Red is red.
I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. It seems to me that with regards to materialism, we find it very difficult to escape the evolutionarily evolved, inbuilt notion of "things" and "stuff" that our brains need in order to manipulate the world.
Yet QM and importantly the expected dissolution of time and space as fundamental entities in physics have made any such simple mechanistic notion of matter obsolete - what is left of matter except mathematics and some strange thing we can only call "instantiation" - the fact that things have specific values rather than (seeming to be) pure abstractions? What does a sophisticated materialist today place his or her faith in exactly? Something along the lines of the idea that the world is fundamentally describable by mathematics, impersonal and reducible to the operation of its simplest components. With regards to the last part - reductionism - that also seems to be hitting a limit in the sense that, while we have some supposed candidates for fundamental entities (whether quantum fields, branes or whatever), there is always a problem with anything considered "fundamental" - namely the old turtle stack problem. If the world is really made of any fundamental entity, then fundamentally it is made of magic - since the properties of that fundamental thing must simply be given rather than depending on some other set of relations. While physicists on the one hand continually search for such an entity, on the other they immediately reject any candidate as soon as it is found, since the question naturally arises, why this way and not that? What do these properties depend on? Furthermore, the fine tuning problem, unless it can be solved by proof that the world *has* to be the way it is – a forlorn hope it seems to me – suggests that the idea that we can explain all of reality in terms of the analysis of parts (emergent relationships) is likely to collapse – we will need to invoke a cosmological context in order to explain the behaviour of the parts. It's no wonder so many physicists hate that idea, since it runs against the deep reductionist grain. And after all, analysis of emergent relationships (the parts of a thing) is always so much easier than analysis of contextual relationships (what a thing is part of).
To get to the point then, I am considering the idea of a purely relational ontology, one in which all that exists are relationships. There are no entities with intrinsic properties, but only a web of relational properties. Entities with intrinsic properties are necessary components of any finite, bounded theory, and in fact such entities form the boundaries of the theory, the "approximations" it necessarily invokes in order to draw a line somewhere in the potentially unbounded phenomenological field. In economic theory for instance, we have “rational, self-interested” agents invoked as fundamental entities with rationality and self-interest deemed intrinsic, even though clearly such properties are, in reality, relational properties that depend on evolutionary and psychological factors, that, when analysed, reveal the inaccuracies and approximations of that theory. I am claiming that all properties imagined as intrinsic are approximations of this sort - ultimately to be revealed as derived from relations either external or internal to that entity.
Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.
I prefer the latter. (Note that I am using a definition of relational properties that includes emergent properties as relational, though the traditional philosophical use of those terms probably would not. The reason is that I am interested in what is ontologically intrinsic, not semantically intrinsic.)What would such a conception imply in the philosophy of mind? Traditionally, the “qualiophiles” have defined qualia as intrinsic properties, yet (while I am no fan of eliminativism) I think Dennett has made a strong case against this idea. Qualia appear to me to be properties of relationships between organisms and their environments.
They are not fundamental, but then neither is the “stuff” of which organisms and environments are made. We simply cannot ask about fundamental properties, but must confine ourselves to the networks of relationships we find ourselves embedded in, and from which we, as observer-participants, cannot be extricated.
“Third person” accounts, including physics, are abstractions from aggregations of first person accounts, and none can rise so high above the field of observation as to entirely transcend their origins in the first person. Thus there are certainly objective truths, but not Objective Truths, that is truths that are entirely unbound to any observer and which nominate the absolute properties of real objective things.
Note that the “relationalism” I am proposing does not in any way imply *relativism*, which flattens out truth claims at the level of culture. Nor does it make consciousness “primary”, or mathematics. I cannot personally reconcile the interior views (qualia, if you like, though I think that terms places an unwarranted emphasis on “what experiences are like” rather than the mere fact of experience) with a purely mathematical ontology.One obvious objection to this whole idea is the counter-intuitiveness of the idea of relationships without “things” being related. Yet I think the fault lies with intuition here. Western thinking is deeply intellectually addicted to the notion of “things”. David Mermin has interpreted QM in terms of “correlations only” – correlations without correlata as he puts it – an application of similar ideas to quantum theory. Part of the objection I think lies in the semantics of the word “relationship”, which automatically causes us to imagine two things on either side of the relation. It would be better to think in terms of a web, then, than individual, related entities. Or simply say that the related entities are themselves sets of relationships. Mathematics provides a good example of such a purely relational domain – a number exists solely by virtue of its relationships with other numbers. It has no intrinsic properties.Yet what then of the problem of specific values – the instantiation aspect of materialism? To quote Hedda Mørch: “… physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction.”We can overcome such an objection by invoking the first person perspective. Mørch credits the specific values of entities in our environment (some specific electron having this position, that momentum and so on) to some property of “being instantiated in something intrinsic”, harking back to Kant’s Ding an Sich. Yet there is an alternative way of viewing the situation. Let us imagine that each integer was conscious and able to survey its context in the field of all numbers. Take some number, let us say 7965. When number 7965 looks around, it sees the number 7964 right behind it, and the number 7966 right ahead. Trying to understand itself and the nature of its world, it starts doing arithmetic and finds that everything around it can be understood purely in terms of relational properties. Yet it says to itself, how can this be? Why do the numbers around me have the specific values they do? What “breathes fire” into those arithmetical relations to instantiate the specific world I see? Yet 7965 is wrong. It is ignoring the significance of the first-person relation that places it within a specific context that defines both it and the world it sees.Note that I am not, like Bruno, actually suggesting that numbers are conscious.
The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties.Grateful for any comments/critiques.
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self-referentiality / recursion.
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On 18 Jun 2019, at 04:15, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality.
It seems to me that with regards to materialism, we find it very difficult to escape the evolutionarily evolved, inbuilt notion of "things" and "stuff" that our brains need in order to manipulate the world.
Yet QM and importantly the expected dissolution of time and space as fundamental entities in physics have made any such simple mechanistic notion of matter obsolete -
what is left of matter except mathematics and some strange thing we can only call "instantiation” -
the fact that things have specific values rather than (seeming to be) pure abstractions? What does a sophisticated materialist today place his or her faith in exactly?
Something along the lines of the idea that the world is fundamentally describable by mathematics,
impersonal and reducible to the operation of its simplest components.
With regards to the last part - reductionism - that also seems to be hitting a limit in the sense that, while we have some supposed candidates for fundamental entities (whether quantum fields, branes or whatever), there is always a problem with anything considered "fundamental" - namely the old turtle stack problem.
If the world is really made of any fundamental entity, then fundamentally it is made of magic - since the properties of that fundamental thing must simply be given rather than depending on some other set of relations. While physicists on the one hand continually search for such an entity, on the other they immediately reject any candidate as soon as it is found, since the question naturally arises, why this way and not that?
What do these properties depend on? Furthermore, the fine tuning problem, unless it can be solved by proof that the world *has* to be the way it is – a forlorn hope it seems to me –
suggests that the idea that we can explain all of reality in terms of the analysis of parts (emergent relationships) is likely to collapse – we will need to invoke a cosmological context in order to explain the behaviour of the parts. It's no wonder so many physicists hate that idea, since it runs against the deep reductionist grain. And after all, analysis of emergent relationships (the parts of a thing) is always so much easier than analysis of contextual relationships (what a thing is part of).
To get to the point then, I am considering the idea of a purely relational ontology, one in which all that exists are relationships. There are no entities with intrinsic properties, but only a web of relational properties. Entities with intrinsic properties are necessary components of any finite, bounded theory, and in fact such entities form the boundaries of the theory, the "approximations" it necessarily invokes in order to draw a line somewhere in the potentially unbounded phenomenological field.
In economic theory for instance, we have “rational, self-interested” agents invoked as fundamental entities with rationality and self-interest deemed intrinsic, even though clearly such properties are, in reality, relational properties that depend on evolutionary and psychological factors, that, when analysed, reveal the inaccuracies and approximations of that theory. I am claiming that all properties imagined as intrinsic are approximations of this sort - ultimately to be revealed as derived from relations either external or internal to that entity.
Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships,
but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.
I prefer the latter.
(Note that I am using a definition of relational properties that includes emergent properties as relational, though the traditional philosophical use of those terms probably would not. The reason is that I am interested in what is ontologically intrinsic, not semantically intrinsic.)
What would such a conception imply in the philosophy of mind? Traditionally, the “qualiophiles” have defined qualia as intrinsic properties, yet (while I am no fan of eliminativism) I think Dennett has made a strong case against this idea.
Qualia appear to me to be properties of relationships between organisms and their environments.
They are not fundamental, but then neither is the “stuff” of which organisms and environments are made.
We simply cannot ask about fundamental properties, but must confine ourselves to the networks of relationships we find ourselves embedded in, and from which we, as observer-participants, cannot be extricated. “Third person” accounts, including physics, are abstractions from aggregations of first person accounts, and none can rise so high above the field of observation as to entirely transcend their origins in the first person.
Thus there are certainly objective truths, but not Objective Truths, that is truths that are entirely unbound to any observer and which nominate the absolute properties of real objective things.
Note that the “relationalism” I am proposing does not in any way imply *relativism*, which flattens out truth claims at the level of culture. Nor does it make consciousness “primary”, or mathematics. I cannot personally reconcile the interior views (qualia, if you like, though I think that terms places an unwarranted emphasis on “what experiences are like” rather than the mere fact of experience) with a purely mathematical ontology.
One obvious objection to this whole idea is the counter-intuitiveness of the idea of relationships without “things” being related.
Yet I think the fault lies with intuition here. Western thinking is deeply intellectually addicted to the notion of “things”. David Mermin has interpreted QM in terms of “correlations only” – correlations without correlata as he puts it – an application of similar ideas to quantum theory. Part of the objection I think lies in the semantics of the word “relationship”, which automatically causes us to imagine two things on either side of the relation. It would be better to think in terms of a web, then, than individual, related entities. Or simply say that the related entities are themselves sets of relationships. Mathematics provides a good example of such a purely relational domain – a number exists solely by virtue of its relationships with other numbers. It has no intrinsic properties.
Yet what then of the problem of specific values – the instantiation aspect of materialism? To quote Hedda Mørch: “… physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction.”
We can overcome such an objection by invoking the first person perspective. Mørch credits the specific values of entities in our environment (some specific electron having this position, that momentum and so on) to some property of “being instantiated in something intrinsic”, harking back to Kant’s Ding an Sich. Yet there is an alternative way of viewing the situation. Let us imagine that each integer was conscious and able to survey its context in the field of all numbers. Take some number, let us say 7965. When number 7965 looks around, it sees the number 7964 right behind it, and the number 7966 right ahead. Trying to understand itself and the nature of its world, it starts doing arithmetic and finds that everything around it can be understood purely in terms of relational properties. Yet it says to itself, how can this be?
Why do the numbers around me have the specific values they do? What “breathes fire” into those arithmetical relations to instantiate the specific world I see? Yet 7965 is wrong. It is ignoring the significance of the first-person relation that places it within a specific context that defines both it and the world it sees.
Note that I am not, like Bruno, actually suggesting that numbers are conscious. The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties.Grateful for any comments/critiques.
On 18 Jun 2019, at 12:56, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:Hi Pierz,On Tue, Jun 18, 2019, at 04:15, Pierz wrote:I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. It seems to me that with regards to materialism, we find it very difficult to escape the evolutionarily evolved, inbuilt notion of "things" and "stuff" that our brains need in order to manipulate the world.Right. I think this points to a fundamental fact that is overlooked in the dominant scientific paradigm of our age: that we are embedded in reality. We are participants, looking at it from the inside. The contemporary paradigm gives the utmost importance to the "third-person view" of reality, which is nothing more than a model, if not a fantasy.The edifice collapses once you try to explain consciousness, because this third person view model forces us to explain consciousness as an emergent property of matter, and that doesn't work. An overlooked simple possibility is that separating the notions of "consciousness" and "reality" is nonsensical. There is no evidence of any "reality" outside of conscious experience, nor can there be.I am not saying that there is no value in the third-person view, on the contrary, it leads to myriad interesting things, namely the computer I am using to type this email. But we have to be able to see models for what they are.Consider a camera lens. I want to take a photo of something, which is to say, I want to compress a 3D object into some 2D representation. Different lenses provide different mappings, but there is no way to avoid the fact that, no matter what lens you choose, something is lost. At the same time, there is no "correct lens". They just produce different mapping, that may be more or less useful depending on the situation.There are no cells, hearts, stars, atoms, people, societies, markets, ants, music or any other such category outside of human language. These are words that point to human mental models. These models please us, and we keep playing the game. Sometimes we find even better models, but we are doing nothing but coming up with new, perhaps better lenses. Ultimately, I think this is an infinite game.Yet QM and importantly the expected dissolution of time and space as fundamental entities in physics have made any such simple mechanistic notion of matter obsolete - what is left of matter except mathematics and some strange thing we can only call "instantiation" - the fact that things have specific values rather than (seeming to be) pure abstractions? What does a sophisticated materialist today place his or her faith in exactly? Something along the lines of the idea that the world is fundamentally describable by mathematics, impersonal and reducible to the operation of its simplest components. With regards to the last part - reductionism - that also seems to be hitting a limit in the sense that, while we have some supposed candidates for fundamental entities (whether quantum fields, branes or whatever), there is always a problem with anything considered "fundamental" - namely the old turtle stack problem. If the world is really made of any fundamental entity, then fundamentally it is made of magic - since the properties of that fundamental thing must simply be given rather than depending on some other set of relations. While physicists on the one hand continually search for such an entity, on the other they immediately reject any candidate as soon as it is found, since the question naturally arises, why this way and not that? What do these properties depend on? Furthermore, the fine tuning problem, unless it can be solved by proof that the world *has* to be the way it is – a forlorn hope it seems to me – suggests that the idea that we can explain all of reality in terms of the analysis of parts (emergent relationships) is likely to collapse – we will need to invoke a cosmological context in order to explain the behaviour of the parts. It's no wonder so many physicists hate that idea, since it runs against the deep reductionist grain. And after all, analysis of emergent relationships (the parts of a thing) is always so much easier than analysis of contextual relationships (what a thing is part of).I have the utmost respect and interest in Physics, but I think that contemporary physicists suffer from the problem of having convinced themselves that their field, and their filed alone, can produce "the correct lens". Most scientific fields have a lot to learn from Physics when it comes to rigor, but at the same time physicists underestimate how much easier it is to achieve rigor when you are dealing with very low levels of complexity (as compared to Biology, Psychology, Sociology and so on).I think it would be good if Physics found its way back to a more humble and wise position, being proud of the great lenses it creates, but understanding that we also need other lenses in our toolkit.Another thing I think is that the epistemic boundaries of current scientific fields have reached a point of diminishing returns, and we really should take seriously the project of crossing these boundaries without sacrificing rigor -- the elusive dream of interdisciplinarity without bullshit.To get to the point then, I am considering the idea of a purely relational ontology, one in which all that exists are relationships. There are no entities with intrinsic properties, but only a web of relational properties. Entities with intrinsic properties are necessary components of any finite, bounded theory, and in fact such entities form the boundaries of the theory, the "approximations" it necessarily invokes in order to draw a line somewhere in the potentially unbounded phenomenological field. In economic theory for instance, we have “rational, self-interested” agents invoked as fundamental entities with rationality and self-interest deemed intrinsic, even though clearly such properties are, in reality, relational properties that depend on evolutionary and psychological factors, that, when analysed, reveal the inaccuracies and approximations of that theory. I am claiming that all properties imagined as intrinsic are approximations of this sort - ultimately to be revealed as derived from relations either external or internal to that entity.I agree.Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential.
The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter. I think this is the only way out of the fact that we are observing an object from the inside, so self-referentiality is unavoidable.
This is also why I claim that computer science might be more fundamental than Physics, because computer science is the field with the tools to tackle self-referentiality / recursion. But again, I am being silly. Perhaps it is just another lens.
I prefer the latter. (Note that I am using a definition of relational properties that includes emergent properties as relational, though the traditional philosophical use of those terms probably would not. The reason is that I am interested in what is ontologically intrinsic, not semantically intrinsic.)What would such a conception imply in the philosophy of mind? Traditionally, the “qualiophiles” have defined qualia as intrinsic properties, yet (while I am no fan of eliminativism) I think Dennett has made a strong case against this idea. Qualia appear to me to be properties of relationships between organisms and their environments.My only problem with this idea is how quickly it goes over "relationships between organisms and their environments", as if there is some clear distinction or boundary between the two categories. Right now I am looking at this text, in my computer screen, and I am me looking at my computer screen. This is true of all objects we know. When we say apple, we mean "a human being's experience of an apple", even if we are not consciously aware of that. But we say "apple" for short.They are not fundamental, but then neither is the “stuff” of which organisms and environments are made. We simply cannot ask about fundamental properties, but must confine ourselves to the networks of relationships we find ourselves embedded in, and from which we, as observer-participants, cannot be extricated.Exactly.“Third person” accounts, including physics, are abstractions from aggregations of first person accounts, and none can rise so high above the field of observation as to entirely transcend their origins in the first person. Thus there are certainly objective truths, but not Objective Truths, that is truths that are entirely unbound to any observer and which nominate the absolute properties of real objective things.I think so too.Note that the “relationalism” I am proposing does not in any way imply *relativism*, which flattens out truth claims at the level of culture. Nor does it make consciousness “primary”, or mathematics. I cannot personally reconcile the interior views (qualia, if you like, though I think that terms places an unwarranted emphasis on “what experiences are like” rather than the mere fact of experience) with a purely mathematical ontology.One obvious objection to this whole idea is the counter-intuitiveness of the idea of relationships without “things” being related. Yet I think the fault lies with intuition here. Western thinking is deeply intellectually addicted to the notion of “things”. David Mermin has interpreted QM in terms of “correlations only” – correlations without correlata as he puts it – an application of similar ideas to quantum theory. Part of the objection I think lies in the semantics of the word “relationship”, which automatically causes us to imagine two things on either side of the relation. It would be better to think in terms of a web, then, than individual, related entities. Or simply say that the related entities are themselves sets of relationships. Mathematics provides a good example of such a purely relational domain – a number exists solely by virtue of its relationships with other numbers. It has no intrinsic properties.Yet what then of the problem of specific values – the instantiation aspect of materialism? To quote Hedda Mørch: “… physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction.”We can overcome such an objection by invoking the first person perspective. Mørch credits the specific values of entities in our environment (some specific electron having this position, that momentum and so on) to some property of “being instantiated in something intrinsic”, harking back to Kant’s Ding an Sich. Yet there is an alternative way of viewing the situation. Let us imagine that each integer was conscious and able to survey its context in the field of all numbers. Take some number, let us say 7965. When number 7965 looks around, it sees the number 7964 right behind it, and the number 7966 right ahead. Trying to understand itself and the nature of its world, it starts doing arithmetic and finds that everything around it can be understood purely in terms of relational properties. Yet it says to itself, how can this be? Why do the numbers around me have the specific values they do? What “breathes fire” into those arithmetical relations to instantiate the specific world I see? Yet 7965 is wrong. It is ignoring the significance of the first-person relation that places it within a specific context that defines both it and the world it sees.Note that I am not, like Bruno, actually suggesting that numbers are conscious.I do not think that this is what Bruno claims.
In fact, most of what you write seems compatible with what Bruno says, but he will correct me if I am wrong.
Telmo.The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties.Grateful for any comments/critiques.
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On 18 Jun 2019, at 14:37, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:Self-reference is not the same as recursion. I invite you to read my paper "The Self-Referential Aspect of Consciousness", or for the full picture my book "I Am": https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan
On Tuesday, 18 June 2019 13:58:49 UTC+3, telmo wrote:self-referentiality / recursion.
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On 18 Jun 2019, at 14:37, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:Self-reference is not the same as recursion. I invite you to read my paper "The Self-Referential Aspect of Consciousness", or for the full picture my book "I Am": https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visanAs I said already, you are right. What you describe is the “first person self-reference”. This one is indeed not directly amenable to recursion, neither through the first recursion theorem, still less with the second recursion theorem.But the first person reference is offered freely by arithmetic by identifying the soul and the knower in arithmetic. The consistency is given that this self-reference does not give an name to the subject, except “I”, which is not definable except by local self-pointing relatively to others FAPP.It is the subject of the experience, the inner god, the soul, the one got by []p & p, and []p & <>t & p. They are provably not definable in the language of that machine, but she can, like us, bet on mechanism, bet on its consistency (with precautions) and say “yes” to the doctor, knowing that she does not know what she is doing.The beauty is that G* proves that []p is equivalent with the two variants above, but G does not prove it, and the machine is condemned to conflicting logics and mathematics about itself, enforcing a deepening of the self-observation.You seem to want to communicate a (plausibly partially correct) insight, instead of looking for some theory explaining that’s insight, and the rest.Bruno
I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality.
Hi Pierz,Your writings remind me very much of the work of Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher who similarly shifted ontology from identity to relation, and explored many interesting consequences of making that shift. My exposure to him came from the excellent Philosophize This podcast, which dedicated 5 episodes to Deleuze. If you're interested, check out the first episode here.
Terren
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Hi Pierz,On Tue, Jun 18, 2019, at 04:15, Pierz wrote:I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. It seems to me that with regards to materialism, we find it very difficult to escape the evolutionarily evolved, inbuilt notion of "things" and "stuff" that our brains need in order to manipulate the world.Right. I think this points to a fundamental fact that is overlooked in the dominant scientific paradigm of our age: that we are embedded in reality. We are participants, looking at it from the inside. The contemporary paradigm gives the utmost importance to the "third-person view" of reality, which is nothing more than a model, if not a fantasy.The edifice collapses once you try to explain consciousness, because this third person view model forces us to explain consciousness as an emergent property of matter, and that doesn't work. An overlooked simple possibility is that separating the notions of "consciousness" and "reality" is nonsensical. There is no evidence of any "reality" outside of conscious experience, nor can there be.
I am not saying that there is no value in the third-person view, on the contrary, it leads to myriad interesting things, namely the computer I am using to type this email. But we have to be able to see models for what they are.Consider a camera lens. I want to take a photo of something, which is to say, I want to compress a 3D object into some 2D representation. Different lenses provide different mappings, but there is no way to avoid the fact that, no matter what lens you choose, something is lost. At the same time, there is no "correct lens". They just produce different mapping, that may be more or less useful depending on the situation.There are no cells, hearts, stars, atoms, people, societies, markets, ants, music or any other such category outside of human language. These are words that point to human mental models. These models please us, and we keep playing the game. Sometimes we find even better models, but we are doing nothing but coming up with new, perhaps better lenses. Ultimately, I think this is an infinite game.
Yet QM and importantly the expected dissolution of time and space as fundamental entities in physics have made any such simple mechanistic notion of matter obsolete - what is left of matter except mathematics and some strange thing we can only call "instantiation" - the fact that things have specific values rather than (seeming to be) pure abstractions? What does a sophisticated materialist today place his or her faith in exactly? Something along the lines of the idea that the world is fundamentally describable by mathematics, impersonal and reducible to the operation of its simplest components. With regards to the last part - reductionism - that also seems to be hitting a limit in the sense that, while we have some supposed candidates for fundamental entities (whether quantum fields, branes or whatever), there is always a problem with anything considered "fundamental" - namely the old turtle stack problem. If the world is really made of any fundamental entity, then fundamentally it is made of magic - since the properties of that fundamental thing must simply be given rather than depending on some other set of relations. While physicists on the one hand continually search for such an entity, on the other they immediately reject any candidate as soon as it is found, since the question naturally arises, why this way and not that? What do these properties depend on? Furthermore, the fine tuning problem, unless it can be solved by proof that the world *has* to be the way it is – a forlorn hope it seems to me – suggests that the idea that we can explain all of reality in terms of the analysis of parts (emergent relationships) is likely to collapse – we will need to invoke a cosmological context in order to explain the behaviour of the parts. It's no wonder so many physicists hate that idea, since it runs against the deep reductionist grain. And after all, analysis of emergent relationships (the parts of a thing) is always so much easier than analysis of contextual relationships (what a thing is part of).I have the utmost respect and interest in Physics, but I think that contemporary physicists suffer from the problem of having convinced themselves that their field, and their filed alone, can produce "the correct lens". Most scientific fields have a lot to learn from Physics when it comes to rigor, but at the same time physicists underestimate how much easier it is to achieve rigor when you are dealing with very low levels of complexity (as compared to Biology, Psychology, Sociology and so on).
I think it would be good if Physics found its way back to a more humble and wise position, being proud of the great lenses it creates, but understanding that we also need other lenses in our toolkit.
Another thing I think is that the epistemic boundaries of current scientific fields have reached a point of diminishing returns, and we really should take seriously the project of crossing these boundaries without sacrificing rigor -- the elusive dream of interdisciplinarity without bullshit.
To get to the point then, I am considering the idea of a purely relational ontology, one in which all that exists are relationships. There are no entities with intrinsic properties, but only a web of relational properties. Entities with intrinsic properties are necessary components of any finite, bounded theory, and in fact such entities form the boundaries of the theory, the "approximations" it necessarily invokes in order to draw a line somewhere in the potentially unbounded phenomenological field. In economic theory for instance, we have “rational, self-interested” agents invoked as fundamental entities with rationality and self-interest deemed intrinsic, even though clearly such properties are, in reality, relational properties that depend on evolutionary and psychological factors, that, when analysed, reveal the inaccuracies and approximations of that theory. I am claiming that all properties imagined as intrinsic are approximations of this sort - ultimately to be revealed as derived from relations either external or internal to that entity.I agree.Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter.
I think this is the only way out of the fact that we are observing an object from the inside, so self-referentiality is unavoidable. This is also why I claim that computer science might be more fundamental than Physics, because computer science is the field with the tools to tackle self-referentiality / recursion. But again, I am being silly. Perhaps it is just another lens.
I prefer the latter. (Note that I am using a definition of relational properties that includes emergent properties as relational, though the traditional philosophical use of those terms probably would not. The reason is that I am interested in what is ontologically intrinsic, not semantically intrinsic.)What would such a conception imply in the philosophy of mind? Traditionally, the “qualiophiles” have defined qualia as intrinsic properties, yet (while I am no fan of eliminativism) I think Dennett has made a strong case against this idea. Qualia appear to me to be properties of relationships between organisms and their environments.My only problem with this idea is how quickly it goes over "relationships between organisms and their environments", as if there is some clear distinction or boundary between the two categories. Right now I am looking at this text, in my computer screen, and I am me looking at my computer screen. This is true of all objects we know. When we say apple, we mean "a human being's experience of an apple", even if we are not consciously aware of that. But we say "apple" for short.
They are not fundamental, but then neither is the “stuff” of which organisms and environments are made. We simply cannot ask about fundamental properties, but must confine ourselves to the networks of relationships we find ourselves embedded in, and from which we, as observer-participants, cannot be extricated.Exactly.“Third person” accounts, including physics, are abstractions from aggregations of first person accounts, and none can rise so high above the field of observation as to entirely transcend their origins in the first person. Thus there are certainly objective truths, but not Objective Truths, that is truths that are entirely unbound to any observer and which nominate the absolute properties of real objective things.I think so too.Note that the “relationalism” I am proposing does not in any way imply *relativism*, which flattens out truth claims at the level of culture. Nor does it make consciousness “primary”, or mathematics. I cannot personally reconcile the interior views (qualia, if you like, though I think that terms places an unwarranted emphasis on “what experiences are like” rather than the mere fact of experience) with a purely mathematical ontology.One obvious objection to this whole idea is the counter-intuitiveness of the idea of relationships without “things” being related. Yet I think the fault lies with intuition here. Western thinking is deeply intellectually addicted to the notion of “things”. David Mermin has interpreted QM in terms of “correlations only” – correlations without correlata as he puts it – an application of similar ideas to quantum theory. Part of the objection I think lies in the semantics of the word “relationship”, which automatically causes us to imagine two things on either side of the relation. It would be better to think in terms of a web, then, than individual, related entities. Or simply say that the related entities are themselves sets of relationships. Mathematics provides a good example of such a purely relational domain – a number exists solely by virtue of its relationships with other numbers. It has no intrinsic properties.Yet what then of the problem of specific values – the instantiation aspect of materialism? To quote Hedda Mørch: “… physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction.”We can overcome such an objection by invoking the first person perspective. Mørch credits the specific values of entities in our environment (some specific electron having this position, that momentum and so on) to some property of “being instantiated in something intrinsic”, harking back to Kant’s Ding an Sich. Yet there is an alternative way of viewing the situation. Let us imagine that each integer was conscious and able to survey its context in the field of all numbers. Take some number, let us say 7965. When number 7965 looks around, it sees the number 7964 right behind it, and the number 7966 right ahead. Trying to understand itself and the nature of its world, it starts doing arithmetic and finds that everything around it can be understood purely in terms of relational properties. Yet it says to itself, how can this be? Why do the numbers around me have the specific values they do? What “breathes fire” into those arithmetical relations to instantiate the specific world I see? Yet 7965 is wrong. It is ignoring the significance of the first-person relation that places it within a specific context that defines both it and the world it sees.Note that I am not, like Bruno, actually suggesting that numbers are conscious.I do not think that this is what Bruno claims. In fact, most of what you write seems compatible with what Bruno says, but he will correct me if I am wrong.
Telmo.
The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties.Grateful for any comments/critiques.
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Red is red.
Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.
I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter.Gotta read Hofstadter some day. I have thought of the possibility of circular set of relationships, but then the circular system itself would be a brute fact. Infinite regress is not necessarily something "suffered", unless what we are hoping for is some intrinsic property, some solid ground somewhere.
On 6/19/2019 6:07 PM, Pierz wrote:
On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 7:12:33 PM UTC+10, Cosmin Visan wrote:Red is red.
No I don't think it is. I do understand your point of view. Indeed subjectively red does seem to be red, some kind of irreducible. Yet it is far from unambiguously clear that this is really the case. Imagine if you could only see in shades of red. How long would it take before red became black-and-white? Imagine if all you could ever be conscious of were redness. Without contrast, is such a state of consciousness possible? Just pure intrinsic redness, existing in and of itself, outside of any relationship with other colours, other qualia? If you only have one colour receptor in your visual system, you have only one differentiator of elements in your visual field - brightness. If you have two colour receptors, like a dog, what colours do you see? Red and yellow? Blue and yellow? The specific wavelengths of course do not matter here - it's no guarantee that just because a dog has a receptor for what we call "blue" light, that it perceives what we call blue when it sees that colour. Indeed I doubt it, because blue is a differentiator of a trichromatic system, and specifically our, human trichromatic system. I believe that the colour red has its particular qualities by virtue of evolutionary associations with red. What is red in nature? Blood, fire. Red stimulates us to pay attention. Green soothes us because of its deep evolutionary association with safe, sheltered environments. I am not reducing qualia to "nothing but" here, let alone "nothing at all", like Dennett, but I am saying that they are part of a field of relationships and exist only by virtue of those relationships. Take the relationships away and "red" dissolves - and I believe you could prove that by wearing red-lensed glasses for a week.
Exactly. And compare some other colors. My father was red/green color blind (which is fairly common) so ripe strawberrys looked the same color as the leaves to him. Is orange orange? English didn't even have a word for orange until the fruit was imported from China.
Chaucer writes of a sunset color between red and yellow. And some people have four different color receptors, instead of just three. But even though there are many gradations and associations, does that mean there are only relations? There is no red?
Brent
I don't know jack about "eternal," but in physics (memory?) here is an example of 'immortal' which is darn close to eternal :-)I like stuff like this, so I posted it. Is it at all of use? Meh!
On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 8:58:49 PM UTC+10, telmo wrote:I have the utmost respect and interest in Physics, but I think that contemporary physicists suffer from the problem of having convinced themselves that their field, and their filed alone, can produce "the correct lens". Most scientific fields have a lot to learn from Physics when it comes to rigor, but at the same time physicists underestimate how much easier it is to achieve rigor when you are dealing with very low levels of complexity (as compared to Biology, Psychology, Sociology and so on).Yes exactly. It really needs to be pointed out that we can only barely calculate the states of the simplest atoms, using all the supercomputers available to us! Yet the successful analysis of these isolated, microscopic physical systems is supposed to convince us that we understand all of physical reality "in principle"? This laughable idea that we live in a computer simulation of some advanced civilization - when we can't even simulate a single fucking oxygen atom?! We sure are clever apes, but it's even more impressive how impressed we are with ourselves.
On 19 Jun 2019, at 22:50, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:"First person self-reference" is a pleonasm. Self-reference IS first person. Anything else, "3rd person bla-bla", is just words-play.
On Tuesday, 18 June 2019 21:00:22 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:As I said already, you are right. What you describe is the “first person self-reference”.
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On 20 Jun 2019, at 00:13, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wednesday, June 19, 2019 at 11:05:53 PM UTC+10, PGC wrote:
On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 4:15:43 AM UTC+2, Pierz wrote:I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality.Lol then this list would be about the wrongest place in the world, right?I mean Jesus, behold all the attempts to assimilate the discourse of your post immediately! You apparently appear as fresh meat to all the members.Especially in demonstrating how well your post and thoughts would do under a better regime... ;-) What fantastic academic armor you would wear, how colors would appear to you, how Yoda would formulate syntax (btw it's "Red, I am!" you morons), how arithmetic would make love to you, how Bruno would know whether Telmo is wrong, and on top of that Deleuze too! Never mind that Deleuze and the infinitely undecided Christian consciousness soul fundamentalists on this list are as far apart as Plato is from logging on to the web in his dialogues... "You would most certainly do well on our team is the consensus here", lol.How about going full bore on avoiding fundamental discussions? As in resisting the urge to prove to ourselves... anything! Asking instead perhaps where you want the thing to go? What you want your discourse to perform? What... IT... does? Leaving the whole parental "should" and "respectability" formations, the originality vanities, historical pornography, Christian reputations, saints and names, pretense towards some real fundamental or truth thing... leaving all that crap behind and asking how can discourse perform or leave room for things at the destination?Goes without saying that if you're resourceful enough to free yourself of the prison section of your own discourse fortress, bribing yourself as the guard on the bridge, not paying mind to heights and alligators living in the moat: then you got some black ops work ahead of you. The kind of work where, if it is done pro, teams have each others' backs and words instead of whining around and bickering endlessly like everybody else... who run from themselves by lowering the bar of expectations enough to definitely not make a mistake, not take risks, to not finish things and see them through, and instead be forever amazed by their usual wishful thinking with infinitely precise and accurate explanations that fill books and waste precious time, because they need recruits for what they can't themselves believe: the road beyond the personal discourse fortress is not safe. It is wondrous, filled with infinite opportunity that satiates everything in abundance. But it's not for cowards or those that fear seeing blood, which is why the shy folks stay home and defend the thing forever. PGCHowdy cowboy. I know what you're saying. Everyone here has their drum to bang - and bang it they will! I once described the fight between John Clark and Bruno over the third person indeterminacy
(step 3 or whatever it is) as being like one of those Siberian coal fires that has been burning since the start of the 20th century. I think for now it is dormant - but I'm hesitant even to mention it, since that may be all it needs to burst into flame again... It all becomes rather sterile and exhausting even to watch. Hence why I'm not here so much any more.
On the other hand, we're all people who are in love with trying to understand the deep nature of things, and whatever human foibles get in the way, surely it's not the worst possible way to go to through the world. Anyway, to your main point, there is, I think, a point, beyond the intellectual game. I have no interest in defending any fortress.
I believe that the western bias towards thinking in terms of things with intrinsic properties has had many unfortunate consequences. It means we tend to see people as individuals with intrinsic characters rather than parts of a system, which causes us to blame them, often enough, for their suffering. It has blinded us to critical environmental interdependencies. It has led to the dominance of an impoverished reductionist account of the world that forecloses the possibility of a plurality of other rich epistemologies. I don't harbour too many illusions of changing the world, but those are the reasons I'm firing my arrow into the maelstrom.
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On 20 Jun 2019, at 00:13, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wednesday, June 19, 2019 at 11:05:53 PM UTC+10, PGC wrote:
On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 4:15:43 AM UTC+2, Pierz wrote:I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality.Lol then this list would be about the wrongest place in the world, right?I mean Jesus, behold all the attempts to assimilate the discourse of your post immediately! You apparently appear as fresh meat to all the members.Especially in demonstrating how well your post and thoughts would do under a better regime... ;-) What fantastic academic armor you would wear, how colors would appear to you, how Yoda would formulate syntax (btw it's "Red, I am!" you morons), how arithmetic would make love to you, how Bruno would know whether Telmo is wrong, and on top of that Deleuze too! Never mind that Deleuze and the infinitely undecided Christian consciousness soul fundamentalists on this list are as far apart as Plato is from logging on to the web in his dialogues... "You would most certainly do well on our team is the consensus here", lol.How about going full bore on avoiding fundamental discussions? As in resisting the urge to prove to ourselves... anything! Asking instead perhaps where you want the thing to go? What you want your discourse to perform? What... IT... does? Leaving the whole parental "should" and "respectability" formations, the originality vanities, historical pornography, Christian reputations, saints and names, pretense towards some real fundamental or truth thing... leaving all that crap behind and asking how can discourse perform or leave room for things at the destination?Goes without saying that if you're resourceful enough to free yourself of the prison section of your own discourse fortress, bribing yourself as the guard on the bridge, not paying mind to heights and alligators living in the moat: then you got some black ops work ahead of you. The kind of work where, if it is done pro, teams have each others' backs and words instead of whining around and bickering endlessly like everybody else... who run from themselves by lowering the bar of expectations enough to definitely not make a mistake, not take risks, to not finish things and see them through, and instead be forever amazed by their usual wishful thinking with infinitely precise and accurate explanations that fill books and waste precious time, because they need recruits for what they can't themselves believe: the road beyond the personal discourse fortress is not safe. It is wondrous, filled with infinite opportunity that satiates everything in abundance. But it's not for cowards or those that fear seeing blood, which is why the shy folks stay home and defend the thing forever. PGCHowdy cowboy. I know what you're saying. Everyone here has their drum to bang - and bang it they will! I once described the fight between John Clark and Bruno over the third person indeterminacyFirst person indeterminacy. Like in Everett, the probability (and the collapse) are first person experience. There is no third person self-reference. I just correct your typo.
(step 3 or whatever it is) as being like one of those Siberian coal fires that has been burning since the start of the 20th century. I think for now it is dormant - but I'm hesitant even to mention it, since that may be all it needs to burst into flame again... It all becomes rather sterile and exhausting even to watch. Hence why I'm not here so much any more.You did show complete understanding of this in your publication of the UDA. I understand you don’t follow the thread on it, but you might thing helping those who does not understand, or perhaps fake to not understand, etc.
On the other hand, we're all people who are in love with trying to understand the deep nature of things, and whatever human foibles get in the way, surely it's not the worst possible way to go to through the world. Anyway, to your main point, there is, I think, a point, beyond the intellectual game. I have no interest in defending any fortress.Nor do I. Nobody can know if I personally believe or not in Mechanism. Defending ideas is a waste of time, I think.
I believe that the western bias towards thinking in terms of things with intrinsic properties has had many unfortunate consequences. It means we tend to see people as individuals with intrinsic characters rather than parts of a system, which causes us to blame them, often enough, for their suffering. It has blinded us to critical environmental interdependencies. It has led to the dominance of an impoverished reductionist account of the world that forecloses the possibility of a plurality of other rich epistemologies. I don't harbour too many illusions of changing the world, but those are the reasons I'm firing my arrow into the maelstrom.I do want a change in the world, like making theology back into science. We see the obscurantism and the suffering which happens when we let this filed in the hand of those who exploit it for their special interest. I want to share the universal machine lesson in modesty. I want a better world for the kids.Bruno
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Howdy cowboy. I know what you're saying. Everyone here has their drum to bang - and bang it they will! I once described the fight between John Clark and Bruno over the third person indeterminacy (step 3 or whatever it is) as being like one of those Siberian coal fires that has been burning since the start of the 20th century. I think for now it is dormant - but I'm hesitant even to mention it, since that may be all it needs to burst into flame again... It all becomes rather sterile and exhausting even to watch. Hence why I'm not here so much any more. On the other hand, we're all people who are in love with trying to understand the deep nature of things, and whatever human foibles get in the way, surely it's not the worst possible way to go to through the world. Anyway, to your main point, there is, I think, a point, beyond the intellectual game. I have no interest in defending any fortress. I believe that the western bias towards thinking in terms of things with intrinsic properties has had many unfortunate consequences. It means we tend to see people as individuals with intrinsic characters rather than parts of a system, which causes us to blame them, often enough, for their suffering. It has blinded us to critical environmental interdependencies.
These are interesting things that you say, and indeed I'm postponing for a while the wearing of the colored glasses for a week, primarily because I would look weird at work with colored glasses all the time. But sooner or later I will do the experiment, because it is also my belief that the selected color will vanish.
Also, you ask what colors the dog will see. I believe it will be yellow and blue. The reasons I'm giving in my paper "Is Qualia Meaning or Understanding?" with reference to the Haidinger's Brush phenomenon, which is yellow and blue: https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan If you read it, I'm very curious what you think. I'm also talking about red, green and most of the stuff that you mentioned.Though in the end there is a problem with this relational ontology. Indeed red might disappear if you wear those glasses, because there would be no relation to other colors. But what do you do when you talk about the full experience of being conscious ? That experience, in itself, cannot be compared to anything else, because by definition it is the full experience. How is it maintained ? I'm also curious what the answer is.
On 20 Jun 2019, at 02:41, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 8:58:49 PM UTC+10, telmo wrote:Hi Pierz,On Tue, Jun 18, 2019, at 04:15, Pierz wrote:I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. It seems to me that with regards to materialism, we find it very difficult to escape the evolutionarily evolved, inbuilt notion of "things" and "stuff" that our brains need in order to manipulate the world.Right. I think this points to a fundamental fact that is overlooked in the dominant scientific paradigm of our age: that we are embedded in reality. We are participants, looking at it from the inside. The contemporary paradigm gives the utmost importance to the "third-person view" of reality, which is nothing more than a model, if not a fantasy.The edifice collapses once you try to explain consciousness, because this third person view model forces us to explain consciousness as an emergent property of matter, and that doesn't work. An overlooked simple possibility is that separating the notions of "consciousness" and "reality" is nonsensical. There is no evidence of any "reality" outside of conscious experience, nor can there be.But then you risk reification of consciousness itself
- something I have fallen into myself, but now am less sure about. Is consciousness a "thing" in which experiences occur? Do we need such an "ether" for experiences to propagate through? I totally agree with you that a purely third person account of mind fails (any kind of "property dualism" solution is nasty and ad hoc).
But do we need to find some new fundamental substrate?
Perhaps there is one, but "the Tao that you can name is not the Tao”.
Even the Buddhists don't really believe in consciousness - the manifestations of it are part of the veil of Maya and nirvana is a state of non-being.
Consciousness is an abstraction of our experiences, as matter is. What certainly exists is the phenomenological field we share, a network of relationships of which qualia and what we call matter are a part.
I am not saying that there is no value in the third-person view, on the contrary, it leads to myriad interesting things, namely the computer I am using to type this email. But we have to be able to see models for what they are.Consider a camera lens. I want to take a photo of something, which is to say, I want to compress a 3D object into some 2D representation. Different lenses provide different mappings, but there is no way to avoid the fact that, no matter what lens you choose, something is lost. At the same time, there is no "correct lens". They just produce different mapping, that may be more or less useful depending on the situation.There are no cells, hearts, stars, atoms, people, societies, markets, ants, music or any other such category outside of human language. These are words that point to human mental models. These models please us, and we keep playing the game. Sometimes we find even better models, but we are doing nothing but coming up with new, perhaps better lenses. Ultimately, I think this is an infinite game.Yep. David Deutsch says the same in The Beginning of Infinity.
Yet QM and importantly the expected dissolution of time and space as fundamental entities in physics have made any such simple mechanistic notion of matter obsolete - what is left of matter except mathematics and some strange thing we can only call "instantiation" - the fact that things have specific values rather than (seeming to be) pure abstractions? What does a sophisticated materialist today place his or her faith in exactly? Something along the lines of the idea that the world is fundamentally describable by mathematics, impersonal and reducible to the operation of its simplest components. With regards to the last part - reductionism - that also seems to be hitting a limit in the sense that, while we have some supposed candidates for fundamental entities (whether quantum fields, branes or whatever), there is always a problem with anything considered "fundamental" - namely the old turtle stack problem. If the world is really made of any fundamental entity, then fundamentally it is made of magic - since the properties of that fundamental thing must simply be given rather than depending on some other set of relations. While physicists on the one hand continually search for such an entity, on the other they immediately reject any candidate as soon as it is found, since the question naturally arises, why this way and not that? What do these properties depend on? Furthermore, the fine tuning problem, unless it can be solved by proof that the world *has* to be the way it is – a forlorn hope it seems to me – suggests that the idea that we can explain all of reality in terms of the analysis of parts (emergent relationships) is likely to collapse – we will need to invoke a cosmological context in order to explain the behaviour of the parts. It's no wonder so many physicists hate that idea, since it runs against the deep reductionist grain. And after all, analysis of emergent relationships (the parts of a thing) is always so much easier than analysis of contextual relationships (what a thing is part of).I have the utmost respect and interest in Physics, but I think that contemporary physicists suffer from the problem of having convinced themselves that their field, and their filed alone, can produce "the correct lens". Most scientific fields have a lot to learn from Physics when it comes to rigor, but at the same time physicists underestimate how much easier it is to achieve rigor when you are dealing with very low levels of complexity (as compared to Biology, Psychology, Sociology and so on).Yes exactly. It really needs to be pointed out that we can only barely calculate the states of the simplest atoms, using all the supercomputers available to us!
Yet the successful analysis of these isolated, microscopic physical systems is supposed to convince us that we understand all of physical reality "in principle"? This laughable idea that we live in a computer simulation of some advanced civilization - when we can't even simulate a single fucking oxygen atom?! We sure are clever apes, but it's even more impressive how impressed we are with ourselves.
I think it would be good if Physics found its way back to a more humble and wise position, being proud of the great lenses it creates, but understanding that we also need other lenses in our toolkit.Another thing I think is that the epistemic boundaries of current scientific fields have reached a point of diminishing returns, and we really should take seriously the project of crossing these boundaries without sacrificing rigor -- the elusive dream of interdisciplinarity without bullshit.You have to sacrifice some rigour. Psychology is an example of a field where rigour has been applied, and the effect has been the sterilisation of imagination.
Psychology as a discipline has a giant chip on is shoulder about its status as a "soft" science. So they inject more and more rigour in the form of statistical analysis, and what have we been left with? Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT is fine and good, helpful in many cases, but it's a terribly limited approach to human beings, and it reduces therapists to technicians and patients to something like faulty machines.
People are far richer than that, but the problem is that statistical methods are very blunt instruments that require a high degree of standardisation of technique and the levelling out of as much other variation as possible, with the result that all the richness of what actually occurs in therapy is lost, and you end up with lowest-common-denominator therapy as the only sanctioned therapeutic modality. We certainly do need quantitative analyses to keep us honest in psychology as in other areas, but rigour is not the only consideration, and quantitative methods come with their own costs. In some areas, what we need is not necessarily more rigour, but more tolerance of uncertainty, more imagination, more experimentation, combined with corrective critical analysis which may or may not include a quantitative component.
To get to the point then, I am considering the idea of a purely relational ontology, one in which all that exists are relationships. There are no entities with intrinsic properties, but only a web of relational properties. Entities with intrinsic properties are necessary components of any finite, bounded theory, and in fact such entities form the boundaries of the theory, the "approximations" it necessarily invokes in order to draw a line somewhere in the potentially unbounded phenomenological field. In economic theory for instance, we have “rational, self-interested” agents invoked as fundamental entities with rationality and self-interest deemed intrinsic, even though clearly such properties are, in reality, relational properties that depend on evolutionary and psychological factors, that, when analysed, reveal the inaccuracies and approximations of that theory. I am claiming that all properties imagined as intrinsic are approximations of this sort - ultimately to be revealed as derived from relations either external or internal to that entity.I agree.Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter.Gotta read Hofstadter some day. I have thought of the possibility of circular set of relationships, but then the circular system itself would be a brute fact. Infinite regress is not necessarily something "suffered", unless what we are hoping for is some intrinsic property, some solid ground somewhere.
I think this is the only way out of the fact that we are observing an object from the inside, so self-referentiality is unavoidable. This is also why I claim that computer science might be more fundamental than Physics, because computer science is the field with the tools to tackle self-referentiality / recursion. But again, I am being silly. Perhaps it is just another lens.I prefer the latter. (Note that I am using a definition of relational properties that includes emergent properties as relational, though the traditional philosophical use of those terms probably would not. The reason is that I am interested in what is ontologically intrinsic, not semantically intrinsic.)What would such a conception imply in the philosophy of mind? Traditionally, the “qualiophiles” have defined qualia as intrinsic properties, yet (while I am no fan of eliminativism) I think Dennett has made a strong case against this idea. Qualia appear to me to be properties of relationships between organisms and their environments.My only problem with this idea is how quickly it goes over "relationships between organisms and their environments", as if there is some clear distinction or boundary between the two categories. Right now I am looking at this text, in my computer screen, and I am me looking at my computer screen. This is true of all objects we know. When we say apple, we mean "a human being's experience of an apple", even if we are not consciously aware of that. But we say "apple" for short.And I am saying "organisms and their environments" for short. It is hard to talk at all without such shortcuts. I do not believe that organisms are fundamentally separate from their environments.They are not fundamental, but then neither is the “stuff” of which organisms and environments are made. We simply cannot ask about fundamental properties, but must confine ourselves to the networks of relationships we find ourselves embedded in, and from which we, as observer-participants, cannot be extricated.Exactly.“Third person” accounts, including physics, are abstractions from aggregations of first person accounts, and none can rise so high above the field of observation as to entirely transcend their origins in the first person. Thus there are certainly objective truths, but not Objective Truths, that is truths that are entirely unbound to any observer and which nominate the absolute properties of real objective things.I think so too.Note that the “relationalism” I am proposing does not in any way imply *relativism*, which flattens out truth claims at the level of culture. Nor does it make consciousness “primary”, or mathematics. I cannot personally reconcile the interior views (qualia, if you like, though I think that terms places an unwarranted emphasis on “what experiences are like” rather than the mere fact of experience) with a purely mathematical ontology.One obvious objection to this whole idea is the counter-intuitiveness of the idea of relationships without “things” being related. Yet I think the fault lies with intuition here. Western thinking is deeply intellectually addicted to the notion of “things”. David Mermin has interpreted QM in terms of “correlations only” – correlations without correlata as he puts it – an application of similar ideas to quantum theory. Part of the objection I think lies in the semantics of the word “relationship”, which automatically causes us to imagine two things on either side of the relation. It would be better to think in terms of a web, then, than individual, related entities. Or simply say that the related entities are themselves sets of relationships. Mathematics provides a good example of such a purely relational domain – a number exists solely by virtue of its relationships with other numbers. It has no intrinsic properties.Yet what then of the problem of specific values – the instantiation aspect of materialism? To quote Hedda Mørch: “… physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction.”We can overcome such an objection by invoking the first person perspective. Mørch credits the specific values of entities in our environment (some specific electron having this position, that momentum and so on) to some property of “being instantiated in something intrinsic”, harking back to Kant’s Ding an Sich. Yet there is an alternative way of viewing the situation. Let us imagine that each integer was conscious and able to survey its context in the field of all numbers. Take some number, let us say 7965. When number 7965 looks around, it sees the number 7964 right behind it, and the number 7966 right ahead. Trying to understand itself and the nature of its world, it starts doing arithmetic and finds that everything around it can be understood purely in terms of relational properties. Yet it says to itself, how can this be? Why do the numbers around me have the specific values they do? What “breathes fire” into those arithmetical relations to instantiate the specific world I see? Yet 7965 is wrong. It is ignoring the significance of the first-person relation that places it within a specific context that defines both it and the world it sees.Note that I am not, like Bruno, actually suggesting that numbers are conscious.I do not think that this is what Bruno claims. In fact, most of what you write seems compatible with what Bruno says, but he will correct me if I am wrong.Yes, I know Bruno doesn't believe 7965 can reason, but he thinks mathematics implements reasoning.
I like Bruno's ideas,
but his is a mathematical ontology that starts with arithmetic, whereas mine is a relational ontology that starts with the phenomenological field.
Maybe they are compatible views, maybe they aren't. I remain unconvinced about qualia arising in arithmetical structures, but these are deep questions. I may be wrong.
Telmo.The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties.Grateful for any comments/critiques.
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On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 12:13:34 AM UTC+2, Pierz wrote:Howdy cowboy. I know what you're saying. Everyone here has their drum to bang - and bang it they will! I once described the fight between John Clark and Bruno over the third person indeterminacy (step 3 or whatever it is) as being like one of those Siberian coal fires that has been burning since the start of the 20th century. I think for now it is dormant - but I'm hesitant even to mention it, since that may be all it needs to burst into flame again... It all becomes rather sterile and exhausting even to watch. Hence why I'm not here so much any more. On the other hand, we're all people who are in love with trying to understand the deep nature of things, and whatever human foibles get in the way, surely it's not the worst possible way to go to through the world. Anyway, to your main point, there is, I think, a point, beyond the intellectual game. I have no interest in defending any fortress. I believe that the western bias towards thinking in terms of things with intrinsic properties has had many unfortunate consequences. It means we tend to see people as individuals with intrinsic characters rather than parts of a system, which causes us to blame them, often enough, for their suffering. It has blinded us to critical environmental interdependencies.There is no requirement for a discursive vehicle that explains everything. Conspiracy discourses accomplish that all the time but lead nowhere. On this list the burden of proof should always lay on those that propose to explain everything.
But a discourse that specifies a pluralism that ditches the usual one vs many issues, idealism, belief, religions etc. is a candidate for breaking the gridlock of always framing what's going on politically at the level of nation states, with all the potential for ugly nativist/purist nonsense. Instead I see sexier discourses run more along the lines of specifying that pluralism, say in cultural, scientific, and biodiversity senses, is an international security and survival matter with the potential to override the traditional war zones of philosophy of science, aesthetics, even belief.Bruno can defend his 30 year old thesis here forever but its defense costs diversity, like the guy at the party who must always tear the conversation to his pet topic and cannot relate to folks on their own terms without dominating their discourse á la behold the supreme unified truth of the G*/G split and your deviation from the truth that there is no truth, over which I, the only last remaining sincere scientist preside. He could tattoo his diamonds on his face, take a photo, and just post the photo when he looses his cool with Brent, Russell, Telmo, Bruce, Phil etc. when their posts waver from the divine truth of the mechanical übersoul and save everybody time.Explanations, reality, truth etc. can be overrated because you don't need to believe in a certain ontology, truth, personal religions, views etc.
if we can agree on some higher level e.g. that things are sexy regardless of discursive origins and games: like aiming for biodiversity in oceans at a global level, with global budgets and research. More protection, efficient management, increasing biodiversity means more fish in the sea, more fish on peoples' plates, money in fishermen pockets, resilience of these resources to changing climates: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/22/6230, more potential for cleaner tourism, better dives for Russell, all of which should charge more research. The notion that we somehow have to align on what the physical or real world is to be able to proceed is innocent but devoid of pragmatic ability. Yawn on the sophomoric innocent debates running for thousands of years: the time is now.More relations, more food, better survival, sustainability, more access to more resources, more sophisticated approaches to ethics and problems of evil and law seem sexier than betting everything on a single ontological horse and policing its dance moves.
On 20 Jun 2019, at 06:36, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 6/19/2019 5:41 PM, Pierz wrote:
Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.
I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter.Gotta read Hofstadter some day. I have thought of the possibility of circular set of relationships, but then the circular system itself would be a brute fact. Infinite regress is not necessarily something "suffered", unless what we are hoping for is some intrinsic property, some solid ground somewhere.
But if you stop worrying about what exists (where "exists" is theory dependent anyway) and think or relationships not a things but as explanations, then you can have a virtuous circle of explanation, i.e. one that encompasses everything. To explain/understand something you start from something you already understand and work your way around. Empirically, that's pretty much how we learn things...you always have to start from things you understand.Absolutely, but that is the reason to not start from a circular explanation, but from a simple non circular like one, which, if Turing universal, will account for all circular processes. Then, this attribute mind to machines, and kill all reductionist conception that we can have on machines, and thus on humans too!
I don’t think that PA is a zombie, especially by its silence on the fundamental question, and then the use of G*, with the interrogation marks.Maybe they are compatible views, maybe they aren't. I remain unconvinced about qualia arising in arithmetical structures, but these are deep questions. I may be wrong.I am still not sure if what many miss here is not just some knowledge of mathematical logic.
I would be please if people tell me if they do understand that incompleteness makes all nuance of provability obligatory, and why the non definable one would not explain the qualia, including why that is necessarily felt as mysterious (which is eventually related to the fact that the first person *is* not a machine from its own point of view. Indeed it is anon definable abstract type distributed on the whole arithmetical reality: that is not a machine!(I have commented both Pierz and Telmo, here, sorry for that).BrunoTelmo.The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties.Grateful for any comments/critiques.
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More relations, more food, better survival, sustainability, more access to more resources, more sophisticated approaches to ethics and problems of evil and law seem sexier than betting everything on a single ontological horse and policing its dance moves.Sure - except we have, as a society, bet everything on a single ontological horse, and we do police its dance moves. There's one giant ontological horse in town, in case you haven't noticed, and its name is Materialism. And so I say, yes, let a thousand flowers bloom! But in order to do that, we need to kill that damn horse. Then we might begin to properly honour the true depth of meaning in this world, the subterranean connections of karma, and the stories that shape the whole thing. I like to think a relational ontology would give a lot more horses a lot more space to dance.
On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 9:44:57 PM UTC+10, PGC wrote:
On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 12:13:34 AM UTC+2, Pierz wrote:Howdy cowboy. I know what you're saying. Everyone here has their drum to bang - and bang it they will! I once described the fight between John Clark and Bruno over the third person indeterminacy (step 3 or whatever it is) as being like one of those Siberian coal fires that has been burning since the start of the 20th century. I think for now it is dormant - but I'm hesitant even to mention it, since that may be all it needs to burst into flame again... It all becomes rather sterile and exhausting even to watch. Hence why I'm not here so much any more. On the other hand, we're all people who are in love with trying to understand the deep nature of things, and whatever human foibles get in the way, surely it's not the worst possible way to go to through the world. Anyway, to your main point, there is, I think, a point, beyond the intellectual game. I have no interest in defending any fortress. I believe that the western bias towards thinking in terms of things with intrinsic properties has had many unfortunate consequences. It means we tend to see people as individuals with intrinsic characters rather than parts of a system, which causes us to blame them, often enough, for their suffering. It has blinded us to critical environmental interdependencies.There is no requirement for a discursive vehicle that explains everything. Conspiracy discourses accomplish that all the time but lead nowhere. On this list the burden of proof should always lay on those that propose to explain everything.I would never claim that the proposal I have put forward here "explains everything". It's not meant as a candidate for a theory of everything. It's meant as an antidote to reifications and reductions of all kinds.But a discourse that specifies a pluralism that ditches the usual one vs many issues, idealism, belief, religions etc. is a candidate for breaking the gridlock of always framing what's going on politically at the level of nation states, with all the potential for ugly nativist/purist nonsense. Instead I see sexier discourses run more along the lines of specifying that pluralism, say in cultural, scientific, and biodiversity senses, is an international security and survival matter with the potential to override the traditional war zones of philosophy of science, aesthetics, even belief.Bruno can defend his 30 year old thesis here forever but its defense costs diversity, like the guy at the party who must always tear the conversation to his pet topic and cannot relate to folks on their own terms without dominating their discourse á la behold the supreme unified truth of the G*/G split and your deviation from the truth that there is no truth, over which I, the only last remaining sincere scientist preside. He could tattoo his diamonds on his face, take a photo, and just post the photo when he looses his cool with Brent, Russell, Telmo, Bruce, Phil etc. when their posts waver from the divine truth of the mechanical übersoul and save everybody time.Explanations, reality, truth etc. can be overrated because you don't need to believe in a certain ontology, truth, personal religions, views etc.Yes of course. Ontologies are less important than saving the world's fish, educating our children well, getting rid of nuclear weapons etc etc, and those goals do not depend much on whether anyone believes in intrinsic properties or not. But we all gravitate to our particular fascinations, intellectual bones we just can't help gnawing at. I teach classes about how to have better relationships. I write fiction. I write code. And I ponder the deep questions of the relationship between mind, matter and mathematics - without, I think, becoming that guy at the party. In fact I almost never even mention these ideas because most people consider it weird.if we can agree on some higher level e.g. that things are sexy regardless of discursive origins and games: like aiming for biodiversity in oceans at a global level, with global budgets and research. More protection, efficient management, increasing biodiversity means more fish in the sea, more fish on peoples' plates, money in fishermen pockets, resilience of these resources to changing climates: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/22/6230, more potential for cleaner tourism, better dives for Russell, all of which should charge more research. The notion that we somehow have to align on what the physical or real world is to be able to proceed is innocent but devoid of pragmatic ability. Yawn on the sophomoric innocent debates running for thousands of years: the time is now.More relations, more food, better survival, sustainability, more access to more resources, more sophisticated approaches to ethics and problems of evil and law seem sexier than betting everything on a single ontological horse and policing its dance moves.Sure - except we have, as a society, bet everything on a single ontological horse, and we do police its dance moves. There's one giant ontological horse in town, in case you haven't noticed, and its name is Materialism. And so I say, yes, let a thousand flowers bloom! But in order to do that, we need to kill that damn horse.
On 20 Jun 2019, at 13:19, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:But there are no legs in the first place. "Legs" are from the very start just ideas in consciousness.
Also, self-reference doesn't "happen". Self-reference eternally is.
All the consciousness in the world are self-reference.
Self-reference is no-thing (in the sense that it is not a thing,
it is unformalizable)
and every-thing (all the consciousness in the world) both at the same time.
I'm not sure if you grasp this subtlety.
On Thursday, 20 June 2019 14:08:55 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:First person self-reference happens when a human say I feel pain in my leg, even if he has no leg. It refers to our own private subjective experience.
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I do miss some knowledge of mathematical logic, but again this wasn't me. I will reply to the other things soon. I apologize for being inconsistent in my participation in discussions. Life gets in the way…
Telmo.I would be please if people tell me if they do understand that incompleteness makes all nuance of provability obligatory, and why the non definable one would not explain the qualia, including why that is necessarily felt as mysterious (which is eventually related to the fact that the first person *is* not a machine from its own point of view. Indeed it is anon definable abstract type distributed on the whole arithmetical reality: that is not a machine!(I have commented both Pierz and Telmo, here, sorry for that).BrunoTelmo.The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties.Grateful for any comments/critiques.
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On 20 Jun 2019, at 13:37, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 9:16:58 PM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote:On 20 Jun 2019, at 00:13, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wednesday, June 19, 2019 at 11:05:53 PM UTC+10, PGC wrote:
On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 4:15:43 AM UTC+2, Pierz wrote:I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality.Lol then this list would be about the wrongest place in the world, right?I mean Jesus, behold all the attempts to assimilate the discourse of your post immediately! You apparently appear as fresh meat to all the members.Especially in demonstrating how well your post and thoughts would do under a better regime... ;-) What fantastic academic armor you would wear, how colors would appear to you, how Yoda would formulate syntax (btw it's "Red, I am!" you morons), how arithmetic would make love to you, how Bruno would know whether Telmo is wrong, and on top of that Deleuze too! Never mind that Deleuze and the infinitely undecided Christian consciousness soul fundamentalists on this list are as far apart as Plato is from logging on to the web in his dialogues... "You would most certainly do well on our team is the consensus here", lol.How about going full bore on avoiding fundamental discussions? As in resisting the urge to prove to ourselves... anything! Asking instead perhaps where you want the thing to go? What you want your discourse to perform? What... IT... does? Leaving the whole parental "should" and "respectability" formations, the originality vanities, historical pornography, Christian reputations, saints and names, pretense towards some real fundamental or truth thing... leaving all that crap behind and asking how can discourse perform or leave room for things at the destination?Goes without saying that if you're resourceful enough to free yourself of the prison section of your own discourse fortress, bribing yourself as the guard on the bridge, not paying mind to heights and alligators living in the moat: then you got some black ops work ahead of you. The kind of work where, if it is done pro, teams have each others' backs and words instead of whining around and bickering endlessly like everybody else... who run from themselves by lowering the bar of expectations enough to definitely not make a mistake, not take risks, to not finish things and see them through, and instead be forever amazed by their usual wishful thinking with infinitely precise and accurate explanations that fill books and waste precious time, because they need recruits for what they can't themselves believe: the road beyond the personal discourse fortress is not safe. It is wondrous, filled with infinite opportunity that satiates everything in abundance. But it's not for cowards or those that fear seeing blood, which is why the shy folks stay home and defend the thing forever. PGCHowdy cowboy. I know what you're saying. Everyone here has their drum to bang - and bang it they will! I once described the fight between John Clark and Bruno over the third person indeterminacyFirst person indeterminacy. Like in Everett, the probability (and the collapse) are first person experience. There is no third person self-reference. I just correct your typo.Apologies, yes of course I meant that,
(step 3 or whatever it is) as being like one of those Siberian coal fires that has been burning since the start of the 20th century. I think for now it is dormant - but I'm hesitant even to mention it, since that may be all it needs to burst into flame again... It all becomes rather sterile and exhausting even to watch. Hence why I'm not here so much any more.You did show complete understanding of this in your publication of the UDA. I understand you don’t follow the thread on it, but you might thing helping those who does not understand, or perhaps fake to not understand, etc.To me the idea of first person indeterminacy is pretty simple and obvious,
and is the basis for MWI - so I don't know why JC doesn't get it, or if he pretends not to as you say.
What I understand even less is why you bother to continue the debate with him over it when he's clearly entrenched in his position and will never budge.
Life's too short to spend it banging your head against a brick wall.
On the other hand, we're all people who are in love with trying to understand the deep nature of things, and whatever human foibles get in the way, surely it's not the worst possible way to go to through the world. Anyway, to your main point, there is, I think, a point, beyond the intellectual game. I have no interest in defending any fortress.Nor do I. Nobody can know if I personally believe or not in Mechanism. Defending ideas is a waste of time, I think.Isn't that what you were doing in your endless wrangle with JC though?
I believe that the western bias towards thinking in terms of things with intrinsic properties has had many unfortunate consequences. It means we tend to see people as individuals with intrinsic characters rather than parts of a system, which causes us to blame them, often enough, for their suffering. It has blinded us to critical environmental interdependencies. It has led to the dominance of an impoverished reductionist account of the world that forecloses the possibility of a plurality of other rich epistemologies. I don't harbour too many illusions of changing the world, but those are the reasons I'm firing my arrow into the maelstrom.I do want a change in the world, like making theology back into science. We see the obscurantism and the suffering which happens when we let this filed in the hand of those who exploit it for their special interest. I want to share the universal machine lesson in modesty. I want a better world for the kids.Bruno--
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On 20 Jun 2019, at 14:36, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 2:02:37 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:On 20 Jun 2019, at 06:36, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 6/19/2019 5:41 PM, Pierz wrote:
Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.
I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter.Gotta read Hofstadter some day. I have thought of the possibility of circular set of relationships, but then the circular system itself would be a brute fact. Infinite regress is not necessarily something "suffered", unless what we are hoping for is some intrinsic property, some solid ground somewhere.
But if you stop worrying about what exists (where "exists" is theory dependent anyway) and think or relationships not a things but as explanations, then you can have a virtuous circle of explanation, i.e. one that encompasses everything. To explain/understand something you start from something you already understand and work your way around. Empirically, that's pretty much how we learn things...you always have to start from things you understand.Absolutely, but that is the reason to not start from a circular explanation, but from a simple non circular like one, which, if Turing universal, will account for all circular processes. Then, this attribute mind to machines, and kill all reductionist conception that we can have on machines, and thus on humans too!You pretend that this immunizes people from evil
or that such approaches were inherently more truthful, more correct for purely aesthetic ("simple") reasons.
It's ambitious: you don't offer what may appeal to other folks and their sensibilities, you clothe it as "the real reason to not start circular”.
You confuse logic, personal truths/opinions, and taste a lot for somebody who claims to have nailed qualia and sensation. This resembles the confusion of fanatics. PGC
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On 20 Jun 2019, at 14:36, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 2:02:37 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:On 20 Jun 2019, at 06:36, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 6/19/2019 5:41 PM, Pierz wrote:
Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.
I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter.Gotta read Hofstadter some day. I have thought of the possibility of circular set of relationships, but then the circular system itself would be a brute fact. Infinite regress is not necessarily something "suffered", unless what we are hoping for is some intrinsic property, some solid ground somewhere.
But if you stop worrying about what exists (where "exists" is theory dependent anyway) and think or relationships not a things but as explanations, then you can have a virtuous circle of explanation, i.e. one that encompasses everything. To explain/understand something you start from something you already understand and work your way around. Empirically, that's pretty much how we learn things...you always have to start from things you understand.Absolutely, but that is the reason to not start from a circular explanation, but from a simple non circular like one, which, if Turing universal, will account for all circular processes. Then, this attribute mind to machines, and kill all reductionist conception that we can have on machines, and thus on humans too!You pretend that this immunizes people from evilI claim that it destroys the reductionist conception of machine, like the one hold by 19th century materialist, or more recently by Searle, and other “anti-mechanists”.
or that such approaches were inherently more truthful, more correct for purely aesthetic ("simple") reasons.On the contrary. I claim it to be more simple, but anyone can try a non mechanist theory, and for all what I *know* they might be correct. Yet, the evidences obtained today favours Mechanism.
In science, we never know what we hit the truth.
It's ambitious: you don't offer what may appeal to other folks and their sensibilities, you clothe it as "the real reason to not start circular”.I just suggest that Brent’s virtuous circle theory is coherent with a non circular ontology, like RA, and that it has to be possible, if mechanism is true.I put my hypotheses on the table, and I propose to share a reasoning. Ask any question if you feel something is not valid.
Now that does not make sense to me, but this is because your ontology is unclear for me. Your text is not quite helpful, and I might ask you to formalise your ontology and perhaps the phenomenology too, to make precise sense on this. It is unclear how you would test experimentally such statements.
Life's too short to spend it banging your head against a brick wall.
“After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.'”
(Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, quoted from Wikipedia.)
It is something like this. Self-reference keeps looking-back-at-itself and creates all kinds of FORMS of manifestation. Note that, since self-reference is unformalizable, this picture doesn't actually represent self-reference. No FORM can capture the true nature of self-reference. But it can at least give an idea of the ways in which self-reference looks-back-at-itself. If you want, all the "I am"s that you see in the picture are self-reference itself. Self-reference is all the "I am"s at the same time. It can do this because it is an unformal entity.
I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. It seems to me that with regards to materialism, we find it very difficult to escape the evolutionarily evolved, inbuilt notion of "things" and "stuff" that our brains need in order to manipulate the world. Yet QM and importantly the expected dissolution of time and space as fundamental entities in physics have made any such simple mechanistic notion of matter obsolete - what is left of matter except mathematics and some strange thing we can only call "instantiation" - the fact that things have specific values rather than (seeming to be) pure abstractions? What does a sophisticated materialist today place his or her faith in exactly? Something along the lines of the idea that the world is fundamentally describable by mathematics, impersonal and reducible to the operation of its simplest components. With regards to the last part - reductionism - that also seems to be hitting a limit in the sense that, while we have some supposed candidates for fundamental entities (whether quantum fields, branes or whatever), there is always a problem with anything considered "fundamental" - namely the old turtle stack problem. If the world is really made of any fundamental entity, then fundamentally it is made of magic - since the properties of that fundamental thing must simply be given rather than depending on some other set of relations. While physicists on the one hand continually search for such an entity, on the other they immediately reject any candidate as soon as it is found, since the question naturally arises, why this way and not that? What do these properties depend on? Furthermore, the fine tuning problem, unless it can be solved by proof that the world *has* to be the way it is – a forlorn hope it seems to me – suggests that the idea that we can explain all of reality in terms of the analysis of parts (emergent relationships) is likely to collapse – we will need to invoke a cosmological context in order to explain the behaviour of the parts. It's no wonder so many physicists hate that idea, since it runs against the deep reductionist grain. And after all, analysis of emergent relationships (the parts of a thing) is always so much easier than analysis of contextual relationships (what a thing is part of).
To get to the point then, I am considering the idea of a purely relational ontology, one in which all that exists are relationships. There are no entities with intrinsic properties, but only a web of relational properties. Entities with intrinsic properties are necessary components of any finite, bounded theory, and in fact such entities form the boundaries of the theory, the "approximations" it necessarily invokes in order to draw a line somewhere in the potentially unbounded phenomenological field. In economic theory for instance, we have “rational, self-interested” agents invoked as fundamental entities with rationality and self-interest deemed intrinsic, even though clearly such properties are, in reality, relational properties that depend on evolutionary and psychological factors, that, when analysed, reveal the inaccuracies and approximations of that theory. I am claiming that all properties imagined as intrinsic are approximations of this sort - ultimately to be revealed as derived from relations either external or internal to that entity.
Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones. I prefer the latter. (Note that I am using a definition of relational properties that includes emergent properties as relational, though the traditional philosophical use of those terms probably would not. The reason is that I am interested in what is ontologically intrinsic, not semantically intrinsic.)What would such a conception imply in the philosophy of mind? Traditionally, the “qualiophiles” have defined qualia as intrinsic properties, yet (while I am no fan of eliminativism) I think Dennett has made a strong case against this idea. Qualia appear to me to be properties of relationships between organisms and their environments. They are not fundamental, but then neither is the “stuff” of which organisms and environments are made. We simply cannot ask about fundamental properties, but must confine ourselves to the networks of relationships we find ourselves embedded in, and from which we, as observer-participants, cannot be extricated. “Third person” accounts, including physics, are abstractions from aggregations of first person accounts, and none can rise so high above the field of observation as to entirely transcend their origins in the first person. Thus there are certainly objective truths, but not Objective Truths, that is truths that are entirely unbound to any observer and which nominate the absolute properties of real objective things.
Note that the “relationalism” I am proposing does not in any way imply *relativism*, which flattens out truth claims at the level of culture. Nor does it make consciousness “primary”, or mathematics. I cannot personally reconcile the interior views (qualia, if you like, though I think that terms places an unwarranted emphasis on “what experiences are like” rather than the mere fact of experience) with a purely mathematical ontology.One obvious objection to this whole idea is the counter-intuitiveness of the idea of relationships without “things” being related. Yet I think the fault lies with intuition here. Western thinking is deeply intellectually addicted to the notion of “things”. David Mermin has interpreted QM in terms of “correlations only” – correlations without correlata as he puts it – an application of similar ideas to quantum theory. Part of the objection I think lies in the semantics of the word “relationship”, which automatically causes us to imagine two things on either side of the relation. It would be better to think in terms of a web, then, than individual, related entities. Or simply say that the related entities are themselves sets of relationships. Mathematics provides a good example of such a purely relational domain – a number exists solely by virtue of its relationships with other numbers. It has no intrinsic properties.Yet what then of the problem of specific values – the instantiation aspect of materialism? To quote Hedda Mørch: “… physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction.”We can overcome such an objection by invoking the first person perspective. Mørch credits the specific values of entities in our environment (some specific electron having this position, that momentum and so on) to some property of “being instantiated in something intrinsic”, harking back to Kant’s Ding an Sich. Yet there is an alternative way of viewing the situation. Let us imagine that each integer was conscious and able to survey its context in the field of all numbers. Take some number, let us say 7965. When number 7965 looks around, it sees the number 7964 right behind it, and the number 7966 right ahead. Trying to understand itself and the nature of its world, it starts doing arithmetic and finds that everything around it can be understood purely in terms of relational properties. Yet it says to itself, how can this be? Why do the numbers around me have the specific values they do? What “breathes fire” into those arithmetical relations to instantiate the specific world I see? Yet 7965 is wrong. It is ignoring the significance of the first-person relation that places it within a specific context that defines both it and the world it sees.
Note that I am not, like Bruno, actually suggesting that numbers are conscious. The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties.Grateful for any comments/critiques.
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On 20 Jun 2019, at 19:46, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:Self-reference not being a formal entity, it can maintain at its unformal level propositions like "1=2”.
Therefore, it can look-back-at-itself in all kinds of way without creating contradictions, so it is able to bring multiple consciousnesses into existence, all consciousnesses having as their first (formal) emergent level the level of the Self: "I am”.
On Thursday, 20 June 2019 16:58:17 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:and every-thing (all the consciousness in the world) both at the same time.Now that does not make sense to me, but this is because your ontology is unclear for me. Your text is not quite helpful, and I might ask you to formalise your ontology and perhaps the phenomenology too, to make precise sense on this. It is unclear how you would test experimentally such statements.
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On 20 Jun 2019, at 17:20, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 3:58:17 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:Now that does not make sense to me, but this is because your ontology is unclear for me. Your text is not quite helpful, and I might ask you to formalise your ontology and perhaps the phenomenology too, to make precise sense on this. It is unclear how you would test experimentally such statements.You "might" ask him. I would advise against such a move as he may reverse the question and ask you something equivalent. E.g. he may ask: Can you show me Bell's theorem in the combinator thread or using any equivalent universal machinery? Just to make precise sense of things? To see in action how to test such statements, ontologies, phenomenologies experimentally, in a formal setting of your choice, beyond retrodiction on others' work? PGCThis is done in detail in my papers (and longer test).If you are interested, I can expand this here.
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Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones. I prefer the latter.
It's not simple to convince stakeholders like universities, governments, public institutions, scientists, and private companies to divert resources towards what is still on the philosophical drawing board, if it is even tractable at all. Everybody is risk averse, we all appear to die, and the notion that some ideological conspiracy is preventing a more genuine ideal fundamental mathematicalism from establishing itself is just, as Russell would say "rather baroque". Like the AGI guys, I hope they make progress towards some benevolent general artificial intelligence, but do I understand why folks wouldn't bet their futures/resources on success? I do: we're not sure about feasibility/evidence. A chess player will always hope for the infinite win continuations but the best of them are who they are because they prepare for the worst outcomes.
And as long as this ambiguity exists, we have the usual two options: abandon what appears to be not solvable or come up with feasibility and testability criteria that are accessible with technology/mathematics/physics/philosophy available today.
Having clarity with ourselves, respecting ourselves even with a negative result is more scientific than infinities of pipe dreams, no matter how well argued and how seductive a unified ensemble theory, some purist arithmetical dream of body and mind feels to us. For even if our wishful thinking got everything right on some intuitive level, it would still be disingenuous to assume "we got it" before we had the quality of evidence that satisfies our peers and ourselves.
And while I may have been critical and harsh these past years, I have no issue with your person and/or your work. Your discourse assumes notions who's existential status/tractability remains unclear at this time.
Therefore assuming "comp" or "mechanism" to be absolutely clear and established beyond doubt is premature.
That tendency... that kind of discourse is most certainly premature, even if we applaud the passion and enthusiasm behind it, as are all the discursive attempts to ensnare folks disagreeing with such world views while posing as professors of the new most advanced fundamental science. That's almost odious (language and discourse is thankfully a bit too ambiguous), particularly when arguing to folks outside their domains of expertise, invoking arithmetic as the generous über-soul that grants certain immortality that folks are programmed since childhood to believe in.
If people want to tarnish themselves, their histories, their work, their reputations in this world with certainties, nobody in their right mind should stop them. But peer systems, and yeah I may naively kid myself that this list constitutes some loose peer discussion system, don't exist exclusively to control and bust the chops of messiahs with the truth:
they guard us from self-delusion as much as they are abused. And sometimes this is irritating and sometimes it hurts because we can't always run from what is unpleasant. Contrary to some folks however, I do not tarnish folks with "Liar, manipulator" just because I see them printing unsupported things, things I may not understand, or things that irritate me. There is enough ambiguity to say that such discourses may not always happen intentionally for various reasons, from various sides, and that they may fuel creativity, imagination, and different perspectives, being the unavoidable result of liberality in exchange and expression, if we're not as literal as fanatics pretending to themselves to be the ultimate arbiters of truth, right?Evidence aside, idealistic dreams are beautiful and working to make them tractable in scientific sense is important.
And for that, I would always support team Plato. Just the beauty. Fuck the evidence. PGC
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It is one of the reason to call it theology: we need some amount of fait to say “yes” to the doctor, and we cannot impose the Mechanist practice to others (with the inevitable complex question of how to decide for kids, etc.).
Having clarity with ourselves, respecting ourselves even with a negative result is more scientific than infinities of pipe dreams, no matter how well argued and how seductive a unified ensemble theory, some purist arithmetical dream of body and mind feels to us. For even if our wishful thinking got everything right on some intuitive level, it would still be disingenuous to assume "we got it" before we had the quality of evidence that satisfies our peers and ourselves.My work is recognise by those who read it. My opponents are non scientist, and do philosophy in the non greek sense: they claim to know that a (primitive) material world exists. My work renew with Plato’s skepticism, and illustrate that we have not yet solve the mind-body problem. It suggest also a new theory (quantum mechanics without collapse and without wave, just partially computable arithmetical sentences.
And while I may have been critical and harsh these past years, I have no issue with your person and/or your work. Your discourse assumes notions who's existential status/tractability remains unclear at this time.I assume Digital Mechanism. Then I prove that physics has to be like QM has already illustrated. QM is basically incomprehensible today, and the fault is the Aristotelian belief in (boolean or not) independent substances.
Therefore assuming "comp" or "mechanism" to be absolutely clear and established beyond doubt is premature.That will never happen. Xe cannot prove anything about “reality”, not even that there is one.We can know consciousness, but still not prove it.Many people believe that mechanism and materialism go hand in hand, where I show them incompatible, and then, thanks to QM, the experimental facts sides with mechanism, against materialism. But that can change tomorrow, or in billions years.
I do not defend the idea that Mechanism is true, only that it is incompatible with (Weak) Materialism, and that the empirical facts side with Mechanism, until now.
If people want to tarnish themselves, their histories, their work, their reputations in this world with certainties, nobody in their right mind should stop them. But peer systems, and yeah I may naively kid myself that this list constitutes some loose peer discussion system, don't exist exclusively to control and bust the chops of messiahs with the truth:When doing science, we never claim truth. We provide theories, and means to refute them. If confirmed, we can still not conclude that it is true.
The default position is that it is unclear or that we haven't advanced far enough.
So that extraordinary claim calls for extraordinary - even immaculate - sort of evidence. Who knows how the problem could be posed and what powerful machines or new mathematics we could invent? That's being open to change our mind... keep working at it.
It is one of the reason to call it theology: we need some amount of fait to say “yes” to the doctor, and we cannot impose the Mechanist practice to others (with the inevitable complex question of how to decide for kids, etc.).Expressing something linguistically - all intentions aside - always "imposes". That's the nature of language and discourse. It's up to folks to use this power responsibly or fail at survival at some point.
Having clarity with ourselves, respecting ourselves even with a negative result is more scientific than infinities of pipe dreams, no matter how well argued and how seductive a unified ensemble theory, some purist arithmetical dream of body and mind feels to us. For even if our wishful thinking got everything right on some intuitive level, it would still be disingenuous to assume "we got it" before we had the quality of evidence that satisfies our peers and ourselves.My work is recognise by those who read it. My opponents are non scientist, and do philosophy in the non greek sense: they claim to know that a (primitive) material world exists. My work renew with Plato’s skepticism, and illustrate that we have not yet solve the mind-body problem. It suggest also a new theory (quantum mechanics without collapse and without wave, just partially computable arithmetical sentences.Ok but if it remains intractable then why all the quantum ambition? Is it like a Freudian quantum envy? Like my quantum and proofs are longer, more elaborate, and precise than yours? ;-)
And while I may have been critical and harsh these past years, I have no issue with your person and/or your work. Your discourse assumes notions who's existential status/tractability remains unclear at this time.I assume Digital Mechanism. Then I prove that physics has to be like QM has already illustrated. QM is basically incomprehensible today, and the fault is the Aristotelian belief in (boolean or not) independent substances.I'm not sure for above reasons: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence
and since that isn't obtainable now believing in independent substances cannot be considered a crime or sin against science.
Therefore assuming "comp" or "mechanism" to be absolutely clear and established beyond doubt is premature.That will never happen. Xe cannot prove anything about “reality”, not even that there is one.We can know consciousness, but still not prove it.Many people believe that mechanism and materialism go hand in hand, where I show them incompatible, and then, thanks to QM, the experimental facts sides with mechanism, against materialism. But that can change tomorrow, or in billions years.This is where your discourse has merit: where, how, why those facts side/support mechanism and our ability or lack thereof to test the thing. The nested boxes of Bell you came up with with Eric Vandenbussche: are we sure that Telmo or Russell can't get their hands on a machine powerful enough to muscle. Why not try? Telmo's Biceps are most certainly huge by now, right? Perhaps with a powerful enough machines today and Goldblatt tattooed on his biceps, the world or the machine will see the light! lol
I do not defend the idea that Mechanism is true, only that it is incompatible with (Weak) Materialism, and that the empirical facts side with Mechanism, until now.Again: that burden of proof has to be extraordinary or the metaphysics has to be extraordinary. Before that happens, we're speculating in mathematical or philosophy of science realms.
If people want to tarnish themselves, their histories, their work, their reputations in this world with certainties, nobody in their right mind should stop them. But peer systems, and yeah I may naively kid myself that this list constitutes some loose peer discussion system, don't exist exclusively to control and bust the chops of messiahs with the truth:When doing science, we never claim truth. We provide theories, and means to refute them. If confirmed, we can still not conclude that it is true.Reasonable confidence, pinning down what that is, finding consensus, would already get this discussion out of the realm of speculation.
And a negative result, that there is no silver bullet up to some point in time is a valuable contribution too. But I will keep my practical belief in water as a magical primitive resource that replenishes me with elan vital life force. Same for good food. And if you don't believe it's ontologically primitive, then that just means you lack evidence of how well I cook. Proof? Nobody I've cooked for has denied this fundamental metaphysical proof, including myself, which is why I have to follow Telmo on the pursuit for magical biceps, abs, etc. otherwise my expansion just progresses horizontally. And that is incompatible with platonism. PGC
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On 24 Jun 2019, at 13:15, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:The burden of proof always falls to those with extraordinary claims. No other scientists lay claim to the origins of reality.That was the subject debate by Plato and Aristotle.Aristotle made the extraordinary claim: there is a physical universe made of primary matter, which was the false obvious fact precisely doubted by Plato. There are never been any proof of this, nor even evidence. We, 20th century human tends to take Aristotle theology for granted, but that is only an habit, I would say.
The default position is that it is unclear or that we haven't advanced far enough.I would say that we have regressed a lot on this domain, since theology has been separated from science.
So that extraordinary claim calls for extraordinary - even immaculate - sort of evidence. Who knows how the problem could be posed and what powerful machines or new mathematics we could invent? That's being open to change our mind... keep working at it.The best way to be able to change our mind, is by making theory precise enough so that we can test it, and up to now, the evidences back up Mechanism.
It is one of the reason to call it theology: we need some amount of fait to say “yes” to the doctor, and we cannot impose the Mechanist practice to others (with the inevitable complex question of how to decide for kids, etc.).Expressing something linguistically - all intentions aside - always "imposes". That's the nature of language and discourse. It's up to folks to use this power responsibly or fail at survival at some point.That is why I insist so much that Mechanism is an hypothesis (aka belief, axioms, postulate). That is why I am almost boring by repeating all the time: If mechanism is true then …
And while I may have been critical and harsh these past years, I have no issue with your person and/or your work. Your discourse assumes notions who's existential status/tractability remains unclear at this time.I assume Digital Mechanism. Then I prove that physics has to be like QM has already illustrated. QM is basically incomprehensible today, and the fault is the Aristotelian belief in (boolean or not) independent substances.I'm not sure for above reasons: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidenceBut extraordinary is subjective. The most extraordinary claim is that a physical universe exist primitively. There are zero reason to believe this. No one doubt that there is a physical reality, but why should it be primitive?
In science, we simply try to avoid committing oneself ontologically. No physicists do that. But physicalist do it, and they use often Mechanism implicitly, to avoid the mind-body problem. But once you grasp that 2+2=4 entails the existence of all computations, even without mechanism, that gives a reason to doubt the necessity of assuming a primitively physical universe.
and since that isn't obtainable now believing in independent substances cannot be considered a crime or sin against science.Of course. It is only an inconsistent belief for those who are willing to say “yes” to a digitalist brain surgeon.
Therefore assuming "comp" or "mechanism" to be absolutely clear and established beyond doubt is premature.That will never happen. Xe cannot prove anything about “reality”, not even that there is one.We can know consciousness, but still not prove it.Many people believe that mechanism and materialism go hand in hand, where I show them incompatible, and then, thanks to QM, the experimental facts sides with mechanism, against materialism. But that can change tomorrow, or in billions years.This is where your discourse has merit: where, how, why those facts side/support mechanism and our ability or lack thereof to test the thing. The nested boxes of Bell you came up with with Eric Vandenbussche: are we sure that Telmo or Russell can't get their hands on a machine powerful enough to muscle. Why not try? Telmo's Biceps are most certainly huge by now, right? Perhaps with a powerful enough machines today and Goldblatt tattooed on his biceps, the world or the machine will see the light! lolEric Vandenbuscche was indeed working on how to optimise G*. But it is advanced mathematical logic, computer science, etc. Not that easy. Eric died and was unable to accomplish this work.
I do not defend the idea that Mechanism is true, only that it is incompatible with (Weak) Materialism, and that the empirical facts side with Mechanism, until now.Again: that burden of proof has to be extraordinary or the metaphysics has to be extraordinary. Before that happens, we're speculating in mathematical or philosophy of science realms.I don’t speculate.
Most people believe in mechanism today (even some who claim the contrary. I use Mechanism in the weaker sense that most of its use.And many people are just wrong on this, as they believe that mechanism is compatible with materialism. That has been proved impossible, which makes some dogmatic materialist angry.
On 24 Jun 2019, at 16:15, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Monday, June 24, 2019 at 3:04:55 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:On 24 Jun 2019, at 13:15, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:The burden of proof always falls to those with extraordinary claims. No other scientists lay claim to the origins of reality.That was the subject debate by Plato and Aristotle.Aristotle made the extraordinary claim: there is a physical universe made of primary matter, which was the false obvious fact precisely doubted by Plato. There are never been any proof of this, nor even evidence. We, 20th century human tends to take Aristotle theology for granted, but that is only an habit, I would say.Any claim regarding the nature or origin of reality is extraordinary. Setting up straw men living in the past does not accomplish much.
The default position is that it is unclear or that we haven't advanced far enough.I would say that we have regressed a lot on this domain, since theology has been separated from science.Then move to ancient Greece and see if their doctors and medicines inspire more confidence and good faith! lol
So that extraordinary claim calls for extraordinary - even immaculate - sort of evidence. Who knows how the problem could be posed and what powerful machines or new mathematics we could invent? That's being open to change our mind... keep working at it.The best way to be able to change our mind, is by making theory precise enough so that we can test it, and up to now, the evidences back up Mechanism.Without precision on said testability, it remains speculative philosophy though.
It is one of the reason to call it theology: we need some amount of fait to say “yes” to the doctor, and we cannot impose the Mechanist practice to others (with the inevitable complex question of how to decide for kids, etc.).Expressing something linguistically - all intentions aside - always "imposes". That's the nature of language and discourse. It's up to folks to use this power responsibly or fail at survival at some point.That is why I insist so much that Mechanism is an hypothesis (aka belief, axioms, postulate). That is why I am almost boring by repeating all the time: If mechanism is true then …
Repeating that endlessly will not change a thing.
And while I may have been critical and harsh these past years, I have no issue with your person and/or your work. Your discourse assumes notions who's existential status/tractability remains unclear at this time.I assume Digital Mechanism. Then I prove that physics has to be like QM has already illustrated. QM is basically incomprehensible today, and the fault is the Aristotelian belief in (boolean or not) independent substances.I'm not sure for above reasons: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidenceBut extraordinary is subjective. The most extraordinary claim is that a physical universe exist primitively. There are zero reason to believe this. No one doubt that there is a physical reality, but why should it be primitive?Nobody is claiming that it should! You need folks to claim something they don't, to set up your discourse. But without means to test...In science, we simply try to avoid committing oneself ontologically. No physicists do that. But physicalist do it, and they use often Mechanism implicitly, to avoid the mind-body problem. But once you grasp that 2+2=4 entails the existence of all computations, even without mechanism, that gives a reason to doubt the necessity of assuming a primitively physical universe.Every court of law dealing with some appeal already doubts some primitively assumed account of facts, status of materials, agents disagreeing about platonic abstractions such as money etc. People already choose platonism on their own. Take family bonds or love as other examples. It may be incompatible propositionally, but this hard split between materialists and immaterialists is something I find myself less and less convinced by, as the discussions progress over the years.and since that isn't obtainable now believing in independent substances cannot be considered a crime or sin against science.Of course. It is only an inconsistent belief for those who are willing to say “yes” to a digitalist brain surgeon.If mechanism were itself testable.
Therefore assuming "comp" or "mechanism" to be absolutely clear and established beyond doubt is premature.That will never happen. Xe cannot prove anything about “reality”, not even that there is one.We can know consciousness, but still not prove it.Many people believe that mechanism and materialism go hand in hand, where I show them incompatible, and then, thanks to QM, the experimental facts sides with mechanism, against materialism. But that can change tomorrow, or in billions years.This is where your discourse has merit: where, how, why those facts side/support mechanism and our ability or lack thereof to test the thing. The nested boxes of Bell you came up with with Eric Vandenbussche: are we sure that Telmo or Russell can't get their hands on a machine powerful enough to muscle. Why not try? Telmo's Biceps are most certainly huge by now, right? Perhaps with a powerful enough machines today and Goldblatt tattooed on his biceps, the world or the machine will see the light! lolEric Vandenbuscche was indeed working on how to optimise G*. But it is advanced mathematical logic, computer science, etc. Not that easy. Eric died and was unable to accomplish this work.That work should be made accessible to any parties interested. And if we're organized enough there should be accessible paths for beginners! Otherwise it's a fail pedagogically and any possible good work is done in vain. And if there is no route to testability that is accessible then those cards should be on the table.
I do not defend the idea that Mechanism is true, only that it is incompatible with (Weak) Materialism, and that the empirical facts side with Mechanism, until now.Again: that burden of proof has to be extraordinary or the metaphysics has to be extraordinary. Before that happens, we're speculating in mathematical or philosophy of science realms.I don’t speculate.Without more concrete tests, that point remains debatable.Most people believe in mechanism today (even some who claim the contrary. I use Mechanism in the weaker sense that most of its use.And many people are just wrong on this, as they believe that mechanism is compatible with materialism. That has been proved impossible, which makes some dogmatic materialist angry.I'm interested in the non-dogmatic court and management/separation of powers with the capacity to approach abolishing crimes and abuse, because diverse possibility and distribution of power is more fun than deserts and dogmas of monotonous force with leaders/authorities holier than the rest of us. Crimes seem an excuse to fuel our toxic addiction to authority figures, prisons, paramilitary police and intelligence force etc. coupled with laziness towards the problem of evil and enforcement questions. I don't see why we principally have the need for any of those things, which is why I'm interested in less specified pluralisms and conflicts of say benevolence towards all life with empathy, care for individuals, security etc. If some ontology can address those kinds of problems, then I'm interested beyond testability. PGC
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