Woops, I mean't indeterminism!

It isn't compatible with determinism, I don't think. I just meant that it is possibly meaningful for the name to point out that the mechanism isn't indeterministic, separating it from alternative indeterministic interpretations.

Not sure I agree that "superdeterminism" is a type of determinism. It is just a mechanism for Bell violations which has a silly name because of how far-out it is. The use of "determinism" in the name is meaningful in the sense that many people do think of quantum mechanics as random, so pointing out that the mechanism is deterministic is informative - however it seems incredulously deterministic, "superdeterministic" if you will. But I think thats just rhetoric.

Aha I wasn't responding to the OP - I was just puttung down thoughts. I think most people probably don't disagree with the OP at its core, but some people emphasize the points more than others.

There is no scientific evidence for dualism - verifiable separability of mental stuff and physical stuff. It is also not metaphysically parsimonious and borderline incoherent. So which is it? Mental stuff or physical stuff?

Scientific theories, or any knowledge, or even any concepts about either experience or topics like "being" and ontology cannot tell us about "stuff" or what "stuff" is independent of limited perspectives that we don't usually identify with the "stuff" we are talking about - apart from experiences. Obviously we have direct aquaintance with experience; regardless of limitions of our concepts about experience, it is hard to deny that we experience. But I would argue concepts of experience play a similar role in naturalistic scientific knowledge as any other scientific concept as does concepts of "being". And ultimately there is no self-sustaining foundation for these things independent of enactive roles within perspective.

What actually is experience metaphysically? There is no criteria for what is and what is not an experience. There is no criteria to give that question the meaning that we want it to either - what does "metaphysical" mean? Just another concept we use, and (albeit) within experience too. But again, any coherent metaphysical generalization of our direct aquaintance is impossible.

To say the world is made of experience in the same way as houses are made of bricks also doesn't avoid the hard combination problem. The strong emergence involved in stacking layers of experience on top of each other.

Talk of any fundamental metaphysics is on some deeper level a enactive game as any other knowledge - it will always be found lacking in the sense that when we talk about fundamental metaphysics we are wanting something deeper than say the mathematical descriptions that make science superficially effective. Obviously no strict dividing line between science and metaphysics (or philosophy of science I guess) though. Best we can do is have concepts that make things coherent. Does saying the world is made of experience make things coherent for me? No, because experience is something deeply tied to my personal perspective which I may share with others in virtue of being organisms.

What I can say is my experience is some coarse-grained structure in the world undergirded by finer structures.

I have been thinking all scientific paradigms are united by notions of causality.

Steven Frank:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=5393718917133646068&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=16974184348648837789&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

We cannot access anything else but causal relations between "things" on different scales.

If I make the assumption of equating my aquaintance with experience as ontology (whatever this means), then it suggests reality should be conceptualized as scale-free.

Reality is just causal structures all the way down (and this is akin to scientific statement with all the limitations of our physical theories that cannot tell us what the physical is - theories of reality cannot tell us the nature of reality intrinsically):

e.g.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33286288/

We cannot arbitrarily make more fundamental some causal structures over others even if they arise from coarse-graining over others. We can only at most make the distinction that finer-grained structures carry more information about reality. Insofar as causality is like communication, that is how we may relate it to minds - information and statistical physics are two sides of the same coin. There is a weak emergence aspect of information in the sense of scaffolding causal structures on top of each other. But also a strong emergence aspect in information when we look at how structures can detect or distinguish other causal structures in a "brute" way - almost like with our own phenomenal experiences.

I cannot tell you anything else about reality other than causal structures existing that can in some sense be construed as communicating information - what does "causal structure" mean? Again there is no non-circular foundation to this concept. Maybe we can talk about cause in terms of non-redundant temporal structure? These concepts bottom out in spatio-temporal structure.

But this talk about causal structure is not distinct from how when you dissect physics, what is fundamental is things like energy and work - which are just ways of quantifying how things change, or their propensity to do so - i.e. causality.

Is there a "bottom" to reality? What would that actually mean. Don't know. Maybe cannot know.

On the otherhand, does it make sense to say experience is what it is like to be some kind of causal structures in reality? Maybe. Could we then go on to say that all structures are just experience? Maybe. But the vacuousness of this makes it almost like a personal choice.

My personal choice is not to because it brings so many other connotations that complicate the naturalistic picture of reality, sometimes not making as much sense to me. If experience is another way of just talking about information (personal to, accessible to me) then the most fundamental notion in all this is something like causality. Reality is not made of blobs of "stuff" arranged or stacked, but causal structures instead. Maybe reality should be seen in terms of blobs of "stuff". But we cannot talk about intrinsic "stuff" in a way that does justice to the word "intrinsic". We can talk about causal structure, information...

... Insofar that causal structures relate things that are sensible to us... we don't need to think about it in terms of cause as some "intrinsic" things... things too may be talked about or given meaning in terms of relations to other things.... relations all the way down another way of saying causes all the way down? Or perhaps structure.

A kind of structuralism. I have generally pushed back from Ontic structural realism in the past. I think my thoughts are closest to Otavio Bueno's empirical structuralism I think he calls it. (Or perhaps structural empiricism). Imo ontic structuralism is kind of empty or trivial -

[perhaps anti-realism too insofar that I think questions of realism may be subject to similar indeterminacy as scientific theories themselves - debates about theories being right or wrong, how right or wrong (or which bits) and in what sense right and wrong mean (e.g. Newtonian physics could be right or true in the sense of describing some of our data approximately, it could be wrong if you take it as the general principles of the universe).

Can we justify theories being correct in contexts of pluralism and empirical adequacy? Is there even a discrete dividing line between theories insofar that you can deconstruct, change them, throw bits out, retain others. Theories can be right (or useful) in some ways, wrong in others, often idealized. The significance may depend on perspective - as said before once, scientific anti-realists and realists often accept the same facts about science in terms of underdeterminism and losses with theory change.]

- while we only access structure through enactive perspectives. I guess it in some ways boils down to what you think "right" means. If you have a loose or indeterminate standard for what "correct" or "true" means then theories may seem more "real" compared to someone in which "true" requires stronger standards.

But ultimately, many theories are idealized and go on to be rejected - its always an open question how long things will be rejected or accepted for. At the end of the day, the story I use about scientific theories is an enactive one, truth too. So there is a strange loop aspect - debating about whether theories are true when you have already decided that uses of truth is nothing more than an enactive process in a real world of structure. One could try and clear this up with a simpler picture of separating subjective from objective, real from non-real - but a clearer picture comes at the cost of greater idealization. And here we see there is an element of personal preference in selecting meta-theoretical views where you trade off clarity and precision or complexity and accuracy in the context of model selection. But I think regardless of meta-theoretic views of what "truth" or "correctness" means I always endorse notions of knowledge fundamentally in terms of enaction, idealization and agnosticism of future acceptance (to various degrees of subjective certainty depending on what we are talking about - and even then, graded certainty has an arbitrary relation to acceptance or rejection in the sense that someone may have higher standards of certainty to which they accept something compared to others - belief and justification always have some kins of normative aspect in general: i.e. its not strictly about whether something is true or false but whether I ought to believe it and why. Induction may not be the best argument in general, deflating enactivism better so).

Pictures of the world typically do not end up being testable or falsifiable. They are constructed after the fact to fit to the facts themselves as we intuitively see fit.

It's to yield a sense of what certain scientific philosophers have called 'understanding'. Not to be identified with knowledge or any truth-aptness.

If all you cared about was concordance with observations then science would devolve into bare observational statements and mathematical modeling. Nothing much else that wouldn't just be considered besides the observational facts would be highly speculative. I.E. philosophical or creative speculation — substantivalism

Its very simple. Science is about solving problems, regardless of whether you want to talk about it in terms of "truth", "understanding", "mathematical predictions". All these things feature. It is multi-faceted.

I don't believe quantum interpretation is necessarily an unsolvable problem, or at least one where people can't find consensus as they do in other scientific areas.

Those other fields typically aren't complete black boxes. — substantivalism

But some probably were at one point.

I can give a picture of a virus, end of story. I can't of an electron without a tremendous amount of speculative holistic open-ended philosophical interpretation to even analyze the output of said detector. — substantivalism

Quantum interpretation is the way it is because there are many problems. A good way of gauging a good interpretation is how it plugs those gaps. I don't think an interpretation needs to necessarily be validated in terms of empirical predictions that others don't make. It just needs to plug conceptual gaps others don't plug satisfactorily. I think those gaps are pluggable in principle.

There doesn't have to be a consensus because it makes no sense to ask which is 'right' or 'wrong'. Nor does it make sense to ask which is 'closer' to how it really is. — substantivalism

I don't understand what you mean. We are talking about science here. The whole point is to construct a picture if the world that makes sense and fits to what we observe. Quantum interpretation is as fair game as any other part of science or knowledge in general. Are you going to make this comment to other fields of science? I doubt it.

There are already ways of doing so. — substantivalism

Well yes but I mean in terms of a consensus on some kind of interpretation which makes sense to people within a scientific context.

Seems, from my perspective, that part of Michael's idiosyncratic views is the idea that the word "truth" cannot be about something in the same way that a word like "gold" is about something. To me, "truth" is about "what is the case", regardless of your broader metaphysics, ontologies or inclinations toward realism or anti-realism. The same way "gold" is about something regardless of metaphysics, ontologies or inclinations toward realism or anti-realism. "Truth" is an abstract word, but so is "gold" and every other word we use to refer or point out things. No concepts come without abstraction. Nothing we talk about is completely devoid of abstract conceptual baggage that makes it meaningful. If a concept like a "proposition" requires some kind of mind-independent abstract ontology, I don't see why that isn't the case for concepts like "rock". Sure, it's harder to point at a "proposition" but our uses of a word "proposition" is induced by statistical structures of events that actually happen or we at least experience; no doubt, from reflecting upon our own word-use inextricably related to non-word events. Similarly can be said for "economies" or "money". From a neuroscientific or cognitive perspective do these concepts need mind-independent abstract objects to explain their use? No, ofcourse not. Is the use of these concepts that much different from pointing out rocks or chairs? No. Fundamentally both reflect our cognitive and neurobiological ability to pick out statistical structures in the world, in our sensory inputs, in our experiences; some are just much more complicated than others.

The use of words like "truth" or "propositions" or "numbers" as about things in the same sense as "gold" is about things is absolutely coherent imo. Abstraction is by degree, without a determinate or discrete dividing line.

And again, this is just the story of how we use words in relation to the world, and navigate the world - veridically or not, whether or not there are big caveats like: indeterminacy; underdetermination; inherent fuzzyness; perspectival aspects or even isolation due to our biology; vicious or strange circularities in our ability to articulate information about the world, etc. Nothing, "concrete" or "abstract" is exempt. We can have a Quinean jungle where "gavagai" is fundamentally indeterminate and we practise linguistic and epistemic behaviors "blindly", but the scientific story about what is going on is a story about brains bi-directionally interacting with the wider world, responding to it and the world responding back. You can argue about what exactly it means for words to be about something or whether their effectiveness requires or even is "veridicality" - or simply pragmatism by blind Darwin-esque selectionism. I would say this is fundamentally indeterminate - you can plausibly gerrymander or redefine either side in various different ways and the differences may be ones of degree - and all words, all concepts, share a core of this fundamental indeterminacy, fuzzyness, abstraction in the same sense when they are used and related to - or occur in relation to - other parts of experience, including the word about itself ( a word that seems to be about or related to the mappings we make that pick things out in experience). But again, at the same time they all played out in this bi-directional interaction between brains - and the underlying states that cause their dynamics - and what brains cannot see beyond their sensory inputs. At least, that is what makes sense in the idealized scientific story. There must be some statistical coupling in some sense (not excluding the general messyness that might come with talking about it: e.g. indeterminacy, fuzzyness, pluralistic models) to what you might call "events" or "things" in the objective world, regardless of deeper examinations about what that "objectivity" actually means, cannot mean or simply alludes to (also statistical coupling between events in ones own brain). And statistical coupling can be scale-free, with many levels of abstraction. Coupling doesn't have to be unique in some sense either.

[Or maybe our seemings about statistical couplings. Models we want to assert in terms of seeming pragmatic effectiveness. And that could be wrong. But what do we mean when they assert they are true? ... Not strictly determinate.]

So there is at least a fuzzy aboutness; we may debate about veridicality, etc. But nonetheless we can also agree amongst ourselves about the aboutness of words and concepts in a practical sense as we sample the world in real-time.

Part of the paradox is that trivial and non-trivial indeterminacies coexists with a sense in which our lives cannot be made coherent without a world that is actually out there. Another part is that there are no inherent foundations; there is no ultimate story that all others sit on infallibly, just as the scientific one isn't infallible - you can just argue about its virtues based on what people agree or disagree about. But then its our nature as epistemic beings to have stories to make the world we live in coherent, stories that seem to acceptably reflect or communicate what we see.

And I think we can coherently distinguish talk about "truth" and how we coherently use the word, from "meta-truth" - questioning whether that has some objective meaning, analyzing and deconstructing it where the illusions of essentialism are removed. In the same sense you can debate about how to use a certain word in everyday life and then question whether what it actually means for that word to have meaning. Similar to how in ethics, you can have a moral anti-realist say "murder is bad" and really means it, but then you can separate this from the meta-ethical stance of deconstructing "murder is bad" in a kind of anti-realist sense in terms of indeterminacy or other things. You can say the same for the realist though; their claims that "murder is bad" is also different from their claim that "murder is objectively bad" because ethics and meta-ethics are two different topics talking about normative statements in different ways or frameworks, different levels of abstraction or analysis, different assumptions that are added or forgotten. But again, for me, all concepts stand on a similar foundation, whether truth, everyday words, science, ethics, normativity, belief or justification.

Of course we have nothing else to work with, but for me the point is that there is no reason to think that we must be able to make the microworld phenomena intelligible to us in ways we can visualize. — Janus

Not sure I agree. Someone might only think that because there is no consensus on quantum interpretation, but that doesn't necessarily mean a reasonable one cannot be found eventually and ways of visualizing it.

I actually should add that my picture makes it look less weird than it is.

Non-local correlations of particles also depend on measurement settings at the point the particle is measured, which are chosen by the experimenter or by some other random event.

Superdeterminism would also mean not only that a common cause is affecting particle behavior but also the choice of measurement settings. If you chose the settings then that common cause is making you pick those settings. If you chose settings with a dice roll then the common cause is causing the outcome of the dice roll. If you chose settings by looking at the light patterns of quasars very far away and that originate from billions of years ago (because of how long it takes light to reach us) then the common cause is causing the behavior of those quasars billions of years ago.

Bohmian mechanics just means simple communication between particles faster than light given the measurement settings.

In superdeterminism, you get non-local correlations because a common cause in the past affecting both particles through chains of local events tracing back to that common cause, and so don't require faster than light communication.

In Bohm, you don't need a common cause in the past, particles communicate faster than light across space directly.

Yes, definitely true; but I guess the exact ways people say the microworld is strange depense on their interpretation of quantun mechanics.

What do you mean?

They just mean surreal as not typically compatible with classicality.

Yeah I couldn’t even understand that much. Like I said you guys overestimate what the knowledge of most people is on this. — Darkneos

Maybe! Who knows, maybr someone else will!

They are actually closely related. The kind of non-realism Gnomon expresses about position and momentum is the same kind of non-realism as in the non-realism / non-locality issue. I actually think the dichotomy of realism vs locality is a bit of a pointless dichotomy because you cannot really choose the non-realism option without an ontology that basically still looks as non-local as the non-local option... for the intents and purposes of commonsense anyway. You would [still] have to talk about non-separable states that exist over space which I would say is about as bizarre as the non-local option.

Edit: [ ]

Just realized I forgot to link paper showing the actual hydrodynamic pilot-wave model:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=9134117041907264858&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=16295625758829094935&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1



Its long but its not written at a particularly difficult level I would say. I explain what I mean by stochastic interpretation immediately after anyways. Its realist in the sense that it has particles with real, definite properties all the time.

I have no idea. I am not familar at all with those philosophies.

You may wanna check out this:



(and in the description it gives titled links to particular sections of the interview)

Jacob Barandes presents a completely realist interpretation of quantum mechanics. Its one version of what you would call a stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The basic idea is that particles move along trajectories where at any time they are always in a definite position. The caveat is that their motion is kind of random. Closest analogy in everyday experience is probably something like a dust particle bobbing about in a glass of water, the water molecules pushing it one direction then another. This analogy isn't necessarily precisely how we should view quantum behavior but it displays within it precisely what I mean when I say that the particle always has a definite position but is being subject to random motion making it change directions.

It is important to note that in this view, the wavefunction is not real, it is just a proxy for a statistical description of particle behavior. The particle and the wavefunction in this interpretation are completely separate things: the wavefunction spreads about in space and evolves deterministically, the particle is hidden underneath this description (but is compatible with Bell non-locality) and is always in a definite point of space like the dust particle in water and it moves randomly. The wavefunction is entirely a formal object that carries information about particle statistics when you repeat an experiment many, many times - it is a predictive tool like how probabilities in statistics are not physical objects but predictive tools that you apply to things. This is important to emphasize because in many interpretations, people automatically assume the particle and wavefunction are the same thing and so they make arguments against a stochastic interpretation under this kind of assumption. From my experience, it is really difficult for people to stop thinking in this kind of way and entertain the alternative. You can still use collapse in this theory but the implication is that it isn't a real event, it is just something a statistician could do if they wanted to describe behaviors of a statistical system when assuming some measurement event definitely occurs or has occurred - effectively this is just equivalent to throwing some of the data away.

Similar interpretations to Barandes' one (e.g. the main other one is called Nelsonian stochsstic mechanics) have existed literally since quantum mechanics was invented and what is nice about them is they are all - including the one by Barandes in the video - justified by and constructed in math. They prove that just starting from assumptions about particles randomly moving about, you can derive all quantum behavior. These interpretations have never been popular though. Probably partly because the mathematical formulation of these things can seem convoluted (Barandes' formulation appears to be a simpler statement of these kinds of interpretations though). They have had some unanswered questions too (though most major questions seem to have been directly addressed in the last couple years). Maybe partly they are unpopular because the news was never spread that well. Maybe because of bias and a preconception that these kinds models shouldn't be able to work (but they do). Maybe because some people just like quantum mechanics to be mysterious.

In Barandes formulation, it seems to be suggested that entanglement is due to memory effects, i.e. there is a local interaction which causes a correlation and the correlation is remembered over time and space... it is non-local in the formal sense invented by Bell and Bell's theorem, but the non-locality is due to memory and not direct communication over space - I give an example of this kind of thing in a paper further down. Because it is simpler, Barandes' formulation doesn't really describe why quantum mechanics would have this weird behavior at all - it is agnostic about that - it just describes some formal conditions. The Nelsonian stochastic mechanics is more complicated but imo it gives a bit more depth to exactly what is causing quantum behavior. But it doesn't strictly explain the whole hog either.

Interestingly, there are classical models (called hydrodynmic pilot-wave models) and experiments which seem to show quantum-like behaviors. They are very different - physically and descriptively - from what stochastic interpretations say, and they are very far from perfect models of quantum behavior; but they actually broadly share some mechanisms that seem to be proposed as explaining quantum mechanics in both the Barandes and Nelsonian models. Barandes says that particle behavior display a particular breed of behavior called non-markovianity (behavior with memory). The most straightforward interpretation of the Nelsonian math is that particles get their behavior from interacting with some kind of background field in a particular kind of way. Both of these suggestions seem to be present in a loose way in the hydrodynamic pilot-wave model (though not exactly in the same way given that the classical model is only an analogy with a very different description to the stochastic interpretations of quantum mechanics). The model is basically an oil droplet (i.e. the particle) bouncing on a bath (i.e. analogous to the Nelsonian background).

I can only see the abstract of this following paper but what it appears to be describing is actually very similar to the Barandes description of entanglement but in the same hydrodynamic droplet-bath model that's been mentioned:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=11815274735010691195&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

An interaction causes droplet correlations that are remembered even after the droplets are isolated.

The interesting coincidence between these hydrodynamic models and stochastic interpretations suggests that this may be a possible way of looking at how quantum behavior occurs... in a way that is completely realistic and classical. Obviously the connection between the bath and the stochastic interpetations isn't proven in any sense, the analogy imperfect, and the suggested mechanism is still not very intuitive imo - so I am not necessarily expecting people to see this and immediately find it convincing in any way. But to me, this is my leading avenue or direction of enquiry about what quantum mechanics actually means. I also imagine that the idea of particles moving in and interacting with some background that fills all of space may seem weird too but something like this already exists in quantum field theory (stochastic interpretation versions also exist of quantum field theory) where empty-space (i.e. the vacuum) always has energy fluctuations going on and these can actually interact with regular objects. So its not really adding anything weirder than what is already in quantum theory; it may not be adding anything at all if it were to turn out that the stochastic interpretation background and quantum vacuum fluctuations could be shown to be inextricably connected in some way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fluctuation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

I have to emphasize though that Barandes hasn't explicitly acknowledged the background explanation because it isn't explicitly part of his model - it is only something that has been inferred in the other Nelsonian theory. I think he is just agnostic about why quantum behavior is like it is; but the main takeaway is that in proving that quantum behavior follows from certain assumptions about stochastic behavior (e.g. particles moving randomly), you no longer have to view quantum mechanics in a way that isn't realistic, even if you don't know exactly why it does what it does. According to the Barandes model (the Nelsonian one too), you can in principle simulate all quantum mechanics with particles always in definite positions even when they are not being measured or observed.

Which I have personal doubts about since doesn't science posit an external reality to study. — Darkneos

Its actually what the math seems to say (at least to probably most people) but at the same time, this is very strongly interpretation dependent so not everyone sees it that way.

Truth is an adjective applied to a sentence but it brings unintuitive consequences if you don't further dissect what a sentence is - that there is sentence as object and what the sentence is about. They are independent in the same way that observer and observation should be independent in order to avoid paradoxes like the liar paradox. When we say that a sentence is true, we are saying that what the sentence is about is true, what the sentence is about is the case. It is meaningless to say if a sentence is true if it is not about something - when we say a sentence is true, we are actually talking about what the sentence is about. This is doing all the work.

when we say that the sentence "it is raining" is false we are saying that the sentence is false, we're not saying that the rain is false. — Michael

We are saying that that the existence of rain in some spatiotemporal context is not the case. We are saying what the sentence is about is not the case.

A sentence not existing (the object which we would add the phrase "is true" to) doesn't mean that what the sentence is about doesn't exist.

Other adjectives or adverbs are also about things: "big" is about bigness, "gold" is about goldness. Regular adjectives are applied to words or phrases but we are talking about properties that belong to what those words and phrases are about, not the words and phrases themselves. If I remove all words from the world that are names of living organisms, that doesn't mean that there is nothing with the property of being "alive" - "alive" is a property of what the names of animals are about, not the names themselves.

I think "truth" is also about something. Truth is what is the case. We can distinguish truth and "true" "sentences" as objects - in the sense of squiggles and symbols and sounds. Removing the latter doesn't change the former... or you have to make an explicit distinction between them otherwise you endup implying the same word "truth" in contradictory ways I think. Something which you seem to try to remedy in the painting example.

So if there are no people there is nothing which has the property of being either true or false. But assuming that idealism/phenomenalism isn't the case, there is still gold and rain and so on. — Michael

You seem to think that (1) and (2) are true only if some truth-bearer existed 10 million years ago. — Michael

The truth (pun intended) is that truth-bearers didn't exist 10 million years ago (but dinosaurs did), and it is only the sentences we use now (about the past) that are either true or false. — Michael

Well clearly the issue is you have a different definition of truth we just agree on otherwise you wouldn't be repeating what seems like contradictions. You think that truth is just something you tag onto sentences. Well fine, you can do that; it just doesn't make sense to me.

My point is simple: truth-bearers are linguistic entities, and so if there is no language there are no truth-bearers and so nothing has the property of being either true or false. — Michael

I would say though that it is not the sentence itself as an object that is true or false - it is not the sequence of symbols that is somehow true. It is what the sentence is about that is true or is the case.

If you say:

It is is true that "it is raining"

Then you are saying whatever "it is raining" is about is true. When we say a sentence is true, we are talking about what the sentence is about, not the sentence itself as an object. If there is a world where sentences don't exist, it doesn't mean that what those sentences would be about wouldn't be true or the case in their absence. And I feel like this is how people think about it intuitively.

I'm not saying that the existence of rain depends on language — Michael

I think though, by your analysis, truth is implicitly embedded in here because truth is just talking about whatever is the case. And so: when you say there are no things with the property of being true or false, but you can nonetheless formulate a sentence about the existence of rain being true - it looks strange.

And this again just comes back to my earlier point that your approach leads to these kinds of paradoxes where you end up asserting that something would not be true and then immediately after asserting that it exists. It just doesn't seem coherent to me.

I’m not. There’s just nothing special going on when I say that the sentence “it is raining” is written in English, contains three words, is true, and is my preferred example case when doing philosophy.

There is no need to read into this some deeper metaphysics. — Michael

I agree; but imo that doesn't mean it is necessary to gerrymander your concepts to the point that they confound!

Something that is true is something that is the case. That something is the case is not just a property of a sentence. It is referring to things in the world.

Just say "it is raining".

Phrases like "it is the case that" and "it is true that" don't add anything to the above; they're vacuous — Michael

But you use them all the time and its very hard not to. You even tried replacing "truth" with "correct description" even though "correct" is more or less just a synonym for "true".

I think it may be fair to say that truth is vacuous in the sense that we use words like "truth" or "correct" just to assert something. But then what we are left with is our attempts at referring to what is the case based on our encounters with the world. If "truth" adds nothing on top, then clearly all that it is doing is servicing the same attempts at referring to what is the case.

I'll just have to accept this is what you find perhaps intuitive while I do not.

My point is that talk of truths without sentences is a category error — Michael

Truth is about what is the case. The fact you need sentences to assert what is the case is incidental to what actually is the case in the world. A true sentence is one where - what the sentence is about actually is the case.

I want nothing to do with mind-independent abstract objects à la Platonism or mathematical realism. — Michael

For me, there is no dividing line between abstract objects like numbers and abstract objects like sentences or chairs or points. All our concepts are abstract in some sense given our cognitive abilities to attend or engage with some distinctions and ignore others. For me, if all concepts we use to engage with the world are in some sense abstract, there is no point in trying to gerrymander things to do away with some concepts and not others, with bizarre consequences. From the perspective of the brain there is no fundamental distinction between different concepts because they are constructed and used in the same way by the same set of neural machinery. Sure, there is a meaningful distinction between numbers and chairs in the sense I am inclined to say one is more physical and the other is not; but there are a huge number of these abstract distinctions you can possibly make about anything. The physical is like anything else a concept which is difficult to define but can nonetheless abstract from our sensory information caused by the world.

If there are no sentences then there are no correct descriptions of the world. But there's still rain. — Michael

The use of the phrase "correct description" may seem to remedy the situation somewhat from what I see but I am not sure it replaces "truth" or gives a better version. Surely, "correct" is just a synonym for "true" and so implicitly "truth" has been sneaked in there anyway. And you obviously cannot just replace "correct" with "correct description" because it regresses. So the remedy isn't an all-encompassingly general one.

If descriptive sentences are about things, then I think I can say that truth is plausibly about things too... truth is about what is the case. And so it seems a bit deeper than just an add-on adjective to a sentence.

There's no such thing as the truth; there's only the truth of a sentence, so this remark doesn't make much sense.

What you should say is that the non-existence of a sentence doesn't affect the existence of rain. — Michael

It does make sense given that I described what I mean to say something is true in the same sentence.

It also seems to follow from what I said that: to say a sentence is true is to say that what [that] sentence is about is the case (i.e. exists). To say something is true is to say that it is the case. Seems to me that what truth is actually about is the existence of things, where things are the case (Analogous to how the word "gold" is about gold). The fact we need sentences to assert that is incidental. If an observer sees something and asserts that it has the property of being the case, what is the case is a property of the observation / thing that is seen, not the assertion itself. How they say that it is the case or the very fact that they say it is incidental to the thing that has the property and was observed.

Edit: additional [that]

This notion that the existence of rain either entails or requires that something has the property of being true is misguided. — Michael

Yes, it just requires the property of rain existing. To say something is true simply asserts this, and the non-existence of a sentence doesn't affect the truth, only the existence of the thing the sentence is asserting the existence of.

For me, I think truth possibly would make sense as more like a condition that asserts what those sentences are about, which then maybe eases the problem I said in my post after I acknowledge that you already said you don't fail to distinguish them.

Abstractions might be conceptually useful, but given that they lead some to Platonism I'd rather just not give them much significant thought. — Michael

For me, I would say everything we talk about is an abstraction on some level. Sentences are abstractions, "conceptually useful" is an abstraction, thought is an abstraction. The beauty of the complexity of the human brain is that we can use these abstract concepts even when it is not always straightforward what they actually mean in some clear, concrete, determinate sense.

A truth-maker can exist even if a truth-bearer doesn't, but if a truth-bearer doesn't exist then nothing exists that has the property of being either true (correct/accurate) or false (incorrect/inaccurate). — Michael

The way you've been presenting this thought completely fails to acknowledge the fact that you can distinguish between the existence or non-existence of a sentence and what that sentence is about. If you cannot do that then I don't think it can be a complete or good characterization from my perspective because this is something i can do very intuitively, regardless of what i think about truth or objectivity. My intuition is that your analysis is making a similar kind of error that moral realists sometimes make when they confuse normative statements with meta-ethical statements, in the sense that your account obfuscates the distinction between a sentence and what a sentence is about. Obviously, I have seen you say that you don't do that. But in order to do that you have to use sentences that says gold exists in some world even though you have said that sentences about gold existing cannot exist and so gold doesnt exist in that world.. and that makes no sense to me. This kind of paradoxical thing wouldn't happen if you acknowledge the distinction - you need to distinguish truth and meta-truth. This seems rather general; we must always make the distinction between "objects" and talk "about-objects" otherwise we get paradoxes - trivially if a sentence about an object becomes the object it is talking about, you get paradoxes - e.g. I am lying. And this doesn't have to be direct, e.g. if you have networks of statements that are about each other recursively.

That ability includes, but is not limited to, language. When we gaze out at the external world, or back at the geologically ancient world, we are looking with and through that conceptual apparatus to understand and interpret what we see. That is the sense in which the mountains (or objects generally) are not mind independent. They're mind-independent in an empirical sense, but not in a philosophical sense. — Wayfarer

Yes, I see what you mean though I may have put it a different way.

The only part I don't agree with is the assertion that the things are not also both mind dependent and mind-independent in the philosophical sense, depending on perspective. Whether we think of them as being one or the other just depends on the perspective we take. Why should we think there to be but one philosophical perspective and sense? — Janus

Yes, I sympathize with a pluralistic way of looking at things in comparable kinds of ways. And ofcourse, the enactive / embodied viewpoints.

I think I could plausibly talk about this involving minds and ask a similar question. Not as an argument but I am just interested how you will answer...

What if me and you both existed 8 million years ago and we saw these mountains but had no language. Incapable of it. But now we are: did the mountains exist 8 million years ago?

The existence of rain or a cloudless sky might determine whether the sentence "it is raining" is correct/true or incorrect/false, but it is nonetheless the case that it is the sentence that is correct/true or incorrect/false. — Michael

Yes, exactly. So the fact that language didn't exist 8 million years ago doesn't affect the fact that mountains existed 8 million years ago, because the what is the case does not depend on the incidental existence or non-existence of language. The existence of mountains determines whether such sentences are correct, not whether a sentence exists.

So it is appropriate to describe the sentence "it is raining" as being correct/true/incorrect/false but a category error to describe either the rain or the cloudless sky as being correct/true/incorrect/false. — Michael

Sure, but when you say a sentence is correct, you are asserting something about the thing that that sentence is about.

'if "there is gold in those hills" does not exist (1) then "there is no gold in those hills(2)".'

Does not seem correct if (1) is about the fact that the specific sentence doesn't exist but if (2) is about what that sentence is about. I don't really see how this exact sentence could be seen in any other way.

But surely, truth isn't really about the sentence itself, its about what the sentence is about. Changing the sentence or making it disappear doesn't change truth values, changing things in the world is what changes truth values. Even if a sentence doesn't exist, what that sentence would be about exists / does not exist.

At the same time, I'm not even sure what you mean by "a sentence exists". If people decides to burn all the words and stop talking for 5 minutes, would all sentences stop existing for 5 minutes? Does a sentence exist only if uttered? Does a sentence only exist when someone is reading and interpreting it directly?

I keep it simple — Michael

Sure, and nothing there is different from what I implied in the post I said. You make the distinction between the sentence "I am 25 years old" and what that sentence is about, the 25 or 26 year old. What the sentence is about doesn't depend on language.

There's certainly no need to bring up mind-independent abstract objects that exist even if language doesn't. — Michael

I don't think you necessarily have to be determinate on ontologies here for the definition to still be valid or at least intelligible. And I think it is intuitively reasonable to talk about the difference between a sentence in terms of words or sounds, and what the sentence is about, a proposition then being "the type of states that declarative sentences denote".

Edit:

I realize that I am thinking about states in terms of literally what sentences are about, so it doesn't make total sense to identify propositions with them strictly.

I see further down the wikipedia page I see the definition:

"propositions are often modeled as functions which map a possible world to a truth value."

I guess then propositions are more about the mapping between states that sentences are about and truth values??

Or maybe propositions are the mappings between sentences and what sentences are about? The communication about something??

But I don't think that changes much of what I intended because it seems to me that the truth value of what sentences are about does not depend on the existence of language. Maybe the sentence existing does but then the sentence is just sounds or scribbles. Whether 'what a sentence is about' is true doesn't seem to depend on language based on my intuitive notions.

Similarly it doesn't seem to me that [the truth of what "there is gold on these hills" is about] {} entails the existence of the sentence "there is gold on these hills".

So what I mean by saying that the proposition "there is gold on these hills" is true is that what the sentence "there is gold on these" is about is true. And that shouldn't depend on language; but when I say it, it effectively comes out to:

"There is gold on these hills is true iff there is gold on these hills."

Maybe that makes more sense, I dunno.

Edit: deleted the word doesn't where {} now is.

[ ] just to enclose this phrase

I keep it simple — Michael

Sure, and nothing there is different from what I implied in the post I said. You make the distinction between the sentence "I am 25 years old" and what that sentence is about, the 25 or 26 year old. What the sentence is about doesn't depend on language.

There's certainly no need to bring up mind-independent abstract objects that exist even if language doesn't. — Michael

I don't think you necessarily have to be determinate on ontologies here for the definition to still be valid or at least intelligible. And I think it is intuitively reasonable to talk about the difference between a sentence in terms of words or sounds, and what the sentence is about, a proposition then being "the type of states that declarative sentences denote".

Fair enough. When I was thinking of object, I wasn't thinking about it in any way that I think would be different from what you are saying is a state.

There is gold and there is the sentence "gold exists". Why add some third thing? Having a sentence, a proposition, and gold seems superflous. — Michael

Not sure there is a third thing, based on the wikipedia definition. There are sentences and objects (states). Propositions are arguably also a special case of states insofar as they are states that sentences denote. Sentences themselves are arguably a special case of states too insofar that utterances, written words (and generalizations of those things) are states in the world.

the existence of propositions depends on the existence of language — Michael

I dunno, when I look up the definition of "proposition" on wikipedia, and it says that they are "the type of object that declarative sentences denote", then it is not clear to me that "the type of object that declarative sentences denote" should depend on the existence of language. Is that a faulty analysis?

The Timeless Wave. I don't think it is really 'mystical' although it does consider the idea of what is outside space-time.) — Wayfarer

I would actually say this article is more or less exactly what was meant by mystical in the video.

(This is also represented by constructive empiricism, as advocated by Bas Van Fraassen — Wayfarer

I'm not sure I would agree unless there is some further record of Van Fraassen talking about this topic. But I feel like the fact that his view takes the meaning of unobservable scientific theories in a semantically literal sense is not really in line with the kind of view you're saying. I think what you say is more similar to logical positivists who are more stringent that meaning in scientific theories is tied to observability.

that much the same can be said in modern physics, which doesn't tell us about what nature is, but only how nature responds to our methods of questioning. — Wayfarer

Highly recommend you watch this video:

https://youtu.be/7oWip00iXbo?si=bxEOt_Iau2tJmQa7

You may want to start at the clip from 01:30:00 to 01:33:40 to get an idea about what the video is about.

1. Deny the existence of mind-independent objects and/or

2. We cannot grasp the features of external objects which happen to be mind-independent and/or

3. We cannot justify our knowledge of mind-independent objects — Sirius

Imo, I want to remove 1. because I don't see how you can do this in a way which [doesn't] either suggests you hold a view like idealism or is just something that has been expressed by 2.

Regarding 2.? I think the problem is that realists and anti-realists will often assent to the same "facts" about reality or at least acknowledge them. The issue is that they have different notions of what it means to "grasp" which in a way is kind of subjective. I feel like realists may actually agree with an anti-realists analysis of how science works but they just consider this enough to "grasp". Then again, when asked what "grasp" means or related terms like "ontology you just get into dead ends imo that compromise whether "real" has any kind of useful, distinctive meaning beyond use in contexts which are just that... context-dependent, dependent on one's personal use of language and perception and envisioning. Ofcourse, the Davidsonian/Banno-ian does not consider this a barrier to realism as long as you can seemingly, coherently say things are 'true' or 'false'. I have sympathy for this because I have no problem with people saying things are 'true' or 'false' or making similar assertions, including myself. I just don't think such things have a determinate, unambiguous meaning when you look at it in higher order terms. Its not clear what people mean when they say things are 'true' or 'false' or whatever in a way which is[n't] context-dependent or relies on prior assumptions or relies on other people just agreeing or understanding you, which doesn't necessarily imply anything else about reality imo, [at least not in a metaphysically fundamental sense, albeit perhaps still in the sense that you can agree where Paris is and behave coherently in a physical world because of that. If you want to be extremely blunt and coarse and commonsensical you might then say that we agree that Paris has an objective physical existence].

Regarding 3. ? Similarly, I have no idea what justify means and I don't think anyone can give me a good version of that which anymore overcomes the drawbacks of my analysis in my preceding paragraph. Similarly to before, realists and anti-realists all agree on things like problems of induction and that people often are wrong.

I think realists then rely on the idea that someday we may come across unique "correct" descriptions of reality. But I don't see how a realist can overcome the fact that pluralist descriptions are ubiquitious. It then comes down to whether you think empirical adequacy can be identified with truth. Then again, what 'truth' means rears its head again. Our use of 'truth' is nothing over its use like a 'tool' in how biological organisms use words, communicate, behave. Exactly the same can be said for all facets of theories, ontologies, sciences, folk knowledge.

The whole thing is under-self-specified like some strange loop. [Easy example of this when I make a statement about what truth is... I am clearly acting within the paradigm to making a statement about the paradigm, which risks contradiction given I am trying to deflate 'something is the case' but using it at the same time. But I don't see any conflict since I am acknowledging that when I say these statements, they are about 'use'... but I did it again! Smells like Munchausen trilemma! - correction and to clarify, the Munchausen trilemma reference maybe isn't the best one. I think the strange loop analogy better describes what I meant there maybe. But there is something trilemma-ish about it. The fact that I end up using the same 'something is the case' just clarifies that it really is something one just uses almost automatically if anything, without explicit foundations. And this was always the case! So by clarifying the deflation is not to change something about the way one is using words]

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