : refers to some sort of universal meta-physical source (mind-field) of Information/Energy/Meaning that we know only by reasoning from our experience with the physical world. Not a localized persona, but a general Cause of all change, including the difference-that-makes-a-difference known as "Information".
Agreed.
See my response to Mapping the Medium.
Quoting Enrique
Yes. In the infancy of humanity, the concept of an immaterial Soul was a serious philosophical explanation for both Animation and for Action-at-a-Distance. But the task for modern philosophy is to reconcile those ancient rationalizations with the empirical evidence uncovered by Science. Which is exactly why I have developed the Enformationism thesis.
For example the notion of invisible causal Spirit/Chi/Prana is what we now know as Energy. But some of the imaginary effects of spirit/energy --- such as martial arts masters "throwing" Chi --- are now seen as adolescent fantasies : super-hero powers. It works like magic in stories, but when's the last time you actually saw someone in your presence knocked-down without touching?
Um...no comment lol
I understand that...but even a 'wise fool' (according to the well known Irish joke) knows that if you want to get to Dublin you shouldn't start from here...! If the 'world' began in primordial chaos, how did it know there even was to be an outcome, a destination, a path (no matter how diffuse and indistinct) to be followed - let alone anything about its "general" parameters? Learning processes often do lead to unexpected destinations, but they usually start with at the very least a question - even if it is an open-ended one. They don't usually start from "no idea at all" as far as I can tell...although they might, like threads on philosophy forums, end up there!
Quoting Gnomon
OK - but we're getting confusing definitions now - I was going on from Terrence Deacon's usage...which not about perceptions...in any case - even if 'elephant-aboutness' is in the eye of the beholder, the question still pertains - what is an elephant with no 'elephant-aboutness'?
Quoting Gnomon
I don't believe I said anything about intent and goal coexisting, what I said was that 'ententionality' (aims, purposes, motivations, functionalities, directionalities...) must emerge with the emerging reality - their 'goals' may be future and may remain unrealized, but the 'ententionalities' are (I am suggesting) the 'mental poles' of the emerging realities - inseparable from and necessarily coexistent with the 'physical pole' substrates on which they (ententionalities) 'supervene' (perhaps) driving the evolution of the reality forward...but with no particular destination in mind - at least most of the time.
I assume you are referring to the programmers of mundane Evolutionary Programming, But, did I say anything about “no idea at all”? In my analogy between Intelligent Evolution and Genetic Design, I indicated that the designer (human or deity) used the heuristic search process, specifically because there was no viable path directly to the goal. In the “evolved antenna” design, the barrier was computing power. So, they established parameters to be met, and let their artificial intelligence computers “stumble” upon the optimum solution by a process of trial & error. Our Programmer was a wise-wizard, in that he started before the beginning. It's called a "program" : a plan of action.
In the Intelligent Evolution theory, I postulate that the Programmer had no entention of creating dumb creatures like Adam & Eve, but merely had the “idea” of creating semi-autonomous intelligent creatures --- little avatars for entertainment. So, S/he simply designed a process that would “stumble” upon an optimum solution --- within the constraints of space & time, and natural laws --- by learning from its own mistakes. The design criteria & parameters are assumed to be working via Natural Selection. So the final goal was specified only in terms of a problem description. And the zig-zag path to that goal was what Hegel called “The Dialectic Process”, as contrasted with the “Didactic Process” of Intelligent Design. The Process is the Product. Playing the game is the point, not the final score. "The play's the thing". ___Shakespeare, Hamlet
Dialectic : a back & forth philosophical argument between Good & Evil. Bottom-up design.
Didactic : an autocratic method of instruction by commandment. Top-down design
Quoting Siti
An elephant who doesn't recognize himself in a mirror? :razz:
Actually, Aboutness is a property of the observing subject, not the observed object. “Aboutness “is a mental arrow pointing to an object. “Aboutness” is conception, not perception. It's a mental image of something that is not present in space & time. Its essence -- to get back on topic -- is Information in the form of an immaterial Concept --- a not-yet-realized idea, design, or purpose.
Of course, Daniel Dennett redefined "Aboutness" as the “Intentional Stance”, in which the subject imputes goals & beliefs to the object. So, maybe you are confusing my “Ententional Evolution” notion with Dennett's strategy for understanding another agent. In my concept of Intelligent Evolution, the designer did indeed have a “mental image of something not present” and an “entention” to realize it --- make it real : Teleology. I admit to attributing these ideas and ententions to an unreal agent. It's my strategy for understanding an otherwise absurd world --- whether that of Religion or of Science.
Quoting Siti
This is where we typically part ways. You assume that all “events” occur in space & time : the existing evolving reality. But, if intent & goal (cause & effect) occupy the same space & time, what's the point? They may of course occupy the same time-line, which may be what you have in mind. But my Ententional Agent is supposed to be outside space-time; which I know does not compute for you. Yet, Eternity and Infinity are common concepts in human discourse, and they are assumed to be non-real, like the so-called Imaginary Numbers & Zero & Infinity of mathematics . Which is true, because they exist only in what I call Ideality : the Mind of G*D. In the MoG, there are no “mental poles” or “physical poles”, because G*D is unitary, holistic, non-dual. But those are just qualities that I attribute to "something that is not present in space-time", due to my Intentional Stance. It's a hypothesis, not a belief system. Did I mention that my G*D is a mathematician and a metaphysician? :smile:
Mathematical Metaphysics : Platonism about mathematics (or mathematical platonism) is the metaphysical view that there are abstract mathematical objects whose existence is independent of us and our language, thought, and practices.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/
No you didn't, I did. I suggested that the "primordial" IDEA - i.e. the starting point of the "process of creation" - if it were truly unlimited (as in an unlimited 'pool of potentiality') - would be exactly equivalent to "no idea at all".
Quoting GnomonBut this is what I don't get - how could it have been known that it was even possible to "stumble upon" any solution - let alone an optimum one - how could it have been known that semi-autonomous intelligent avatars were even a possibility? As soon as the question is asked, the possibilities are limited - and if God already knew that such an outcome was possible, he presumably had no need to experiment. How could God entertain himself by thinking thoughts he had already thought - because in your scheme, I can't see how there can possibly be any thoughts that are not God's thoughts? If the point of "the play" is that the outcome cannot be known in advance, then God did not know - indeed God would seem to be profoundly ignorant - completely unaware that the process could possibly have progressed beyond the level of bacteria - or even beyond inanimate matter for that matter. And if he did know that, then at least a significant part of the story was pre-written before the "heuristic" playwright set pen to paper - wasn't it?
I don't want to go any further about aboutness - I take your point about the subjective angle aboutness is about.
Quoting Gnomon
They don't?
Quoting Gnomon
Well of course they don't exist simultaneously - but the intent is part of reality now - for example, I want to build a new utility room and workshop extension on our farm house...that goal is part of my reality right now - even though it may never be completed as a physical reality. But once it is built, there will be an unbroken process of space-time events connecting the initial idea to the realized goal. None of it happens outside of space and time. Is there any compelling reason to assume that any other cause-effect processes are any different?
Since I don't have any experience with infinity (no beginning, no end), I can only guess what the possibilities are, but by definition they would be unlimited. For example, the Number Line of mathematics is presumed to have no beginning and no end. So, I figured that we had a practical real-world hint about*1 unlimited potential of the values that the human mind has a limited grasp of. Hence, to paraphrase your question, is the Number Line "no number at all", or all possible values? In Philosophy, "Value" is not just sequential position, but significance to a mind. And Mind is the ultimate Ontological problem.
According to many other ontological guesses over the centuries about*1 Infinity, if temporal Mind is possible, Infinite Mind should add-up to Omniscience. Since Materialistic concepts of Reality reach a dead-end at the Big Bang, I decided to explore beyond that scientific bottle-neck to see if I could imagine some plausible explanation for the existence of anything in general, and of our world in particular. Cosmologist's Multiverse theories are attempts to address the Ontological problem of Physics : "How did Matter and Energy get started? They didn't, but have existed forever". In other words, they are "self-existent", just like G*D, and must be taken on faith, as Axioms for theorizing.
However, my thesis attempted to focus on the Ontological problem of Metaphysics : "How did Mind and Qualia come to be?" Materialism simply assumes, without evidence, that there is a missing link between Matter and Mind, which would explain how such non-physical properties could emerge from physical processes. So, my thesis has given a name to that missing link : Information. Which is currently assumed by some cutting-edge credentialed scientists to be the essence of Reality. Claude Shannon's Information Theory applied that ancient metaphysical (mental) term to physics, initiating the Information Age, and opening the door to Artificial Intelligence (assuming they can fill the gap between Matter & Mind). Unfortunately, Natural Intelligence has yet to be explained in physical terms. So, I hope you'll forgive my non-scientific philosophical foray into what I call Meta-Physics.
Information is more fundamental than Energy : https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/the-basis-of-the-universe-may-not-be-energy-or-matter-but-information
Information : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
Meta-Physics : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html
Quoting Siti
I feel your puzzlement. :smile:
All I can say is that Omniscience and Omnipotence would have a much better chance of Knowing the future than my little space-time mind. If you can entertain the notion of an infinite regression of Multiverses, it shouldn't be too hard to imagine that everything possible has been tried, at least in principle. So that is a deep pool of "statistical significance" to draw upon. But to make it more plausible for my thesis, I assume that a combination of the mental trait of Information (to know) and the physical power of Energy (to enform) is even more likely to predict the outcome of a chain of changes, than zillions of mindless atoms bouncing around like un-aimed billiard balls.
Besides, I have concluded that, by choosing such a heuristic path into the physical future, the Prime Programmer must have a good reason for not going directly from A to Z, by-passing all the trials and errors. In Theodicy, that reason is given as The Freewill Argument.
Freewill Argument : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_free_will
(I have my own deistic version of the FWA)
Quoting Siti
How do you know that no cause & effect events happen outside of space-time? Is that an unfounded assumption, or is it based on evidence? Don't you assume that the Big Bang was caused by some event prior to the emergence of our little pocket of space-time?
The Singularity of the Big Bang was defined mathematically as a point at which a given mathematical object is not defined or not "well-behaved", for example infinite or not differentiable (indistinguishable). But scientists were not deterred from speculating about that infinite or holistic state, by imagining that what's out-there is more of the same as what's in-here. The only difference with my speculative undefined state is that it's based on 21st century Information and Quantum Theories, instead of ancient Atomistic and Materialistic assumptions.
Emergent SpaceTime : http://guava.physics.uiuc.edu/~nigel/courses/569/Essays_Spring2018/Files/gupta.pdf
What is SpaceTime? : https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24332470-500-what-is-space-time-the-true-origins-of-the-fabric-of-reality/
(in my thesis, Quantum Entanglement is what happens when particles become holistic in eternity-infinity.)
Illusion of Space-Time : for Einstein, space-time is not a thing, but an idea. And for Donald Hoffman, space-time is an "evolutionary illusion".
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24332472-900-bye-bye-space-time-is-it-time-to-free-physics-from-einsteins-legacy/
*1 About : sorry about the use of that taboo term. :nerd:
PS___Think of my little G*D theory as science-fiction, instead of pseudo-science religion, and it may sound a little more palatable. I don't claim it's true in any ultimate sense, merely useful for inquiring into Ontology.
Quoting GnomonNo I don't - personally, I think it is the height of absurdity to suggest that the most significant event could possibly have happened "outside of time" - no time, no change, no change, no ... anything ... tick, tock, tick tock - nothing happens in no time - how could it?
Actually, the notions of G*D and Multiverse are both infinitely redundant. But if you accept the physicists' Multiverse theory, you still have no explanation for the Metaphysical Ontological problem : how did Mind arise from Matter? What is it about Matter that causes Ideas, Imagination, and Love? If you don't care about such immaterial ideas, there is no need for a theory of an Infinite Enformer. But I know you love me. :cool:
Quoting Siti
Are you talking about Clock Time or Block Time? The latter is Everything Forever. Can you wrap your mind around that? Your incredulity about Eternity is because it is counter-intuitive. But then, Quantum Theory is counter-intuitive. So, what?
Eternalism : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time)
Quoting GnomonI think so - Block Time is a result of treating time as a fourth dimension - effectively, a sequence of geometric points in time in which everything that will ever "happen" has in fact already "happened", and the events that are yet future, well, we just haven't reached "there" yet. A bit too Calvinistic for my liking - I prefer to think that what we do actually makes a difference - however small. I have no idea how time might have worked "before" the Big Bang, but I'm pretty convinced that cause still preceded effect. If not, then there is no hope of us making any sense of anything prior to or beyond the universe as we (barely) know it.
Yes. That is why Enformationism attempts to explain why Matter (noun) has the ability to Live (verb) and to Mind (adverb), not in the technical details of "How", but in the philosophical sense of "Why". Information is all about Relationships, including geometrical and meaningful. My broad definition of Mind is that it's what the Brain does, its function. Yet Function is both a mathematical relationship, and a meaningful correlation. And Information is the common denominator, both abstract and personal. But materialistic science has no answer to the how mathematics and thermodynamics in nature give rise to consciousness and meaning in Culture. So, like many others in recent years, I have looked into the ancient notion of Panpsychism, to see if the dual nature of Information can help to explain how and why Darwinian winnowing of random mutations can produce creatures of both directed Energy (life) and purposeful Entention (mind).
Adverb : a word or phrase that modifies or qualifies an adjective, verb, or other adverb or a word group, expressing a relation of place, time, circumstance, manner, cause, degree, etc.
Quoting Siti
I agree. That New Age nonsense, such as the psychic-power of crystals, was also a motivation for my using the term "Information" as opposed to "consciousness" to describe those "occasions of experience". But I also avoid the term "experience" for the same reason : it implies that atoms have a personal perspective. Instead, Information functions more like un-intentional Energy at the lower levels of reality. Only in more highly-evolved forms does Energy become Animation, then Entention & Experience. Information is simply abstract mathematical ratios and relationships, that also function as physical Hot or Cold (density of energy), and have evolved into metaphysical feelings of Hotness or Coldness (occasions of experience).
Quoting Siti
I understand why you find the notion of Timelessness and Spacelessness absurd. That's because it's counter-intuitive. We humans live immersed in a sea of time and space, so, like the proverbial fish in the water, we take our environment for granted. But science is continually, opening our eyes to features of reality that were once unimaginable.
For example, in the Bronze Age, people assumed that the stars were simply decorations on the ceiling of the sky , just a short distance above the mountaintops of a flat Earth. So, in the Renaissance, you can understand why the church found Gallileo's notions about planets many earth-diameters away patently absurd. Now, we are told by astronomers that the universe is not just the Earth & Sky, but a an inconceivable cosmos of almost infinite magnitude. Likewise, the ancient notion of finite Atoms clustering into all the various forms of the world, is passe. Quantum Theorists now ask us to believe that the micro-cosmos is also almost infinitely endless in the opposite direction from outer space. But, some people accept those absurd beliefs, not because they are intuitive, but because they are the doctrines handed-down by our high-priests of Science. Others reject them because they clash with the dogma of desert-dwelling Bronze Age priests, who spent a lot of time looking at the sky-ceiling just beyond the reach of human hands.
However, some of us now accept those formerly ridiculous notions, because the preponderance of evidence adds together into a cohesive worldview. And recent developments in science --- from Information Theory to Quantum Theory --- are suggesting that the world may be even bigger than the finite limits of Big Bang Theory, and local Physics. Which is why materialists look beyond the former "beginning of finite space-time" to imagine an infinite regression of little bubbles of space-time. But they can only justify that fantasy by assuming as an unprovable axiom, that space-time and matter-energy are eternal. Yet the only scientific evidence we have points to a finite Physics, within a mysterious realm of non-local Metaphysics. So, I have found philosophical evidence that our world is indeed embedded within a greater Reality of Pure Information (the power to enform).
Quoting Siti
Don't give-up hope. Science is propelled by human Reason, which can imagine things-not-seen, and tie disparate facts into convergent concepts. Just as materialists place their hope for a Theory of Everything on an imaginary random Multiverse or Omniverse. I have staked my hope for a consistent worldview upon an imaginary ententional Enformer. In both cases, it's just a hypothesis, but only the latter directly addresses the human concerns for Meaning and Life and Love. Not Mind from Matter, but Mind from Mind, as cause & effect. :nerd:
I just want to clarify why I DO choose to use the experience despite the obvious disadvantage you have correctly pointed out. For me, experience is just about the most fundamental undeniable fact of our existence - by experience I mean the fact (not the content) of experience - that we experience the world is undeniable - even if we and the world are figments of some deity's diseased imagination and purely illusory, we are still experiencing the illusion...the fact of experience cannot be denied - experientia ergo sum (perhaps).
Anyway, the question then arises as to whether this (fact of) experience - the capacity to experience (relate to) the rest of the world - is fundamental to the underlying reality that seems to underpin our existence or some kind of radical emergence or addition that arises (somehow - magically, mysteriously, supernaturally???) only at certain levels of complexity. I don't like the second option (although I freely admit I can never prove that it isn't so), so I go with the idea that experience (the capacity to relate to the rest of the world in some way) is fundamental...and that idea has far-reaching consequences...
First, it does indeed mean that, in a sense, atoms do have a 'personal' (not really personal but individual) perspective - they (each) exist in time as well as space and what just happened is part of their reality now - i.e. they have some kind of 'memory' that is not simply a geometric spatial relationship at a 'point' in time, but a temporal process that carries its own individual information along with its material reality.
This is absolutely key because it temporalizes all of reality at the most fundamental level and it has to if experience is to be fundamental because experiences cannot happen in no time (i.e. at points in time). Atoms do not exist at points in time, they, like everything else, exist during intervals of time (no matter how small) and that does indeed mean that there is "something that it is like" to be an atom (more precisely, to be this or that atom) just as Thomas Nagel famously argued that there was "something that it is like" to be a bat...no matter how different and inaccessible to us it might be, that "something-that-it-is-like"-ness, is, in a very real sense, WHAT the atom IS.
Right - OK - I've gone a long way off topic (it seems)...here's the upshot (leaving some considerable gaps to filled in by the unwary reader's own imagination)...
The essential nature of atoms, consists of the spatial, geometric regularities that distinguish atoms from other stuff - like electrons and elephants...
The individual nature of THIS or THAT atom consists of the spatio-temporal relationships that this or that atom 'experiences' (and has 'experienced') with the other stuff around it.
Ditto human beings - our essential nature is unmistakably human (regularities that distinguish us from electrons and elephants etc.), our individual nature is a function of how we relate to and experience (and have experienced) the world.
And the mind-body interaction problem disappears - minding is just what bodies do - and its "just one of those things you put down to experience! Ooh wah wah, ooh wah wah, ooh!"
Thanks, I've downloaded a copy of the Medium.com article, and will check it out.
Siti and I seem to have drifted off-topic, as we often do. We've just gone deeper than mere Human Nature to the essence of all Nature. As Siti says, "The essential nature of atoms, consists of the spatial, geometric regularities that distinguish atoms from other stuff - like electrons and elephants..."
For me, that essence is called "Information" (the creative power to enform), and for him it's "experience", which I assume, for an atom, is referring to what-it's-like-to-be enformed as a cog in the inanimate cosmic mechanism . For inorganic matter though, we have no way to empathize with their "spatial, geometric" experience, so it would be totally abstract for us, perhaps expressible only in numbers. At least for organic Bats, we have some basis for imagining what-it-feels-like to experience their world, even if it's still only via human-biased metaphors.
Again, to use "experience" for spatio-temporal relationships seems to be referring to an unqualified [no qualia] event, with numerical instead of meaningful values. But the term "experience" can denote simply "an inscrutable cause-effect event", or it can refer to the "conscious knowledge of that event".
The mechanical (cause-effect) occurrence is what Materialism considers fundamental, while most humans feel that the significance (cause-effect-meaning) of the event is more essential. Traditionally, that conscious experience was the purview of Spiritualism, and is associated with ghosts. Which is why I prefer to call it Enformationism, which is explanatory for the natural world, but remains neutral toward supernatural explanations, with one exception : EnFormAction is causation, and must either have an eternal First Cause, or an infinite mechanism of causation.
Since we don't normally associate consciousness with cog & wheel mechanisms, a Mind of some kind seems to be a better metaphor. I think of it as a more humanistic worldview.
Quoting GnomonRight - there are only two options - eternal First Cause or infinite regress. Infinite regress is hard to get the head around, but an eternal first cause that is (at least before the start of 'causation') timeless and changeless. I find that notion utterly absurd - how can something changeless be a reasonable explanation for the most momentous change imaginable? So I'm left with infinite regress - time and change, cause and effect - unbeginning and unending - or at least if it ever did end (and become timeless and changeless) what could possibly set it going again? But it could not have begun - a beginning to change is impossible.
Quoting GnomonAre you sure its humanistic - or unjustifiably anthropocentric?
To expand this, spatio-temporality isn't a universal substrate, as if all existing matter is defined in relation to a single, absolute container. The heterogeneities and discontinuities of which space and time are a relatively specific form may be radical enough to regard many phenomena of substance as completely indescribable with any structural concept we've applied or maybe even invented. We must then continue to investigate what the range of non-trivially "aware" occurrences is, perhaps entirely unanalogizable to what we have so far theorized or conceived.
At this stage of scientific knowledge, we can be somewhat confident of how human agency's linkage to sense-perceptual matter emerges from the organic, namely in association with substances relatively near the scale of the human body, electromagnetic fields as brain waves, and quantum mechanisms within the functional molecules of cells, but we cannot yet model what qualia are. Feelings and many additional qualia will probably turn out as also connected with quantum effects, but these phenomena must be located partially beyond the orbit of rational agency in currently unknown ways, maybe even beyond the body. We don't have a theoretical model of experience that transcends traditional behavior-oriented biochemistry, at least not in Western culture as far as I've learned. The phenomena we experience may no longer be atomic or even spatio-temporally local by the time we deeply understand even human qualia.
What it is like to be a wildebeest or even a human may completely reconstitute what everything (except common sense morality) is like, possibly not even thinkable at this stage. I'm sure there are some extremely improbable moral dilemmas that could throw a wrench in multi-millennial common sense, but it seems to me that our behavioral ideals are basically rock solid because like human rational agency, they are also fundamentally tied to the nature of human-like bodies that change in extremely gradual ways relative to our practical decision-making's frame of reference.
Yes. Qualia are relational aspects of reality, but not in an abstract geometric sense. Feelings are relational to a unique being, who experiences energy inputs and outputs just like any material object. But unlike most of the material world, some lumps of matter have a self-image, and an imperative for self-preservation, that causes them to evaluate energy inputs personally, rather than neutrally. As I see it, the common denominator between an atoms's "experience" and a man's feelings is generic Information : the power to enform --- to cause change. An atom's internal change, due to energy input, involves shifting electron orbits. but a man's internal change, due to information input, involves a memory of the event (experience), and an evaluation of the significance of the event for the person's future well-being (meaning).
Generic Information is plentipotent in that it can cause different effects in different contexts. The "higher levels of complexity" are what I call "phase changes", which seem to be inherent in the
"program" of EnFormAction. EFA doesn't just hit & run, it makes a meaningful difference.
Quoting Siti
I resolved that no-place-to-turn-around-in-infinity problem, by making a distinction between physical change, and meta-physical change. Physical events clearly occur in space & time. But where do meta-physical events occur? When you change your mind, is it in four dimensions? Donald Hoffman has offered a useful metaphor for this dilemma, but it is a brain-twister. You might even call it "utterly absurd". He makes an analogy between space-time as "appearances", and Ideality as the ultimate eternal reality. IOW, Common Sense reality is an illusion, that evolved to enhance fitness for brainy creatures. Can you wrap your head around that non-sense? Can you grok Kant's Transcendental Idealism?
The Reality Interface : Reality is not what you see. Space-Time is a mental construct
http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page21.html
Quoting Siti
It's both. My thesis is humanistic in that it gives preference to the human perspective over the presumably omniscient and impersonal view of Materialism. And it's anthro-centric relative to the non-human majority of Nature. Whether that's justifiable depends on where you place humans in the hierarchy of Natural Evolution --- at the top, in the center, at the bottom, irrelevant? Personally, I place people at the pinnacle (temporarily). But the king of the mountain can always be toppled by the next challenger. Are Dolphins plotting a take-over? :wink:
Ideally, Science is supposed to be an objective search for truth. But so is Philosophy. And in Reality, both disciplines are practiced by opinionated human beings. This forum is an example of how debatable most of those "truths" are. Only G*D, as an outside disinterested observer could be absolutely objective about this world. So it seems that, for now, we have to rely on anthropically-biased humans for knowledge of truth about space-time. Until, of course, a superior race of aliens comes along to save us from ourselves. :nerd:
Is Science 100% Objective? : https://www.quora.com/Is-science-100-objective
PS___Postmodernists were correct that Science is inherently subjective, but their every-man-for-himself alternative was a reaction in the wrong direction.
I have read your article on the Evolution of Perception, and it seems to be heading in the same general direction as my own musings on the Emergence of Consciousness. Apparently, you are much better informed on the technical details of Quantum Physics. My blog post on The EnFormAction Hypothesis has a similar underlying assumption, but makes no attempt to get into technicalities that are way above my pay grade.
The first assertion that caught my eye was "Phenomena of non-locality seem to have causal primacy over three-dimensional forms". This may be referring to what I might call the "transition from holistic unitary Ideality to multi-dimensional Reality". For example, I assume that a Virtual Particle has no detectable location or velocity, because it is no longer an independent part of a multi-part system, but has merged into the Oneness of Ideality : like a drop of water into the ocean. In this analogy, my Ocean is their Vacuum : nothing real, but infinite potential.
Quantum theorists imagine that Virtual particles are constantly & randomly popping into & out of Actual existence in the form of Vacuum Energy. So, when a particle emerges from Virtuality into Actuality, it causes changes to the local system. In that sense, non-locality is more fundamental than locality, because it's the source of all change (EnFormAction) in the dimensional world. IOW, EFA enters Reality from Ideality and causes a succession of changes that scientists attribute to Energy.
Unfortunately, "oneness of ideality" sounds more like New Age guru-jargon than scientific terminology. So, I haven't attempted to develop that notion beyond the stratified phase layers of the blog post. I simply imagine that the local-to-non-local transition is a metaphorical membrane that divides the dimensional Real world from the holistic Ideal world. And only EnFormAction can penetrate that barrier in order to cause physical changes in the world. A quantum scientist would find this notion to be "utterly absurd", so I won't try to make a formal case for my own personal fantasy.
The EnFormAction Hypothesis : http://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
Step 0 is the membrane between Reality and Ideality.
Ideality : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
Virtual Vacuum is Fundamental : https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations/
I like the webpage design of your blog, easy to read. An interesting insight I got from a chemistry chat, though of course the psychologically oriented viewpoint was mine, is that the appearance of solids, liquids and gases is essentially an emergent property of the relative degree to which material substance produces a perceptual state, not an absolute outcome of atomic behavior or some such fundamentality as traditionally construed. In earth conditions, whenever matter as bulk mass is in motion, having a kinetic energy and temperature, it is to a degree in all phase states simultaneously, but our sense-perceptual minds convert physical matter into relatively uniform substance, a process which is functional in circumstances of the ordinary such as those prevailing prehistorically, like an optical illusion. Then our scientific conceiving generalizes the sense-perceptions into categories of phase, and how that affects what we notice phenomenologically I'm not entirely sure. A mathematically non-negligible disjunct between phases and energies exists of course, but the impression of "solid", "liquid" or "gas" is a construction of consciousness.
So it seems to me that matter is fundamentally closer to superposition than spatio-temporal particularity, and an argument could be made for entanglement, coherence and tunneling also, with our cognition performing the act of resolving these non-local phenomena into the locality of organic bodies and atomic theory, essentially behavior-derived instinct and a conceptual thought experiment. Spatio-temporality is a theoretical interpretation of human-scaled, sense-perceptual mass, not intrinsic to matter. From this perspective, the idea that matter violates laws of classical physics and thermodynamic chemistry in diverse ways is almost intuitive.
I don't identify the substance of relatively non-local matter with ideations such as Platonic forms beyond agreeing that our structure conceiving is infinitely adaptable to any possible perception if we employ mathematics.
I think we're both on track, but the cosmos is somewhat bigger than either of us lol
I'll have to take your word for the first phrase, but the second part about phase transitions being a construction of consciousness is what I'm referring to in the blog post. I think of Phase Transitions in terms of Emergence, which I personally define in terms of the limitations of human perception, rather than magical appearances from nothing.
Quoting Enrique
Again, the first part is above my pay grade, but the second part about "entanglement" etc, is right down my alley.
Entanglement in Cosmic Mind : The American philosopher Jonathan Schaffer argues that the phenomenon of quantum entanglement is good evidence for holism. Entangled particles behave as a whole, even if they are separated by such large distances that it is impossible for any kind of signal to travel between them." So, the holistic notion of Panpsychism can explain how two or more entangled particles can behave as-if somehow connected across space into a single entity. That “spooky action at a distance” is possible because the particles themselves are not isolated things, but more like the simple ideas that make-up a complex concept. Ideas are not bound by the limitations of space & time.
http://bothandblog.enformationism.info/page52.html
Quoting Enrique
The association of Virtual Particles with crossing over into an ideal Platonic realm stems from my original insight : that Information is both Mind & Matter. That notion was developed into the concept of EnFormAction (energy that transforms into matter & mind) in the Enformationism thesis.
Without an understanding of that Cosmological thesis for a foundation, most of my later interpretations of Information will seem absurd to most scientists. Siti is a Chemist, and finds the notion of "crossing over" from Real to Ideal to be unscientific. But, Enformationism is not intended to be a scientific theory. It's merely a novel approach to the perennial philosophical paradoxes of Ontology. You can take all that Ideal stuff as metaphors, which they are by necessity. But I take them seriously as philosophical ways of thinking about the cosmos.
FWIW, here's another quote from the same blog post ---
Virtual is Ideal :A "virtual" particle is defined as " . . . not a particle at all. It refers precisely to a disturbance in a field that is not a particle." And a quantum field is a place that is not in space, but merely a mathematical description of the probability for real particles to appear from nowhere. This sounds a lot like Plato's ideal Forms, that under the right conditions can become real Things. So a virtual particle is essentially the idea of a real particle. Which sounds like a mental concept. But in whose mind?
http://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page52.html
The comparision between entanglement and idea conception is interesting. Maybe qualia of perception and thought could be understood as the additive properties of diffuse, superimposed (superpositioned?) entanglement/coherence states that are each associated with a specific spectra of brain wave, like electromagnetic wavelengths synthesize to produce a different color. This explains why qualitative experiences can be strongly correlated with but never isolated to particular brain regions, and how brain wave scans such as EEGs display a fundamental lack of repetition. Each qualitative state could be at least partially the additive influence of not every time-lagged, functional grouping of cells and their supposed constituent "particles" in the brain, but rather every emergent coherence field, many orders of magnitude greater in variability of hybridization. And the causality of these coherence fields may exist beyond spatio-temporality.
This could be why qualia are more holistic than the theoretically localized chemistry of neural networks and how any two arbitrarily introspected experiences are typically connected in a more or less fluid continuity while never being exactly the same: at all moments (except if you smoke a whole lot of pot, or so I'm told), a complex superimposition is in effect. Maybe a sort of clock mechanism exists in the brain for making coherence fields more synchronized, analogous to a CPU, but how that might be embodied in tissue and how to characterize it in experiential terms I have not a clue. Maybe the presence of a "clock mechanism" correlates with self-awareness?
The notion that physical entanglement implies a metaphysical holistic state appeals to me. But the technical details of how that might work are beyond my limited understanding. And a relationship between the entangled state and human perception of Qualia, sounds possible, but working out the details is not in my job description.
Quoting Enrique
There's definitely a biological clock in the brain that coordinates inner activity with the environment. And it may also serve as CPU timer to keep neural pulses from stepping on each other. But how that might relate to "coherence fields" is beyond me. What is a "coherence field"?
Biological Clock : https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/sleep-drive-and-your-body-clock
Quoting Enrique
Interesting idea. Any thoughts on how that temporal correlation might produce self-awareness? Maybe by synchronizing information-processing feedback-loops?
I suppose the clock mechanism idea is that awareness and self-awareness exist as a product of structures that meta-organize these additive photoelectromagnetic coherence fields, synchronizing diverse qualia into a holistic qualitative "experiencing". Maybe much if not all matter inherently has a qualia aspect or can at least be induced into a qualia-like state when its wavelengths adopt additive forms. Bacteria could have qualia without self-awareness, and computers capable of self-awareness without qualia depending on how their components are meta-organized.
"Pay no attention to that water molecule behind the curtain..."
"You're a very bad water molecule"
"No my dear - I'm a very good water molecule, I'm just a very bad ripple-maker"
Beyond the veil of observable physical reality, is there really a qualitatively different realm of disembodied "wizardry" that gives rise to the illusion of materiality? Or is it rather pretty much more of the same - another side of the same coin - just more difficult to see - and 'grasp'? Is the "idea" of an electron (for example) something that resides beyond the physical reality of the electron - or does the electron carry it around with it wherever it goes? Physicality and mentality inextricably entwined.
Why then, did cosmologists feel the need to invoke a "supernatural agency" to explain the logically "prior" cause of the Big Bang? Scientists are now producing arguments in favor of the Multiverse Theory that resemble ancient theological arguments for the existence of God. My G*D theory is just an alternative speculation based on the duality/unity of Information, rather than the dogma of atomic Materialism.
Here's a brief selection of related topics from Google :
[i]5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse
10 Reasons the Multiverse is a Real Possibility
This Is Why The Multiverse Must Exist
Scientific Theory And The Multiverse Madness
The Multiverse Idea Is Rotting Culture
Why the Multiverse Isn't Just Madness[/i]
Quoting Siti
Yes. But, the realm of Ideality, "beyond the veil", is actually made of the same essential stuff as Reality : mundane Information. The difference is that Ideality is unrealized Potential, while Reality is actualized. It's a statistical difference : an immaterial Possible state and a physical Actual state.
Yet, there is a continuity between the stuff on the inside of the physical world, and the stuff outside. However, the "outside" is not a different place in space & time, but merely the difference between the idea of a thing (coffee cup) and the actuality of the cup. There is one general definition of a cup, a container for liquids, but many different instances, "greatest Dad ever" cup; tin cup, cupped hands. G*D is the definer of Reality.
The difference between the inside (reality) and outside (ideality) is indeed qualitative, not quantitative; theoretical, not actual; ideal, not real, possible, not actual. When you begin to mold clay into a cup, you convert a "disembodied" mental image into an embodied physical object. Is that "wizardry"? Or, is it statistics : the distinction between Possible (0%) and Actual (100%)?
Information :
Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
Opposing the Multiverse :
The very nature of the scientific enterprise is at stake in the multiverse debate. Its advocates propose weakening the nature of scientific proof in order to claim that the multiverse hypothesis provides a scientific explanation. This is a dangerous tactic. . . . . Despite this, many articles and books dogmatically proclaim that the multiverse is an established scientific fact.
https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/49/2/2.33/246813
As long as it's just a hypothesis, serving to guide our search for understanding, there's no harm in imagining an unseen world beyond the veil of our local space-time. But, when G*D or Multiverse become dogma, they transcend the realm of Science, and enter the realm of Religion.
I suppose for the same reason that ancient cartographers used to write "here be dragons" at the edges of their maps.
Quoting GnomonThere's no harm, but how does it help? Equating "unseen" with "unrealized" is more or less the definition of the kind of idealism that I believe is counter-productive in terms of constructing a worldview consistent with genuine scientific knowledge...that seems to be the danger that the article you quoted from is referring to (https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/49/2/2.33/246813) - the danger, as you correctly pointed out, of dogmatism...
...but as the article pointed out, it is even more pernicious in that these kind of ideas (multiverse) substitute explanatory power for scientific testability. I would go even further than the author and suggest that this substitution moves physics progressively further and further into the realms of speculative metaphysics where only explanatory power (and not actual observation or measurement) determines the appropriateness of the model to the question at hand. To me, that's a retrograde step...hypotheses are fine, but scientific hypotheses must offer at least a potential means of actually being tested by observation - multiverse(s) are, by definition, untestable hypotheses and therefore unscientific.
I prefer to base my own metaphysical speculations on tested science rather than someone else's untested speculative metaphysics...better the devil you know!
I can see with my own eyes that everything changes - all the time...so 'evolution' - in the broadest sense - is the bedrock of my speculations...
And I sense that sensing (experiencing - in the most rudimentary sense - i.e. 'responses' to 'physical stimuli') seems to be at the root of how bits of the world relate to one another - avoid bumping into one another...etc.
So I've got time, change and experience as fundamentals...that seems to me to be how the world works and tracking deeper into space and time I see no compelling reason to abandon these at any arbitrary point...so I end up with a panexperiential, evolutionary (now this, now that) relational process of physical reality...all the way down.
I doubt you really believe they imagined a Multiverse to fill-in a scary blank in our knowledge by warning people away from the unexplored territory. My theory is that they created the Multiverse myth because it was necessary to indicate that there's nothing special about our world (Copernican Principle). Before the Big Bang discovery, atheists could feel confident (faith?) that the physical world was simply a brute fact, with no need for a First Cause or Creator. Then, the physical evidence upset that smugma (smug-dogma) by indicating mathematically that space-time had a beginning-point that begged for an explanation : either nothing-special randomness, or (heaven forbid!) special-creation.
For similar reasons, Atheists are confident (faith?) that we will soon find evidence of other inhabitable planets with alien life-forms out there in the vast cosmos, to prove once & for all that there's nothing special about humans. Yet again, the physical evidence, that we know at this moment, indicates that homo sapiens is the apogee of evolution. So, some imagine that, if not aliens, then at least dolphins will soon replace us as the singular moral agents in the world. This would prove what they already believe : that there's nothing special about humanity.
For all I know --- I'm agnostic --- there might be nothing special about our universe. My hypothetical axiomatic G*D is perfectly capable of creating billions of worlds. But this is the only one I have any experience with. Everything else is mere possibility. And you have nothing to fear from my feckless imaginary G*D. So no need to put warning signs at the frontier to keep adventurers and speculators away. You might as well say, "here be Unicorns".
Quoting Siti
Just as the Multiverse hypothesis gives Cosmologists a possible explanation for everything physical in this world, my G*D hypothesis gives me a plausible explanation for everything metaphysical in this present world. But the materialistic dogma of modern Science leaves the most important features of this world, to humans, inaccessible.
Such mysteries as how Minds emerged from Matter may be clarified, if we assume the potential for Consciousness was already programmed into the primordial substance of the world : Energy & Laws that I refer to as EnFormAction. If Biochemists were to approach their work with that possibility in mind, they might discover some missing clues to the origin of Life & Mind. Their materialistic worldview has allowed no further progress since the Miller-Urey experiment. Darwinian evolution leaves the origin of Life as an unexplained miracle of chemistry, performed by some yet-to-be-discovered magic enzyme. But, my theory sees such mundane miracles everywhere in the world : phase changes, speciation, emergent properties, etc.
The "magic" is in the dual functions of Information : it's both energy & ideas, both matter & mind. And that notion didn't just spring full-blown from my layman's fervid imagination. I can link you to hundreds of books & articles, by credentialed scientists, who have come to the same conclusion : that immaterial information is the essence of reality.
Is Information Fundamental? :
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundamental/
https://www.closertotruth.com/series/information-fundamental
All of those essential elements are emergent properties of the more fundamental principle of my theory : EnFormAction. EFA can be imagined as a Program of Information, that creates (computes, reckons, realizes) Change (Energy), Duration (Time), and Experience (Mind). Information is meaningful relationships (A:B), mathematical ratios (X/Y), and values (A=B).
Time is not a thing itself, it's a mental construct to explain Change. Change is not a thing, but merely a mental construct to explain Difference. Experience is not a thing, just the mental concept of Things that Change over Time (i.e. Difference).
All of those boil down to Information, which is responsible for both Matter & Mind. To explain Things & Events is to know their relationships within the matrix of reality.
In terms of Physics, EFA is equivalent to Energy and the Laws that regulate change. In terms of Metaphysics, EFA is equivalent to Elan Vital (the organizing principle) that leads to Life & Mind. In terms of your post, you could call it "a panexperiential, evolutionary relational process of physical reality...all the way down".
That essential principle of reality works "all the way down" from Big Bang to today's lunch. And presumably, it works "all the way up" to the Mind that wrote the Program --- unless of course, you prefer an eternal random number generator.
Any questions? :nerd:
Program : a set of related measures or activities with a particular long-term aim.
Information : "the difference (1) that makes a difference (2)"
Difference (1) is Change over time; difference (2) is Experience registered in a mind.
...and 'experientiality' - i.e. the essential relatedness of everything to everything else (rather than some mysterious and supernatural 'organizing principle') - is what guides - or rather limits - the extent of genuine novelty that can emerge.
Quoting GnomonOnly one: is 'experientiality' a real word?
Yes. Because they were looking for a measurable physical force like gravity. But in 1907, Bergson only meant it metaphorically as a natural organizing principle, not "some mysterious and supernatural 'organizing principle'".
Elan Vital was similar to what I call Enformy, and to what physicists now refer to by the awkward term Negentropy. According to Claude Shannon, Information is measured in terms of Negentropy. The only thing "supernatural" about Information/Enformy is the postulated eternal Enformer. Do you think Negentropy existed prior to the Big Boom?
Quoting Siti
In terms of physical evolution, yes. In terms of First Cause Creation, it's a miracle. :smile:
Quoting Siti
Not in my vocabulary. :cool:
But, in my version of Process Theory, I call that inter-relatedness "Holism" or the BothAnd Principle.
Enformy : In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypothetical, holistic, metaphysical, natural trend or force, that counteracts Entropy & Randomness to produce complexity & progress.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
Negentropy : reverse entropy. It means things becoming more in order. By 'order' is meant organisation, structure and function: the opposite of randomness or chaos.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negentropy
Well that's the sixty-four thousand dollar question isn't it? If we extrapolate back, the 2nd law of thermodynamics states that we should see evidence of greater order (lower entropy) the further back we go..."the singularity" that some people imagine was the origin of the universe must have been perfectly ordered - which is just another way of saying there was only one possible state it could have been in and still been "the singularity"...a perfectly ordered universe consisting of just one thing in only one of precisely one possible states - you can't get more negentropic than that. But then whence the increasing disorder...and whence the little pockets of relative order - like the Gnomons and the Sitis - little biological oases of relative orderliness swimming for a spell against the tide of an otherwise decadently chaotic world before being swept away by the waves of overwhelming entropic reality...
...and yet, we also imagine the order of the apparently anthropophilic universe having emerged from primordial chaos to create a world favourable to a particular species of relatively large-brained ape in a far flung corner of an otherwise unremarkable galaxy at the biological and philosophical center of the exquisitely ordered cosmos.
Clearly these two cannot both be right - my guess is that they are both dead wrong. My guess is that there never was a perfectly ordered singularity, and neither was there ever a completely chaotic lack of order. My guess is that this is why the universe was able to get from there (wherever that was) to here (wherever that is) without passing through eternity. My guess is that the universe will be somewhere between chaos and order - always and forever. My guess is that 'something' rather than 'nothing' banged. My guess is that that 'something' was neither perfectly ordered nor absolutely chaotic, but somewhere in between...so yes - I suppose I do think negentropy existed prior to the BB - and so did entropy - but as to whether these could be characterized by anything resembling the 2nd law that characterizes them in 'this" (post Big Bang) 'universe' - I have no idea...and apart from a few metaphysical speculators - some of whom also happen to be rather smart physicists - neither does anyone else.
Those people are materialists, and imagine that all the stuff in the present universe was stuffed into the
Singularity. But that's physically impossible. So instead, I imagine that the singularity was a program of coded (numerical) instructions for creating a world from scratch (i.e. from nothing but creative Information/Energy/EnFormAction). Potential Energy, because it's not actual, takes-up no space, and requires no time. So it can easily be compressed into a spaceless/timeless mathematical Point. Metaphysical Information is dimensionless, and can be compressed infinitely. How much space does the number 1.314 . . . . occupy?
The notion is similar to a physical gene as a recipe for building a physical body. The adult body is a billion times larger than the gene, but the information in the gene is not the amino acids, but the organization and interrelationships (the Code). Likewise, the information in the Singularity takes-up no space or time, so it began as a singular dimensionless state --- until the program was started by by the metaphorical act of pressing the "Run" button we call the Big Bang. That's when the fun began. :grin:
Quoting Siti
Unlike the monistic Singularity, the space-time world is dualistic. Like a cell dividing, the first step in running the program is to make a difference (division), in which one thing becomes two. So evolution is a continuation of universal division and discrimination. And each phase transition is thermodynamic, in the sense that it divides Hot from Cold : Energy from Entropy. So, we now call that process of creative order positive Evolution, and the process of disorder is Entropy. In a space-time world of incessant change, disorder is inevitable. It's a by-product of all construction. You win some, you lose some. :wink:
Quoting Siti
Well, maybe not forever. Cosmologists now predict that the war between Chaos and Order (Entropy & Energy) will eventually self-destruct, by neutralizing each other in a "Big Sigh" of Entropy. The temperature at that point will be absolute Zero. No more Change.
Quoting Siti
That "something" is what I call the Program of Creation (the Singularity). In order to produce Change, it had to be polarized : to create both Energy & Entropy, Hot & Cold, Order & Disorder. When the program said "let there be light", the first vibration began as a distinction between On & Off, Up & Down. And that Difference (change) makes a Difference (meaning), which we now call "Enformation".
If that dimensionless point was literally Infinite, then was it unbounded space, or no space at all? But what difference does it make? If the Singularity preceded the emergence of space-time, was the "before" timeless or Eternal? Space & Time are meaningless without Matter & Energy. So the point of origin would have been either No-thing (no matter, no energy), or everything-in-Potential : the power to create matter & energy. That Omni-potential is what I call G*D. But you can call it Deus, if you prefer.. :joke:
Big Bang Singularity : The universal origin story known as the Big Bang postulates that, 13.7 billion years ago, our universe emerged from a singularity — a point of infinite density and gravity — and that before this event, space and time did not exist (which means the Big Bang took place at no place and no time).Dec 5, 2017
https://www.space.com/38982-no-big-bang-bouncing-cosmology-theory.html
But that would be the end of time - no time, no change, no anything...that can be the end, but it could not possibly be the beginning...how could change possibly arise from changelessness? So the universe will have, must have, been somewhere between chaos and order for the entirety of time - forever.
Quoting GnomonEgg zackly! And vice versa. What is the use of en-ergy if there is no time or space in which to erg en? That's the problem I came up against as I attempted to formulate my own worldview. Space and time are surely not, it seemed to me, just sitting around waiting to be filled with matter and energy...but just as surely, matter and energy cannot exist without time and space. So the physical world (at least) must have always had both matter/energy and space/time and it will always have to have both - forever and ever, world without end - amen! That is the essence (isn't it?) of the physicalist worldview.
Einstein described the universe enigmatically as "finite-but-unbounded". That literally means "finite-but-infinite". How can we make sense of such a contradiction? I think it's both. The finite aspect is physics, and the infinite aspect is metaphysics. They are not two different universes, but two sides of the same coin. Yet, it takes Einsteinian imagination to see beyond what's actual to what's possible.
If we imagine for a moment, that unlimited Eternity-Infinity is the base state, then Space-Time is contingent upon that non-physical fundament (equivalent to the absurd quantum state of superposition)*1. Likewise, Actual particles are contingent upon Virtual particles. When the full cycle of the space-time world has run its course, what will remain is what was "there" before the "beginning", which is all possibilities superimposed in a timeless-spaceless-unformed state. The notion of eternal nothingness is, of course, absurd to a materialist, even though they pretend to understand quantum queerness. But spiritualists have postulated such a timeless Ultimate Reality for millennia : e.g. Brahman. My Enformationism is an attempt to make sense of both ancient Spiritualism and modern Materialism. The bridge between those opposing views is the dual function of Information : it's both physical quantifiable (Shannon), and metaphysical qualifiable (Bayesian).
The New Age movement among young people in the 20th century, was a rejection of Western Materialism, which threw-out Qualia with the religious bathwater. So, they turned to Eastern religions, looking for what was missing in meaningless modern society. But, they became enchanted by the imaginary magical aspects of their new worldview, with visions of Transcendental Meditators "flying" in the lotus position, and the adolescent appeal of being able to "throw Chi" at their enemies, and the power of hallucinogenic drugs to allow ordinary people to leave their bodies and wander the world . Unlike Eternity/Infinity, those real-world possibilities are subject to empirical testing, and have been found to be BS.
So, my approach to the same missing Quality of Life problem was to combine the best ideas of the ancient world (Metaphysics) with the best ideas of the modern world (Physics). I found that Consilience in the definition of Information as the fundamental element of both physical reality (Quanta) and metaphysical ideality (Qualia). But I didn't just make that up. The notion was expressed repeatedly by the pioneers of Quantum Physics. Which unfortunately inspired the New Age notions of Quantum Mysticism. My position though is that the ancient sages were not idiots, but insightful philosophers, who interpreted the mysteries of the world in metaphorical terms. Unfortunately, the masses took their allegories literally, which led to the many errors of world religions. What they called "Spirit", invisible forces, we now call "Energy". But a rose by another name is still the power to cause change. It's the Act of En-Forming (information). Although Energy is invisible and intangible (metaphysical), we know it by its effects on matter (physics).
Logically, what is inherently impossible in Space-Time would be inevitable in Infinity-Eternity. Logically, if something exists, then the possibility of existence must be prior to the actuality of something. But why should we believe that such a counter-intuitive Ideality is more real than Reality? We shouldn't, unless we can understand how that Ideal stuff (metaphysics) relates to the Real stuff (Physics). And that is the long-range project of the Enformationism thesis.
The core problem is that the evolved human brain is designed to make the physical world predictable (science) in order to ensure survival. Ironically, that brain has also developed the ability to imagine "realities" that don't exist in the here & now. Which allows people to predict unlikely futures and to make them happen. For example, they imagine idealized Utopias in empty spaces, and then work to make them real. Ironically, that same imaginary power has allowed people to imagine invisible gods & demons interfering in the normal operations of the world. But we can laugh at those in Bible times who believed that diseases were caused by demons. Yet modern doctors expect us to believe that we are besieged by invisible bacteria and viruses. The difference is that medical doctors are slightly better than witch-doctors at curing the sick. And placebos work better than most drugs, even though the active ingredient is faith. The power of the mind (metaphysics), is far above the power of the body (physics).
If the clock of space-time was wound-up 14 billion years ago, and will run-down in a few billion more years, that would be the death of our world. Hence, it has a finite life-span. When a baby is born, where was it before it emerged in a Big Pop? When an old man dies, where does his Persona/Self go? We don't know the answers, but that doesn't stop us from imagining various scenarios. Some assume there was a pool of souls waiting to be born. while others try to imagine that something came from nothing. I don't know what will remain when Time stops ticking, but based on worldly experience, nothing comes from nothing. So, I must assume there was the Possibility of something, before there was the Actuality of something. Chaos before Cosmos*2. Does that make sense? :nerd:
*1 Superposition : all possible quantum states from 0 to 100% actual
*2 Chaos : In ancient Greek creation myths Chaos was the void state preceding the creation of the universe or cosmos. It literally means "emptiness", but can also refer to a random undefined unformed state that was changed into the orderly law-defined enformed Cosmos. In modern Cosmology, Chaos can represent the eternal/infinite state from which the Big Bang created space/time. In that sense of infinite Potential, it is an attribute of G*D, whose power of EnFormAction converts possibilities (Platonic Forms) into actualities (physical things).
Quoting Siti
Time and Space are indeed necessary for Kinetic Energy to work. But my EnFormAction is a combination of Potential Energy and the Laws that limit its application in reality. Potential Energy is not actual, so it does not occupy space or time. It's essentially the idea of Change, not the effect. The Laws of Nature are not written on slabs of stone, but inscribed in the code of the Big Bang.
Oh c'mon Gnomon! You almost had me believing that you had a solid argument - not one that I happen to agree with you understand, but a solid one nvevertheless...that was until I read this half paragraph that I just quoted...seriously? Are you suggesting that bacteria and viruses are not material realities? And "placebos work better than most drugs"? Where's your evidence for that?
Quoting GnomonNot one bit I'm afraid...
...and you seem to be deliberately misapplying terms like "Potential Energy" - which is, of course, actual - it is a property of actual objects in the physical world - like a boulder at the top of the cliff just before the Roadrunner tips it over and prompts all that potential (work-within) energy to manifest as motion (kinetic) as gravity draws it inevitably downwards towards a hapless and unsuspecting Wile E Coyote below. That energy did not miraculously "cross over" some boundary between ideal unreality and physical actuality as your comments seem to suggest - it was there all the time as a function of the physical mass and the physical location of the boulder - none of it happens or exists outside of space-time...
And then you put the icing on your obfuscatory cake by redefining chaos as some kind of infinite "state" of unlimited potentiality - that is not what either the ancient Greek mythological, or the modern scientific conceptions of chaos meant at all. As applied to the primordial condition of whatever preceded the existence of the apparently ordered cosmos, chaos simply meant "formlessness", "emptiness" or "nothingness". In the modern scientific context chaos describes the inherent unpredictability of complex physical systems. One requires a supernatural agent to intervene to bring order, the other suggests that no agent could possibly predict the future evolution of a reality of such complexity as the universe with precision on account of the inherent unpredictability of the system itself.
Quoting GnomonThey are written on slabs of stone - or rather IN slabs of stone...and in living cells and molecules and stars and clouds and trees and...well you get the picture...just as the 'en' of 'en-ergy' signifies a capacity for work that resides within a physical system, so the laws of nature reside within nature. If not, then what possible (difference-making) meaning could those laws have in the absence of nature? In your proposed primordial ideality of unlimited potentiality, what possible meaning could those "laws" have had? What possible difference could they have made to anything? And, as I have argued before, if it makes no difference at all to anything at all, it quite probably doesn't exist at all.
Drat! My nefarious scheme to pull the wool over your eyes was foiled again, by your astute reasoning. :wink:
Quoting Siti
No. That's not what I said. Your astute reasoning missed the point.Those infectious agents are invisible to the naked eye. So ancient people attributed diseases to demons. They are still invisible to the naked eye, but today we are assured by scientists that they are the cause of many diseases. So, from the perspective of the average person, they are just as real as the demons of the pre-scientific era. I've never seen a virus, except in photographs (ancients also had pictures of demons), but I take it on faith in scientists that they are both agents of disease, and tools for curing disease.
Quoting Siti
Doctors don't like to admit it, but the placebo effect is a major weapon in their arsenal against disease --- just as it always has been for tribal shamen. I just read today, in Skeptical Inquirer magazine, about a doctor who kept Pink Pills in his office, to assuage the ambiguous ailments of those for whom he had nothing better to offer. Often, they would return, asking for more of those effective Pink Pills. He also gave some to his daughter as candy.
The Powerful Placebo : https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/The_powerful_placebo
Quoting Siti
Again, you have missed the point. Potential Energy is indeed a feature of the Real World. It's only the ultimate source of all energy, pre-Big Bang, that I refer to as "Ideal". Scientists cannot measure energy stored in material form, until it does something. They know the voltage of a chemical battery, because they have measured similar setups. But they can't actually measure the voltage until electric current is flowing. They know what energy does, but they only know what it is mathematically by imagining an invisible point in space relative to another point : it's a ratio or relationship (information), not a piece of matter.
Potential Energy : Potential energy is fundamentally energy due to position in a field.
https://www.quora.com/Does-potential-energy-really-exist
Quoting Siti
The Greeks had a primitive notion of what we now call Thermodynamics. Since they saw evidence that the order of the world was constantly declining (entropy), they wondered where the original organization came from. So, they imagined a default state of disorder or void or nothingness, and then reasoned that it took an input of creative energy to organize nothing into something. Modern cosmologists also assume that there was nothing prior to the Big Bang, except the potential for organization (chaos, scalar energy field). Both of those essences (inert energy + physical laws) are literally no-thing until actualized. But combine creative power with laws to regulate the application of power, and voila! you have Matter & Physics. When scientists imagine something essential prior to the beginning of space-time, who is obfuscating whom?
Order & Disorder : In thermodynamics, entropy is commonly associated with the amount of order, disorder, or chaos in a thermodynamic system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(order_and_disorder)
Chaos : In ancient Greek creation myths Chaos was the void state preceding the creation of the universe or cosmos. It literally means "emptiness", but can also refer to a random undefined unformed state that was changed into the orderly law-defined enformed Cosmos. In modern Cosmology, Chaos can represent the eternal/infinite state from which the Big Bang created space/time. In that sense of infinite Potential, it is an attribute of G*D, whose power of EnFormAction converts possibilities (Platonic Forms) into actualities (physical things).
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page12.html
Quoting Siti
Just as they applied the ancient notion of "Atom", to a modern discovery that is not literally un-cuttable, scientists loosely applied the ancient notion of "primal disorder" to the modern discovery that there is potential order within a physically disordered system. In the real world, there is no absolute Chaos; there is only "apparent" chaos, with mysterious potential for order, once triggered by initial conditions. That's similar to the Big Bang Singularity containing the potential for a whole universe in a dimensionless mathematical point. Something triggered that potential into a Phase Change with both initial conditions, and the power to create matter.
Deterministic Chaos : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
Quoting Siti
Again, you missed the point of EnFormAction : it's the concept plus the execution, law plus action. If you have the idea of something new in your mind, what difference could it make in the real world --- until the Idea is implemented by action? Nature is the implementation, the actualization, of the idea of a world. Besides, what possible meaning could abstract (immaterial) mathematics (ratios) have in nature, apart from implementations by humans, who saw invisible relations between things?
For example, Einstein used the abstruse math of Riemann to describe his novel notion of Space-Time, as one of zillions of possible n-dimensional manifolds (hyperspace). Even the relatively simple 4D version of that concept is meaningless to the majority of humans, but when applied by a few physicists, it can allow puny humans to project their influence into outer space. Information is the abstract Difference (ratio) that makes a meaningful Difference (relationship) to a receptive mind, When that information is applied to the real world, it makes a physical Difference. :nerd:
Now who's missing the point? Just because it itself is not a piece of matter doesn't mean it is does not belong to the material world. In any case, what would be the potential energy of a point? Your argument loses weight when you reduce it to points - and the point, in the case of gravitational potential energy (for example), would be a center of gravity - an imaginary point alright, but that doesn't mean that the material reality of the body in question is in question - or that it really has that potential energy. Mind you, it might very well turn out that ultimately potential energy is really a misnomer and that its all really kinetic energy - we just don't properly understand all the motions that it derives from at a sufficiently fundamental level to elucidate that properly yet...but that is quite another story. The point for the current discussion is that the 'potential' bit of 'potential energy' in physics does not mean energy that potentially exists, it means energy that really exists and has the real potential to be converted into kinetic (or other kinds of) energy. It belongs entirely to the material world.
I would agree except for your insistence on the primacy of the material world. To me, and many others, Matter is secondary to Mind. This flips the worldview of Materialism, to one where Qualia, Consciousness, and Mind are primary. But, despite similarities, it's not the same as Spiritualism. That's why I coined a new term : Enformationism.
Here's the dimensionless mathematical "point" where we disagree. You seem to assume the world is a substance monism : all matter all the way down. But Aristotle postulated two components of his single "substance" : Hylos (matter) and Morphos (form). Form is the idea, concept, structure, or design of a material thing, which is logically prior to the embodiment of the idea in matter. Where you think Mind is just a property of matter, I see Matter as a form of Mind/Energy (E=MC^2) : E = Information -- the power to enform. And lots of physicists are coming to that same conclusion (e.g. Paul Davies).
Mind you, we are not disagreeing with the concept of "no matter, no mind", in the space-time world. Instead, we are assuming, like Plato that there is a non-local, non-temporal realm, such as we find in Quantum Theory. That's not a supernatural heaven out-there in the great beyond, but right-here-right-now, everywhere, everywhen. I probably confuse you with my metaphorical references to the traditional notions of Eternity & Infinity. If "non-local" is meaningful to you, we can use that word.
So, I make a crucial distinction between the material (actual) world, and the mental (potential) world. Where in the world is the human mind --- in the brain, where in the brain? I acknowledge that Mind is a function of brain processing, yet it is not a material object, but a holistic quality. Until Quantum Physics upset the apple-cart, physics could ignore the mind of the observer, and had no variable for that non-stuff in its equations. I was surprised that many posters on a philosophy forum are still confused about the "hard problem" : the Subjective aspect of an Objective world.
Descartes attempted to set-aside the mysteries of the mind to make way for empirical Science, when he proposed a substance dualism : res extensa (material stuff with three dimensions) & res cogitans (meaningful stuff). But now Stuart Kaufman --- theoretical biologist, and complex systems researcher, and professor of bio-chemistry --- has updated that dichotomy with what he calls "res potentia", which includes both mental phenomena and such quantum features as observer dependence & non-locality. Classical Physics assumed that non-local cannot be causal, but Quantum queerness says otherwise. Res Potentia is the realm of Virtual Particles and Quantum Tunneling, and Entanglement. It was proposed by A, N. Whitehead, among others, to explain the reality of Consciousness as an agent in the world.
Res Potentia : https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2010/08/17/129250892/res-extensa-res-potentia-and-the-poised-realm
PS__My upside-down worldview wouldn't sound so crazy, if you would read the thesis, which begins at the beginning, instead of the middle, like these posts.
http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/
But energy is even harder to pin down than semi-solid matter. By definition, energy is inherently mercurial, unstable and transitory. Technically, a quantum of energy is not a physical object, but an "action potential"[10]. If "potential" sounds suspiciously like "probability", that's probably because both refer to future events, not to right-here-right-now, put-your-finger-on-it matter. So both matter and energy in the current paradigm of science have proven to be as fantastic as fairies.
I think you are missing the point again - I don't insist on the "primacy of the material world" - the world is always (no matter how simple or complex it is) both mental and physical...these are not two substances, but rather two aspects of one...a physical pole and a mental pole - totally inseparable one from the other. There are no disembodied thoughts and there is no 'mindless matter' - matter is always minded and thoughts are always embodied - i.e. they exist as functions or properties of 'bodies' - reductionism doesn't really work at this level because the 'body' might be as small as a quark or as big as a cosmos (and all stops in between) - they all carry their mentality along with their materiality - there is no primacy of mind or matter - both spring into 'existence' (whatever that is) simultaneously at the birth of the physical reality of the 'thing' (whatever it is) and then dissipate together at the 'things' demise. The electron's 'idea' of 'electron-ness' (i.e. the defining properties that make an electron an electron and not another thing) is exactly coincidental and coeval with the electron's physical reality. The universe does not have to imagine an electron BEFORE it produces one...it just happens - the idea and the reality just pop into existence together at the same time.
Quoting Gnomon
The "hard problem" vanishes with the bipolar panexperiential physicalism that I have suggested - matter minds and minds matter - there is no impenetrable barrier that prevents minds from affecting matter causally - it is precisely what the process of physical reality does - quite routinely. In a sense, there is no objective world, its all subjective because it is all unavoidably relational and what one particle 'senses' in proximity to another affects the reality of the 'sensed' particle - the observer effect runs very deep - there are no 'isolated' particles that can be observed objectively - at best we have an overwhelming consensus of subjective observations. There is no such ding as a ding an sich because there are no dings that exist an sich - in fact they're all, without exception, part of a neverending (or was it neverbeginning) process of continual change. And with that ding an sich bathwater, out goes the baby of the noumena/phenomena dichotomy - the noumenon of a particular particle is the idea of that particular particle in the particular circumstances it finds itself in...there is probably not another one exactly like it, but there are certainly sufficient regularities for an 'intelligent' observer to 'know' an electron when he 'sees' one - they all look the same to me!
Quoting GnomonNon-local is fine, but what you just suggested... Quoting Gnomon...is not helping at all I'm afraid. Non-local does not either imply or entail non-temporal and that is not what we "find" in Quantum Theory - non-temporality might be predicted (although I would suggest it is more accurate to suggest that temporality is not predicted) - but non-temporality has never been observed. They might think they have transcended the limits of physical possibility by faster than light "transmission" (not the right word I know but my brain is turning to jelly) of information, but they have never demonstrated any effect that preceded its cause. The arrow of time has never been reversed even if the clock can be shown to tick faster or slower according to the relative inertial reference frames of object and observer. And the works of Shakespeare did not exist before he began to write them. Ideas are not non-temporal even of they are not spatio-temporal. They're not necessarily entirely non-local either, although we may not be able to pinpoint the exact locus of a process of neural events giving rise to a particular 'thought' or 'feeling', I think we can be pretty sure that it was something that happened in our head and not very much to do with anything happening in the Andromeda Galaxy.
So yes, non-local is meaningful to me - but it probably doesn't mean the same to me as it does to you.
Ha! The target is full of holes in all the wrong places. But, if we continue this machine-gun dialogue, the pattern of holes might just get closer to the bullseye. :smile:
Quoting Siti
That's the main difference between the Materialism worldview and the Enformationism worldview. In materialism, some important events "just happen" randomly, so any meaningful pattern of activity is astronomically unlikely (a miracle). In a world where Information is fundamental, nothing noticeable happens randomly. Any happening has a prior cause. And the unbroken chain of cause & effect (en-formation) in the space-time world has an origin : the First Cause. But, if so, we can always ask "what caused that cause". Some dubious answers are "a quantum fluctuation in eternal space-time", or a "collision between miniverses in eternal space-time". However, if we assume, as the Big Bang theorists did, that space-time itself emerged from the Singularity, that would entail a pre-existing infinite Hyper-Space with antecedents back into eternity, and "dimensions" invisible to the human mind. Yet, as the early Cosmologists realized, that assumption still sounded too much like the old Creation theories : where the deity "just happened" to exist forever for no apparent reason.
Quoting Siti
I don't remember seeing that term before. And a quick Google search wasn't much help. But the idea seems to be related to Whitehead's "panexperiential" proposal, and to other attempts to explain Consciousness as a physical process. But I long-ago gave up on mechanistic processes as a dead-end, and turned to humanistic processes for an explanation of Consciousness. This flip was not motivated by religious impulses, but by the emerging notion among scientists that a "turning point" was near, and that a "paradigm shift" was necessary. The shift is from Reductionism to Holism, and from Mechanism to Organism. A holistic worldview can re-unite the Physics and Meta-Physics of Aristotle into a new paradigm. The atomistic & materialistic "physics" of ancient Greece is mostly obsolete, while the mental "metaphysics" is still debated by philosophers, yet has become the foundation of Psychology, Sociology, and History.
Turning Point : "The new concepts in physics have brought about a profound change in our world view; from the mechanistic conception of Descartes and Newton to a holistic and ecological view, a view which I have found to be similar to the views of mystics of all ages and traditions. . . . What we need, then, is a new 'paradigm' - a new vision of reality; a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values "
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fritjof_Capra
Quoting Siti
But it's a reasonable assumption, in light of Einstein's merging of space & time into a single concept. Both extension-in-space, and extension-in-time are human mental constructs. Time is imagined as a "space" for Change, but what is it really? Donald Hoffman, in The Case Against Reality, said regarding Model Dependent Reality : " there is an objective reality. But that reality is utterly unlike our perceptions of objects in space and time.”
Agreed. But shifting from reductionism to holism and mechanism to organism doesn't mean we have to abandon physicalism...it just means we have to take proper account of the effects of big things (like people and planets) as 'organisms' rather than imagining that we can deduce everything by imagining them as simple conglomerations of individual particles. Its not really fundamentally doing anything more than we do when we ascribe a property (say liquidity) to a body of water despite the fact that we know full well that no such property exists in the individual water molecules. That is - we just have to acknowledge that very often, the whole is more than the simple sum of its parts.
Ecologists have always known this of course...biologists have suspected it for even longer...meteorologists discovered it in the 1960s...chemists hated it and hoped it wasn't true - that is until they decided to use some of the evidence for attractive science fair and open day displays to attract prospective students, and physicists have wondered whether this might be why most of their experiments don't work, but ultimately they split into two camps - a few who still believe that its just a matter of time (and increasing precision of measurement) before we can predict absolutely everything from a relatively simple set of mathematical rules and sufficiently accurate knowledge of the original conditions, and those who think God might be the ultimate Mathematical Wizard par excellence.
For me - I reckon its just that - the whole is greater than the sum of its parts...
You are correct that my ideas are along the lines of Whitehead's "philsophy of organism"
That's what I'm driving at - it is (all) an organic, ecological, holistic process - there are no unconnected realities - there is no mind/body dualism - mind and body are simply - or rather very organically, holistically and complicatedly but nevertheless quite naturally - two aspects of the one reality.
That synopsis sounds like a summation of the Enformationism worldview. Even what I call Ideality is not an "unconnected reality". It's merely a phase of reality that consists only of ideas (principles & potential, as in mathematical ratios & probability). Plato called it the "realm of Forms". And no need to “abandon physicalism” as the foundation for physical Science. It's only metaphysical philosophical Science that needs a different vocabulary. Mind/Body dualism is merely different expressions of the same fundamental substance : information. We're very close, but you still seem to see something “unconnected to reality” in my worldview.
EMPIRICAL vs MYSTICAL SCIENCE
I've been moving over the last week, and discovered a book I bought several years ago, then never read, because it slipped behind other stuff on the bookshelf. I've only read a few chapters, but I get the impression that it espouses a worldview that you would find similar to the Qualia half of my own BothAnd philosophy. It's entitled The Qualia Revolution, From Quantum Physics to Cosmic Qualia Science, by British philosopher Peter Wilberg. He seems to use the term “qualia” in a sense similar to my own use of “information”. The new revolution he speaks of is what he perceives as a paradigm shift which is turning back the clock on Modern Science --- based on empirical evidence and rational analysis –- toward what I would call a pre-scientific "religious" or "mystical" worldview. He quotes Martin Heidegger, calling Modern Science "the new religion. For in essence it is a gigantic socially-constructed myth". Moreover, he says of the "First Scientific Revolution" : "The myth was a revolution in the most literal sense, for it turned our whole understanding of reality [pre-enlightenment] upside down or on its head. It does so by taking scientific representations of reality -- mathematical symbols and scientific models -- as more real than the consciously experienced phenomena they are used to explain" [my bold]. I too, see an emerging emphasis on Qualia and Metaphysics among scientists, but in addition, not to the exclusion, of Quanta and Physics.
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Wilberg's critique is interesting to me primarily because it is diametrically opposed to my own views. He discusses many of the same topics that I address in my blog essays and forum posts --- consciousness, awareness, fields, etc. --- but his vocabulary is foreign to me, partly because he speaks in terms of Phenomenology (subjective sensations) instead of Ontology (objective things). For example, he says, “Cosmic qualia science has its roots in the field-phenomenology of Michael Kosok. Field-phenomenology is distinguished by its recognition that subjectivity or awareness is not a property of a localized subject or 'ego', but has a non-local or field character.” This sounds like Panpsychism, but the term is not in his index. My own version of Panpsychism says that the universal “field” is composed of EnFormAction (energy; power to enform) not Consciousness (awareness).
He also has a notion of God that might sound similar to mine. “Cosmic qualia science is the only framework of scientific thought in which God not only might but must have a place. Qualia theosophy allows us to recognise that God does indeed not exist as any actual being or entity that we can be aware of, but is no less real for that --- being the primordial field of potentiality that is the power behind all actualities. Potentialities, by their very nature, have reality only in awareness. What we call God is 'gnosis' --- a knowing awareness of potentiality that is the source of knowable actualities.” He goes on to assert that “what we call 'energy' is nothing but the 'formative activity' by which this knowing awareness of potentiality is constantly actualized in the form of sensual qualities and perceptual patterns of awareness.”
My problem with these assertions is that they assume humans have two ways of knowing : 1> perception via physical senses, and 2> gnosis via extra-sensory perception. The latter is sometimes called “Intuition” (the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning), but that term is not in his index, so I'm not exactly sure what he means by "gnosis". Likewise, the index includes “Feelings”, but not “Reason”, so you can begin to see where he is coming from by noting omissions. His “field of pure awareness” seems to be accessible only by emotional subjective “feelings”, and not to rational objective “logic”. Since I am not an “emotional person” (no mood swings), I am sometimes accused of being too rational (Vulcan Logic). So, it's possible that I am blind to half the knowledge (the gnosis part) of the whole world. Which would prejudice me against the invisible and intangible aspects of the world (magic & mysticism) that are so important to many others. Am I missing something here, or are they reifying metaphors, and blinded by the smoke & mirrors of deceivers? Are they “unconnected to reality” or am I?
Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/
Quoting Gnomon
This "primordial field of potentiality" seems to be what you suggest - in effect, a condition (I am avoiding saying a "time" on purpose) in which the universe existed as pure potentiality (i.e. no actualities)...another way of saying it would be "a primordial field of (as yet) un-real-ized potentiality" - yes? And it is this that I am suggesting is not - could not be - connected to 'reality' - because in that condition, there would be no reality for it to be connected to unless - as you and Wilberg both seem to want to do - we redefine 'reality' to include things that are patently not real.
BTW - I believe Wilberg was using 'gnosis' to describe "God's knowledge" of potentiality, not human knowledge of God...but that seems to be just a clever maneuver to dodge the problem of God being aware of phenomena that have not yet phenomenalized...un-real-ized realities? And that seems to me to be a case of willful obfuscation. It seems perfectly clear to me that, for example, the "redness" qualia can only exist if there are (apparently) red things for it to describe - employing terminological ambiguity to muddy the waters really doesn't help the argument. To establish a compelling argument in favour of the primacy of ideality over reality, mentality over physicality - mind before matter - one really only has to make a compelling case for the existence of (for example) the redness qualia in a universe that has no red things in it. What possible information (let alone meaning) could the idea of redness convey - by gnosis or perception - in a world with no red things in it? What possible difference could 'redness' make to anything in a world with no red things in it? And if it really makes no real difference at all to any real thing at all...does it really exist at all?
It seems to me to be much more straightforward to make an argument against the real existence of qualia than for...if you doubt this, perhaps you can point to a quale that really exists but that describes some property that has existed in the universe...perhaps a colour or a shape that nothing has ever been...
But your thesis and Wilberg's argument both require that such qualia, such colours, necessarily exist - just waiting for the opportunity to be actualized...they are (presumably) un-real-ized potentialities...
That is the "unconnected to reality" bit that I am finding difficulty swallowing.
Do you have any "un-real-ized potentialities" in your mind? If so, they exist only as ideas until you actualize them. Is there a place in your reality for such ideas about future possibilities? Are ideas in a human mind in a physical world real in any sense? Just because Qualia and Ideas are not reducible to Atoms & Void, are they "unconnected to reality"? (rhetorical question)
Does your worldview have a role for Metaphysics? When we include "Virtual" particles in this expanded Reality, are we guilty of trying to "redefine 'reality' to include things that are patently not real". Far from denying Classical Reality, I am merely expanding the scope of Reality to include Ideas and Qualia, as in the invisible Quantum realm of Reality. I agree with Wilberg and many others that Materialist Science left Qualia behind in its quest for more & more Quanta. I just don't think Qualia give humans the creative powers of gods. They just allow us to be aware of colors that are not in the material stuff out there, but like Beauty, in the mundane subjective mind of the perceiver.
My Ideality merely acknowledges that Ideas and Qualia are non-physical, or not-yet-physical (i.e. metaphysical). They are what Einstein was talking about when he said "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." By "Knowledge", I assume he meant Facts about real actual things. By "Imagination" I assume he was referring to Ideas about currently un-realized possibilities. When I refer to G*D's "knowledge of potentiality, it's no more mysterious than Einstein's imagination, except that G*D's possibilities are backed-up by infinite power to actualize (EnFormAction). Albert had only a fraction of that creativity. Can you swallow Imaginary possibilities (ideas, ideals, universals) as an aspect of Cosmic Reality?
Quoting Gnomon
I can agree that G*D is "gnosis" in that sense, but Wilberg and I part ways when he claims that ordinary humans are capable of god-like Gnosis. We may be more gnostic than animals, but IMHO, even Einstein was not supernaturally imaginative and creative..
Of course they are...oh dear! So many misconceptions and misinterpretations - where to start...
OK - virtual particles are NOT particles that are virtually real, they are real phenomena that are virtually particles in the sense that they affect the world around them in a manner similar to the particles their effects resemble the effects of...I know - I'm not doing very well at clarifying this...they are not particles that are virtually real, they are real effects that are virtually particles.
Quoting Gnomon
"Atoms and void"? Where on earth do you get the idea that my idea is that everything real should be reducible to "atoms and void"? My point is not that ideas must be made of atoms, but that an atom cannot be separated from the "idea" of an atom - not my "idea" of an atom, not even a scientific consensus "idea" of an atom but the universe's "idea" of an atom. Atoms always come together with the idea of an atom otherwise they cannot function like an atom and if they can't function like an atom then they are not an atom. As you may recall me repeating ad nauseum in past conversations, you can't have one without t'other - ever...there are no disembodied ideas.
Quoting Gnomon
Of course - I am proposing a panexperiential physicalist process view of reality incorporating a mental/physical bipolar nature of "things" - how can that not have a role for metaphysics? It is a speculative metaphysics - it would be absurd for a speculative metaphysical scheme to deny the reality of either speculation or metaphysics. No - the question is not whether there is a role for metaphysics, but whether it is correct to insist on the primacy or fundamental role of metaphysics in the unfolding of the real world. Is the metaphysical aspect fundamental or is it co-emergent with the unfolding reality? That's the question.
Quoting Gnomon
Right - so this is where we are getting to the crux of the matter - you have them as strictly non-physical - I have them as a non-physical aspect of the otherwise physical world - fully embedded in the reality of the real world, even of they do seem to transcend the limits of space and time in a way that no strictly physical reality (i.e. an electron, an elephant or whatever) could ever do. But I'm not even convinced that ideas really do transcend time and space anyway - can you give an example, for example, of an idea that is not in someone's head (however that happens)?
Quoting GnomonAll those ARE aspects of cosmic reality...what I can't swallow is ideas, ideals and universals as primordial, creative, pre-cosmic supernaturalistic 'reality'.
Quoting GnomonAnd I would say that even "God" was not supernaturally imaginative and creative...that, in a nutshell, is where we differ. "God" is only as "gnostic" (and imaginative and creative) as "being" the (intricately interconnected) universe permits "him" to be and I am only as "gnostic" (and imaginative and creative) as "being" (the minuscule but also intricately interconnected) part of the universe (that I am) permits me to be.
The reality of virtual particles is subject to debate among scientists, but my position is that "virtue" is a Quality, not a Quantity. A virtual particle has no physical dimensions and no mass, only potential. Hence, in my vocabulary, it's Ideal, not Real. A photon, which is supposed to be real, is massless, hence no stuff, only potential (energy).
Massless particles : "A virtual particle does not have measurable mass."
https://www.quora.com/Do-virtual-particles-have-mass
Quoting Siti
That statement sounds to me like a reference to Plato's Forms. For every Thing, in this case an atom, there is a Form : "the universe's idea of [fill in the blank]". The notion of "disembodied ideas" floating around unconnected to anything, is foreign to me. You seem to interpret my notion of Ideality as a separate place in space. But Ideality and Reality are merely different aspects of the same singular Ultimate Reality, which I call G*D. G*D is not "out there", but everywhere.
Quoting Siti
I have no way of knowing empirically whether Physics or Metaphysics is more fundamental. But based on my understanding of how Information works in the world, Physics must be an emergent property (qualia) of G*D, who is assumed to be omnipotential. The Big Bang began from nothing physical, only potential : a dimensionless Singularity couldn't possibly contain a whole universe of 3D physical stuff. So, I assume all that stuff was stuffed into the Singularity in the form of dimensionless Information, like a computer code : the idea of the ultimate product. Since generic Information, EnFormAction, is equivalent to Energy, it can cause Matter to emerge even though the Energy per se is immaterial [ref massless photons]. As a rule, scientists tend to regard Energy as a property of matter, but a massless photon lacks the essential property of matter. So, which came first, which is fundamental : the power or the product?
Quoting Siti
Can you swallow a primordial, creative, pre-Big Bang, super-local-natural Multiverse as a real thing? If our local temporary universe is what we call Nature, then a non-local eternal Multiverse must be by definition Super-Natural. If you can imagine G*D dreaming multiple universes, that would be a crude notion of my Ultimate Reality.
Argument Against Reality : "quantum physicists have to grapple with the mystery of how there can be anything but a first-person reality."
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/
Quoting Siti
Ontology : If G*D is the known universe, then it must be Natural and Temporal, limited by the laws and conditions of physical Reality. If G*D is the postulated (imaginary) Multiverse, then it must be Super-Natural and Eternal, existing beyond the boundaries of the reality we experience. If the potential for imagination was always inherent in the physical processes of universe creation, then it must be superior in some sense to the collective imagination of a minor world in its ocean of bubble worlds.
PS___To an impartial observer of this dialogue, we may seem to be arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. :grin:
Quoting GnomonNot "known" universe - not limited to human knowledge, but accessible to human knowledge to some degree although even on this understanding there would always be a significant extent to which "God" would exist Quoting Gnomonbecause our ability to experience the reality we inhabit is limited.
The problem is that you then go a step further and place God's "primordial nature" beyond reality, you take the "mental" aspect of reality and insist that it must preempt (logically if not temporally) any and all "physical" aspects of reality.
That is the step I am objecting to. I can see neither logical nor empirical grounds for that assumption. As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no logical (much less observational) reason to assume that "God" must exist prior to the universe.
Yes, the Enformationism thesis does give primacy to the “mental” aspects of the world : consciousness, qualia, etc. To non-scientists, including philosophers, these are the most important “realities” in the world. So, even if it doesn't flip the Materialism paradigm on its head, like Wilberg's Qualia Revolution, it will necessitate a paradigm shift. But, unlike some proponents of Panpsychism, it doesn't attempt to over-ride Physics with Psychics. Any proposed psychic powers will have to show practical results, instead of requiring faith.
A major philosophical problem here is how you define "reality" : either "all-that-is" or "all-that-could-possibly-be". Scientists, for good reason, limit their scope of Reality to the here-and-now --- but make some small allowance for imagining the past & future. Philosophers, for their own reasons, leave their definition of Reality open to all possible times & places : Ontology. So, as a trained professional scientist, your definition is understandable. But, as an amateur philosopher, I am not so constrained. For an Inorganic Chemist, matter is the primary reality, and the mind of the observer is immaterial. But for Quantum Physicists, the material foundations of classical physics have been undermined by the squishy mind/matter nature of the sub-micro-scale foundation of reality.
The "primordial nature" of G*D is, like the existence of a Multiverse, only a hypothesis, since there is no way to directly experience that state before space-time. But both go beyond the physical limits of space-time to mentally imagine an as-if "time before time". For me, it was a logical progression from the Big Bang theory and Quantum Theory. So, the super-natural aspect of G*D was inferred, not from religious myths, but from scientific "facts". Many threads of science are now constructing a picture of ultimate Reality that is actually what I call Ideality. My blog has several examples. In that case, G*D exists, not outside of Nature, but everywhere in Nature. It's just that G*D-nature is more inclusive than Man-nature.
One way to rationalize an extra-real deity is to run the program of evolution in reverse. Astronomers traced the motion of galaxies back to a single point-of-origin of space. As I mentioned before, that hypothesis entails that the Singularity was not a physical container for all the matter in the world. Instead, it could be be something like a capacitor for Cosmic quantities of Energy. But then, for Chemists, Energy is nothing but a Property of Matter. So, if there was no matter in the Singularity, where would the Energy come from? Some imagine a Quantum Field full (?) of Zero-point Energy : i.e. infinite Potential. In place of that mystical notion, I imagine the infinite Potential of EnFormAction, which is both the power to enform (create novelty), and the raw material to sculpt into real things. In that view, Matter is merely a temporary phase of Energy, and Energy is merely a temporary phase of BEING, the power to exist (i.e. G*D). That latter default state of Ultimate Reality is normally outside the purview of empirical Science, but not of theoretical philosophers and theologians.
So, unlike New Ageism and Panpsychism worldviews, mine does not require scientists to “pre-empt” the physical aspects of reality with Orgone energies, or Akashic fields, or Prana Chakras. On the other hand, non-physical scientists --- psychologists, sociologists, etc --- might benefit from taking into account some non-physical aspects of reality, such as Memes, Fuzzy Logic, and Self Image, not to mention Sociobiology, and Superorganisms/Global Minds. :nerd:
What I enjoy about our dialogs is that we can disagree without being disagreeable. Of course, part of the reason for our mutual broad-mindedness is that neither of us is defending a dogma, or fighting for a faith. Our philosophical views tend to be more pragmatic than dogmatic. And our beliefs are open to reinterpretation.
But what I especially like about dialoging with you, is that you ask good questions. You make me see my ideas in a new light, and force me to justify some of my assumptions. I just this morning was reading a Sherlock Holmes story, The Valley of Fear --- The Tragedy of Birlstone. Ironically, it involves a gun-slinging American in England. When the evidence seems like a tangle of contradictions, Watson asks a question that puts Sherlock on the spot. " There is an appealing directness about your questions", Watson, said Holmes, shaking his pipe at me. "They come at me like bullets." I enjoy dodging your bullets, in the Gunfight at Philosophy Forum*. :cool:
* Obscure reference to the old western movie : Gunfight at OK Corral.
PS___Although I think my personal worldview is close to the truth, I must remain somewhat humble, because I could be deceiving myself with self-justifying logic. Paraphrasing Borges, in A Refutation of Time : the Enformationism thesis might be “the reductio ad absurdum of a preterite [outdated] system or, what is worse, the feeble artifice of an [American] lost in the maze of metaphysics”. :joke:
Please give me a brief synopsis of how "the bipolar panexperiential physicalism" softens the hard problem of Metaphysical Consciousness in a Physical Body. That might help to adjust the aim of our dialog, where we keep missing points. :smile:
Gnomon - I really don't think I can do this question justice right now...but the essential idea is that the actual entities composing reality are "occasions of experience" (a la Whitehead)...little "droplets" (perhaps) of experiential reality which all interact with one another to a greater or lesser degree depending on the complexity of their "aggregations". Some "aggregations" are just that - e.g. a rock or a solar system - others are organized composite units or organisms - like a human being for example - discrete individuals. All such "occasions" and (obviously) their aggregations are necessarily extensive both spatially and temporally, which is to say they endure across a finite time and space and they each have a physical and a mental "pole" - the best way I can think of to describe this is to say they each have a "WHAT it is" mental "description" and a "what it IS" physical "presence". These are the two poles of the "bipolar" part of my comment.
The key assumption is that everything that exists has both of these poles and exists as a temporal, "experiencing" (experiential) reality - which is really only to say that they relate to the world somehow and that this 'relating' makes a difference - like I said earlier - 'matter minds and minds matter' (and that seemingly enigmatic phrase can be unpacked in any number of ways...which I'll leave you to ponder).
The upshot of all this is that the kind of experience we think of as human experience is really no more than a rather complex, (self-)organized composite of the kind of "experience" that simpler aggregates (such as atoms, molecules, cells...etc.) "enjoy".
So just as, say, an electron "feels" the influence of neighbouring particles (and "fields" - whatever they are) and "responds" accordingly - in turn adding its own causal influence into the mix in the process - so a human "feels" its circumstances in relation to its own reality in the world and responds accordingly - but in a much more complex and organismic manner. From this emerges what we think of as human consciousness - awareness, imagination, purpose - and in a much more complicated manner than a particle (of course), adds its own causal influence into the mix - "mind" interacting creatively but perfectly naturally with matter by virtue of the continual merging and overlapping of mental/physical bipolar "droplets" of experiential reality. There is no dualistic barrier - no timeless ideality, and no mindless materiality - just a continual flow of fundamentally temporal (pan)experiential reality - a stream composed of drops of experience - discrete events - felt, prehended - by the discrete organismic mental/physical individuals that both emerge from and give rise to it as time rolls on. No hard problem of mind/matter interaction remains in this scheme because there is no matter that is not minded and not mind that is not mattered.
There - I told you I couldn't do it justice! A better explanation is in David Ray Griffin's book (but he took over 200 pages):
https://www.amazon.com/Unsnarling-World-Knot-Consciousness-Freedom-Mind-Body/dp/1556357559
Ouch! A hard-cover of Unsnarling the World Knot is listed for $894.90 on Amazon. It's as way-over my budget as Whitehead's "reality" is way-over my head. :smile:
Quoting Siti
Several years ago I tried to read Whitehead's Process and Reality, because it seemed to be aimed in the same direction as my own thesis. But his arcane, abstruse, and abstract terminology was way over my head. Hartshorne was a little better, but I still got lost in the labyrinth, with few landmarks to guide me. Their reference to such entities as "occasions of experience" didn't ring any bells for me. I couldn't fit them into any real-world system that was amenable with my intuitive understanding of the world.
Can you give a real-world example of one of those "little droplets of experience"? What are they made of? If they consist of "experience", whose experience? How would these entities fit into a well-known system such as Information Theory or Quantum Theory? How do they "add-up" to human awareness and feelings? How do they relate to Physics and Metaphysics? In my own thesis, I equate the hierarchy of information transitions --- from energy exchanges to idea communication --- to physical phase changes on a rising scale of complexity and power, eventually forming what I call Metaphysics (mental phenomena).
The notion of "actual entities" seems to imply that there are "potential or virtual entities" to be distinguished from. Are these fundamental elements self-existent, or did they emerge from an even more basic system? How do they relate to space & time? How do they relate to the Big Bang? Are they equivalent to a mathematician's purely abstract "dimensionless point" in empty space. or like a Klein bottle in hyper-space? Rather than numerical abstractions, I need something Qualitative that I can relate to.
Quoting Siti
In my Enformationism thesis, human ideas and feelings are essentially composites of lower forms of Enformation, such as Energy, but they are also holistic, so the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Are Whitehead's "experiences" like Democritus' atomic theory, unitary physical objects that simply aggregate like sand into sand hills? Or are they like water droplets that integrate into the ocean? Information is like memes that leap from the mind of one organism (person) into many other minds, thereby constituting a super-organism (tribe or nation).
I still don't see how "bipolar panexperiential physicalism" relates to what-it's-like (the experience) to be a conscious being. Sounds like it assumes that physics is inherently conscious, as in Panpsychism, but in much less straightforward language. Hence, one could also assume, without empirical evidence, that the universe as a whole is a thinking, feeling, conscious being. If so, can we "enjoy" an exchange of personal experiences (communicate) with the World Mind? Or must we take his/her/its existence on faith? :cool:
Try the library - that's where I found it.
Quoting GnomonYou can use one's own experiences - that's why these counter-intuitive notions seem like "common-sense" intuition to me. For example, suppose I look up at the night sky and see a star...that experience begins with a physical interaction - a sensory stimulus - a physical "prehension" perhaps(?) - my eye intercepts a stream of photons and that initiates a sequence of physical/mental processes that combined becomes the experience of "seeing a star" - I can break that sequence down by abstraction and analysis, I can explain (at least I could if I knew enough about it) how the sensory apparatus functions physically and how the signal processing apparatus of the optical nerves and the brain turn the raw data into a mental image (actually I can't explain that but maybe someone could)...etc...but the experience itself cannot actually be divided - I cannot have a half, or a third, of the experience of seeing a star - its either all or nothing (although sometimes - often - I might not be acutely aware of seeing it) - it is in that sense that "occasions of experience" are "atomic" - they are not themselves divisible...but they might be nested or overlapping and at our level of experience they almost invariably (if not absolutely always) are. Each moment of a human life is an impossibly tangled web of overlapping, nested and intertwined events - and yet, because of the organismic unity of the human individual, each moment becomes an indivisible occasion in its own right. But if you dig right down - even quarks and electrons (whatever they really are) are doing the same thing - that is, existing as a sequence of indivisible 'experiential' occasions' - moments during which they prehend - i.e. interact with in a 'sensible' (but obviously not cognitive) manner (at this level it is nothing like "apprehension" or "comprehension" but it is nonetheless a kind of "grasping" - the world around them on a much more fundamental level.
I have no idea whether this is helping or hindering your prehension of the idea...maybe I should stop there for now and see which bits draw the most flak before setting the bearings for the next leg of my flight of fancy!
The term "occasions of experience" sounds to me like quanta of incoming information. But my personal experience of the world is continuous and constantly changing, while flocks of photons fly into my eyes, and phonons into my ears, and phonemes in my brain.
As you say, " Each moment of a human life is an impossibly tangled web of overlapping, nested and intertwined events - and yet, because of the organismic unity of the human individual, each moment becomes an indivisible occasion in its own right." But, even though a TV screen is a field of pixels, I am not normally aware of those "atoms of experience" myself. So, what makes them atomic? Is an energetic photon a physical quantum of experience? If so, it must be an on/off code that the brain interprets as something or nothing to be aware of. Has anyone hacked the brain system to decode the photon pattern that I experience as red? How does 450 THZ of light become red in the mind? Is it a continuous process, or a sudden transformation?
In my Enformationism thesis I don't worry about such details, because the transformation process is assumed to be continuous from Big Bang to my experience of a red rose. Each "step" is a phase change, but some phases are purely physical (energy to matter), while some "high level" transitions are metaphysical (mental).
Quoting Siti
I suppose that of my lack of "prehension" is due to my experience that the Whitehead process seems to be mostly quantitative, while my experience is qualitative. Since I take "Information" (EnFormAction) to be both quanta & qualia --- Energy > Matter > Mind --- there are no gaps in the process from photon to visual chemistry to mental experience. This may be what you mean by "a sequence of physical/mental processes that combined becomes the experience".
In my thesis, the current one-way "sequence" of evolutionary enformation began in the BB and will end in the Big Sigh. But the Source and Origin of the power to be, to know, and to experience, presumably exists eternally in some never-never-land that we have no access to, since our ability to experience is limited by the boundaries of space & time. :smile:
For me that is "the difference the makes the difference" between modern idealism/materialism and post-modern process thinking. The "power to experience" surely presupposes time (if not space) - how could anything have an experience in "no time"? Putting 'experience' at ground level forces one to accept that time and change are fundamental to reality. There can be no experiential reality without time and change...one (any "one", any kind of "one") cannot experience changelessness.
Yes. Being is a process. But BEING (the power-to-be) is more like a timeless law or principle. Pragmatic folks take the brute-fact of existence for granted, while theoretical thinkers wonder about "why is there something instead of nothing?"
Quoting Siti
Nobody knows how or why existence is what it is. But philosophers are free to speculate. The only plausible account of the transition from nothing-to-something requires a prior state of Potential, Possibility, or Probability, which is taken for granted by Statisticians (those who study the static state of what's possible-but-not-actual). I simply include that state under the heading of BEING. The creation of something-from-nothing is a necessary assumption, if nothingness is a viable concept. Is it? If not, why do humans keep dredging-up such nonsense?
Quoting Siti
Of course. Experience is a process of knowing what's going on. But the power-to-know is a Principle (a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning). And Principles are assumed to be changeless. So in what sense do Principles exist? Are they like universal Forms with local instances?
PS___Our temporal vs timeless assumptions remind me of the differences between Plato's and Aristotle's worldviews *1. Plato postulated a hypothetical unchanging state as the reservoir of eternal Forms. Yet, while Aristotle accepted the notion of Forms, he could not imagine how an inert state of Potential could have any effect on the constantly changing Real World. So, he concluded that the Forms only existed as embodied in real things. And, I agree that the defining pattern of a thing is embodied, but the body is not the pattern.
For example, when I see a furry object wagging it's tail, how do I infer that it's a dog instead of a deer? Although the physical layout is similar, there is an invisible, but unique, pattern of qualities that we associate with dogs-in-general, not with ungulates. Although the physical details differ from one breed to another, we can usually "see" the pattern that connects specific instances (shapes) to the general Form (definition).
*1 Complementary Worldviews : "Plato’s philosophy is abstract and utopian, whereas Aristotle’s is empirical, practical, and commonsensical."
https://www.britannica.com/story/plato-and-aristotle-how-do-they-differ
Taken together, they cover what's Possible (Ideal) and what's Actual (Real).
Although, years ago, I had difficulty following Whitehead's abstract argument in Process and Reality, I could see that he was talking about some of the same concepts that I was beginning to consider in my own thesis of Program and Reality : i.e.Enformationism. For example, the distinction between inert "aggregations" and animated "organisms", is based on the difference between Parts and Wholes. He just used his own unique terminology, such as "occasions of experience" where I coined my own Information-based terms : "Enformy" --- Creativity, which includes converting physical interactions into psychic experiences.
From his analysis of the temporal process of reality, Whitehead concluded that some timeless Eternal Objects (Forms?) must necessarily exist in some sense. And the most fundamental of those EOs is the notion of "World Soul: which he also called "God. Ironically, in order to define "God" in "Anthrodecentric" terms, he had to humanize the deity into an "erotic" experiencer. Yet that physical attribute is not compatible with metaphysical Timelessness or Omnipotence. Which is where his "dipolar" deity differs from mine. Since my G*D is infinite and eternal, S/he must by definition encompass all possibilities. Nevertheless, like ANW's Eternal God, my Enfernal G*D is "Dipolar" : potential for both Good and Evil.
However, since Whitehead was an old man when the Big Bang theory was first proposed, and long dead when the Cosmic Microwave Background evidence was discovered, he assumed that the Real World was eternal. But now that we know the space-time World is not eternal, we must shift our God-paradigm from Natural (within space-time) to Extra-natural (prior to BB). That's because he was correct in his assumption that eternity is the default state of being, but wrong about the eternity of Reality. Therefore, I think an informed ANW would now agree with me that the deity is not simply a "creature of creativity", but the ultimate Creator. :smile:
Eternal Objects : https://footnotes2plato.com/2012/04/06/whitehead-eternal-objects-and-god/
Anthrodecentric : https://footnotes2plato.com/2012/08/22/anthrodecentrism-the-genesis-and-meaning-of-a-word/
Dipolar Theism : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipolar_theism
If you want to have a sex change to become a women or a man, first have an plastic surgery operation to become a frog (or something similar) and then lop off the penis or graft on a vagina and voila you now have become the opposite sex. Humans have XX, XY and XXY and also damaged or missing genitalia. The holy book i adhere to actually preaches that being a wierd dna or having fucked up genitalia usually means you are some super spiritual power house. On the XX, XY and XXY and ..... please let me know if i missed any.
When the fetus is a single cell, i don't know what gender it is but if a penis hasn't grown yet(in the case of dna XY) does that mean its a women or just a eunuch. This whole argument seems trite and overly simplistic.