Barry’s mike drop.

[gregsharp73]

I’m not certain what was said.  I’ll check the recording when it comes out.  But what I thought I heard from Barry’s talk today was a little startling to me.  He seemed to “mike drop” on the point that there will never be an ontology for modern physics.

My next thought was (and maybe it’s just the accent), “is this the modern incarnation of British Empiricism?  And is he such a hardened empiricist (and yet ironically an ontologist of all things) that he would set the boundary for acceptable ontological entities at the mathematical concepts that have some correspondence to something “real”?”

That the relation of theories of modern physics to the useful mathematical objects they describe is somehow of a different order of abstraction than the theories of classical physics to the physical objects they described and that this represents the crossing of some line that means that ontologies can no longer can apply in the same sense?

From the conclusion of Jobst and Barry’s paper I realized we are perhaps not so lost and that I was hearing an overstatement of the case being made:

“Therefore, post-classical physics cannot be ontologically represented using common-sense based ontologies, but requires an ontology of mathematics which gives us a possibility of thinking about the ideal entities of(?) it(s?) postulates.”

-Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, “Ontologies of common sense, physics and mathematics” (2023)

So there is at least a possibility of thinking about modern physics through an ontology of mathematics - which Barry fortunately assured us is a pretty settled thing thanks to Cantor’s Paradise.

So, last night I just happened to be sticking my nose into Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as he was sticking his finger in the chest of his favorite British Empiricists.  This is surely why the thought regarding Barry above occurred to me, but I actually think Kant would have something to add to today’s discussion.

“The celebrated Locke, for want of due reflection on these points, and because he met with pure conceptions of the understanding in experience sought also to deduce them from experience, and yet proceeded so inconsequently as to attempt, with their aid, to arrive at cognitions which lie far beyond the limits of all experience.  David Hume perceived that, to render this possible, it was necessary that the conceptions should have an a priori origin.  But as he could not explain how it was possible that conceptions which are not connected with each other in the understanding must nevertheless be thought as necessarily connected in the object – and it never occurred to him that the understanding itself might, perhaps, by means of these conceptions, be the author of the experience in which its objects were presented to it – he was forced to drive these conceptions from experience, that is, from a subjective necessity arising from repeated association of experiences erroneously considered to be objective – in one word, from habit.  But he proceeded with perfect consequence and declared it to be impossible, with such conceptions and the principles arising from them, to overstep the limits of experience. The empirical derivation, however, which both of these philosophers attributed to these conceptions, cannot possible be reconciled with the fact that we do possess scientific a priori cognitions, namely, those of pure mathematics and general physics.”

-The Critique of Pure Reason, First Division, Second Part, First Division, Book I, Chapter II, Section I

If Immanuel Kant had attended today’s session, this is the earful I think we could have expected out of him.  And even though, Kant was clearly unfamiliar with quantum mechanics, I wonder if it would have changed his position at all?

So Barry and Jobst, did physics’ relationship of its theories to the world really change in the modern era, or do you just struggle with the reality of transcendent, a priori mathematical truths as being amenable to meaningful ontological analysis because of your British Empiricism J ? (Jobst has an easy out here)

[Gary Berg-Cross]

Greg,

Does your use of Kant's argument come down to the last sentence in the quote?

>The empirical derivation, however, which both of these philosophers attributed to these conceptions, cannot possible be reconciled with the fact that we do possess scientific a priori cognitions, namely, those of pure mathematics and general physics.”

One might ask if there is human a priori knowledge via say evolution for ideas such as spaee and time if Kant would argue for any immediately relevant a priori knowledge of what we now talk about via models in quantum physics or  the notion of space-tin in relativity.

Gary Berg-Cross 

Potomac, MD

240-426-0770

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[Barry Smith]

Not guilty of British empiricism. But not a Kantian either. This is because  Kant had a much too narrow account of the synthetic a priori. 

The story in the arxiv paper is still correct:

post-classical physics cannot be ontologically represented using common-sense based ontologies, but requires an ontology of mathematics which gives us a possibility of thinking about the ideal entities it (post-classical physics) postulates.

We are working on that. But it is hard, not least because where there is no understanding, there is also no agreement. Ontology is at best controversial.

BS

On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 7:56 PM gregsharp73 <gregs...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[John F Sowa]

Gary,

There is evidence of  a priori knowledge in the genome.  It's knowledge that is learned by the species and encoded in genes rather than neurons:  The total genome of any species has an enormous amount of information.   And very little of that information has been decoded.

Gary B-C:  One might ask if there is human a priori knowledge via say evolution for ideas such as space and time if Kant would argue for any immediately relevant a priori knowledge of what we now talk about via models in quantum physics or the notion of space-time in relativity.

Every species from bacteria on up inherits a huge amount of knowledge about space, time, edible items, dangerous items, and species-specific methods for dealing with them.  

For example, just consider honey bees.  The methods for finding honey-bearing flowers and bringing back both honey and pollen are extremely complex, and there is no way that a newly born bee could have learned that method by experience or by teaching from other bees.  There are also complex methods by which a returning bee communicates the distance, direction, and amount of honey by a dance back in the hive.

There is also evidence of learning how to communicate better.   Bees that forage outside the hive acquire larger amounts of brain tissue that is devoted to memory of spatial distance and direction than their fellow bees that work inside the hive.

Furthermore, the regions of a honeybee's brain for spatial info are analogous to regions of the hippocampus in mammals.  Guess what?  Humans and squirrels who need to remember large amounts of spatial info also acquire enlarged regions in the hippocampus. 

For humans, this fact was discovered by observing London taxi drivers who had to memorize a huge amount of information about streets and locations.  They had significantly larger regions in their hippocampus.  But now that taxi drivers use computer displays for that information, there is no enlargement of the hippocampus.

For squirrels that bury nuts in autumn and must remember the locations for several months, their hippocampus grows larger in autumn and decreases in size in the spring.

Re quantum mechanics and relativity:  A critical aspect of QM computation is the need for reasoning about probabilities.  That would imply that humans would need to have inherited reasoning methods that can deal with probabilities.   But such reasoning methods would be useful for many non-QM reasoning as well.  Reasoning about space time is also essential, and it's hard to distinguish QM aspects from the many other factors involved.

John

[gregsharp73]

Well said Barry. But I would not dismiss Kant on account of his “too narrow account of the synthetic a priori” without looking again, and perhaps understanding in a new way, what it was that he had to say.  Perhaps on the other side of that there is less controversy for ontology around these matters.

This brings up Gary’s insightful probing. He put his finger on the words that indeed struck me in drawing the comparison.  But what comes before this is illuminating as well.  The “fact that we do possess scientific a priori cognitions, namely, those of pure mathematics and general physics” must be unpacked.  First we must acknowledge that Kant would have had different definitions of “pure mathematics and general physics” than we do.  It would be unfair to hoist set theory, quantum physics, relativity or even evolution on these words but Kant was at least, presumably, including his thoughts about the schemata of space and time which he addresses later in the Critique.  But what strikes me here is that the “a priori cognitions” he is referring to are his systems of categories and judgements.  And, in the earlier parts of the longer quote above, he is allowing his categories and judgements to wrestle with the intuition/experience that is the starting point for the empiricists.  This is where the conceptual and the physical interface, and he is putting forward a theory in his categories and judgements of how exactly that interface might work.  From that broad perspective, Kant does seem to be making a response to Gary’s question and this is related (at least from my perspective) to the nature of the challenge Barry and Jobst identify in the presumed absence of universals in many areas of contemporary physics.  So we might reframe the question slightly to ask how far does Kant’s a priori system take us into describing a framework that might be capable of describing or even explaining quantum mechanics, relativity or other topics?  I believe it may go much farther than we might expect, and I will try to explain why I think that might be the case.

In another thread, I had challenged this forum to label a diagram of patterns.  I presented that in response to John’s comments about the relations between common logic and natural language, and what the nature of those relations might be if we only approached it from the perspective of pure patterns, unencumbered by language.  I believe that Kant’s categories and judgements actually suffice as two attempts to answer this challenge.  The 12 judgements are his proposed a priori cognitions and the experiential “intuitions” are his 12 categories.  We should note that he felt his categories were an improvement on Aristotle’s categories and that his judgements were original with him.  In that case, we can also register an answer to the challenge on the part of Aristotle: how would he have mapped his categories to patterns?

Here is a proposed Aristotelian response to the challenge, his “Categories” in ADEPT LION patterns:

I unpack these here: https://patternslanguage.com/articles/f/aristotelian-categories 

Here is a proposed Kantian a prior “logical function of the understanding in judgements” in ADEPT LION patterns:

I unpack these here: https://patternslanguage.com/articles/f/kantian-judgements

Here is a proposed Kantian “pure conceptions of the understanding, or categories” in ADEPT LION patterns:

I unpack these here: https://patternslanguage.com/articles/f/kantian-categories

And while we're at it let’s add another one of John's favorite philosophers.  Here is Peirce's Three trichotomies of sings as another solution to the challenge: 

I unpack these here: https://patternslanguage.com/articles/f/pattern-logic-series-part-v-the-appearance-of-peircian-semiotic

Note that there is some commonality and some differences looking across these categorical systems.  In short, Aristotle's categories are material, Kant's categories are conceptual/empirical, Kant's categories are conceptual/transcendental(the a priori dependencies of the former) and Peirce's Trichotomies are semiotic rather than ontological but they all are using the same system of patterns according to this mapping challenge.

Now for the weirdness of “post-classical physics”.  There happens to exists a third set of interpretable patterns which have no value assignment (they can have symbolic assignment) and which none of the aforementioned systems addresses despite the fact that they tangentially anticipate its existence, at least from completing an iterative exploration of patterns within ADEPT LION.  If, as we’ve seen in the diagrams, Aristotle’s Categories and Kant’s Categories enumerate phenomenological entities of determinate value, and Kant’s Judgements enumerate conceptual entities of indeterminate value, then this final set of patterns covers entities of non-determinate value.  

I would suggest that these patterns of non-determinate value present a means of understanding entities like the ontological voids which Barry and Jobst raised in their paper.  Interestingly, the ADEPT LION interpretation results for the non-determinate are not the same as for the indeterminate.  It was long my belief that they were interchangeable but when I got to the point of formalizing the interpretive process in ADEPT LION, I was surprised to see what changed.  The non-determinate expressions actually opened up in a way, primarily through the appearance of an operator that I have called non-limitation.

If we take the relation of “in” as an analogy for the operation of limitation in ADEPT LION, we would say that concept A “is in” concept B is analogous to portion A “is limited by” extent B. 

• 1.       Picture an Euler diagram with an oval A completely bound by another oval B.  A is in B.
• 2.       Another legitimate depiction of limitation would be the diagram in which ovals A and B are the same.  Again, A is in B.

These two arrangements of the two ovals would exhaust the visual representations of a limitation. 

So what does visualizing non-limitation look like?  There are four potential diagrams that satisfy the operation of non-limitation:

1. 1.       Oval B is completely bound by oval A, but not equal to it (that would be a limitation). Now B is in A, but A is not in B.
2. 2.       Ovals A and B overlap, with some commonality that is a proper part of each of them. A is not in B.
3. 3.       Ovals A and B are disjoint, with no commonality, but they do not exhaust the universe. A is not in B.
4. 4.       Ovals A and B are disjoint, and they exhaust the universe (mutual exclusion). A is not in B.

We can see now that limitation is ambiguous, but non-limitation is even more ambiguous.  And what do we get when we enumerate the non-determinate entities interpreted through this operation of non-limitation? I don't yet know.  But my suspicion is that they may be addressing the ontological voids of which modern physics treats.

Greg

[Gary Berg-Cross]

John,

 A few quick thoughts in response to your " Every species from bacteria on up inherits a huge amount of knowledge about space, time, edible items, dangerous items, and species-specific methods for dealing with them. "

Which was in response to my :

"Every species from bacteria on up inherits a huge amount of knowledge about space, time, edible items, dangerous items, and species-specific methods for dealing with them. 

One might ask if there is human a priori knowledge via say evolution for ideas such as space and time if Kant would argue for any immediately relevant a priori knowledge of what we now talk about via models in quantum physics or the notion of space-time in relativity."

Certainly evolution prepares organisms to survive in the world which includes navigating space and having some sense of time. Systems biology among other things gives us a bit more of a dynamic idea of some of things going on here. Even simple autonomous agents are able to distinguish and select external entities by virtue of a simple chemistry that hosts and affords cognitions like symbols and signs. (but also hypotheses and models not inherited) One conceptualization uses the idea of a processing system. Evolution has developed what some call innate “programmed in” software operating on inherited hardware as the result of natural selection. But natural selection also allows learning via systems such as self-organizing maps that optimize the results of try and error behaviors (such as your bee example).

This system's view is one that combines an innate view and an empirical/experiential one where “becoming” is as much or more meaningful than just “innate/natural being”. But innate infrastructure provides affordances.  Self-organizing maps are perhaps just one simple example of reflective loops that provide/afford higher sign-creating activity and eventually symbolic thinking that allows building useful models of perceived reality.

And certainly we have inherited reasoning methods that can deal with probabilities. Probability seems to provide a rich framework for vision and motor control, as well as higher order functions for learning, language processing, and reasoning (Tenenbaum, Joshua B., et al. "How to grow a mind: Statistics, structure, and abstraction." science 331.6022 (2011): 1279-1285.) So we can say that an agent learns what is likely to happen if they do X. But I would hazard the argument that we can distinguish QM probabilistic aspects, say quantum uncertainty as more recently developed cognitive tools developed as part of collective, social and scientific experiences building models. As D’Ariano says “Quantum Mechanics (QM) is a very special probabilistic theory...After more than a century from its birth, Quantum Mechanics (QM) remains mysterious. (D’Ariano, Giacomo Mauro. "Probabilistic theories: what is special about quantum mechanics." Philosophy of quantum information and entanglement 85 (2010): 11.)

Gary Berg-Cross 

Potomac, MD

240-426-0770

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[John F Sowa]

Gary,

The knowledge encoded in genes is not specified in language or in what we might call an ontology.  But it's encoded in methods of interacting with the world and the kinds of things and events we encounter.  The knowledge we encode in language (verbal or gestural) is invented by us to communicate, and that involves many level of encoding in genes for language, for communication, and for interacting with other humans and beasts.   An infant is born with genes that can enable such learning, but there are many, many kinds of things that must be learned befor that ability can be activated.

GBC:  One might ask if there is human a priori knowledge via say evolution for ideas such as space and time if Kant would argue for any immediately relevant a priori knowledge of what we now talk about via models in quantum physics or the notion of space-time in relativity."

Ideas are not encoded in genes.   A new-born infant has the ability to register sensations and the ability to move around.  By trial and error, it discovers which actions have favorable results, which ones are painful, and which ones get milk, warmth, and good feelings.  

There is a huge amount of pre-verbal learning in the first few months.   The first interactions are with a warm soft milk source.  After a while, baby learns that the milk source comes and goes, and other similar things don't provide milk.    That is the first step in distinguishing mama from daddy.  

GBC:   But I would hazard the argument that we can distinguish QM probabilistic aspects, say quantum uncertainty, as more recently developed cognitive tools developed as part of collective, social and scientific experiences building models. 

Baby has no idea about QM vs Newton.  By age 3, the child is a very long way from being a baby, but he or she is nowhere near the level that could distinguish a Newtonian world from a QM world.

I would guess that a child that could appreciate the story of Alice in Wonderland would be able to distinguish QM effects from Newtonian effects.   But that ability would have to be learned from some kind of unusual experience, not intuited from everyday experience.

And the words for describing it would be "book learning" or something taught by a special kind of teacher.

Basic point:   There is a huge jump from learning a language to learning the use the technical terms for grammar and semantics.   Another huge step:  learning to deal with things that  behave differently from one time to another and learning that some behaviors involve an abstract notion of probability.

GBC:  After more than a century from its birth, Quantum Mechanics (QM) remains mysterious.

Yes, but people have learned how to use it for better AND worse.

John

 

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From: "Gary Berg-Cross" <gberg...@gmail.com>