t seems to me that there is an important distinction between riding a bike and playing chess. I don't need to know anything about another person's language game to understand that a person confidently riding a bike has developed (at least) some intuitive understanding of the physics involved in riding a bike.

Can you show an example of bike riding that I will find unintelligible? — wonderer1

When I say the word ‘bike’ you already have a system of practices in mind, involving use of pedals, steering, balance, etc. Of course, your idea of bike doesn’t have to include all of those. Your bike may be electric and not have pedals, it may have three wheels and not require balance. But your practical understanding of bike will probably be general enough that you can participate with no problem in a language game in which criteria of successful bike-riding can be agreed on. But what if you live in a place where the language game ‘bike’ involved an entirely different system of relations, where bikes were flying, floating or digging devices? For you, someone justifying they know how to ride a bike by pedaling something with wheels on a street would be unintelligible as bike-riding.

One justifies that one knows how to ride a bike by getting on the bike and riding it. One justifies that one understands "here is a hand" by waving one's hand about. They agree that the "meanings" of words are seen in what we do with them, not in an explication. — Banno

These situations show that one is performing a practice in a particular way, and one’s understanding is this particular way of ‘knowing how’. These performances dont preclude the possibility that they might be performed in an entirely different way by some other culture, to produce entirely different meanings. If the game ‘chess’ is performed according to an entirely different set of rules in that other culture, then my playing chess according to my rules will not justify to that culture my claim that I know how to play chess. It will justify that I indeed know how to do something, but not what they understand as chess. What we do with words forms a system, and how that system of practices is organized as a language game determines its meaning.

If you and I inherit the same system of practices, then within that same system I may be able to justify that I know how to do something simply by doing it, which is what Wittgenstein means by certainty, that the performance simply IS the justification. Within this shared system of practices called riding a bike, I may make a mistake, and this possibility of error within the shared system is what Wittgenstein calls knowing. Justification, verification, being able to be wrong all are possible within a shared system, but are not applicable when we compare two different language games. If you and I are making use of different language games, then performances like riding a bike , playing chess or waving my hand which appear justified to me will not to you. They will appear unintelligible, even if you call my performance ‘incorrect’.

How does habituation work if a person doesn't have any innate sense of leftness vs rightness? I'm asking. — frank

It wouldn’t be an innate sense so much as one that arises through coordination among different sense modalities and their relation to our actions with our surrounds. We construct a body image and perceptual map out of schemes of action. Out of these coordinations, a relatively stable marker would have to emerge that would allow us to consistently distinguish left from right. For instance, perhaps that marker is tied to an asymmetry of kinesthetic feedback between one side of the body and the other. Also, most are either exclusively left or right-handed. The memory of which hand one uses to play the guitar or throw a ball can be used to distinguish left from right. I think this issue can be compared with that of the development of perfect pitch and other such accomplishments of coordination of perceptual input. One thing I can say definitely is that it has nothing to do with the Euclidean geometry of space.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230112-why-some-people-cant-tell-left-from-right#

Rather than getting hung up on statements like "here is a hand", I think it would have been more effective to follow the example of Zen Master Lin-chi and hold out his hand so the skeptic could see it and then smack him — Fooloso4

The tough love school of enlightenment :clap:

Witt's hinge propositions function the same ( as Kant).. They too are necessary conditions and outside experience. Their examples might be different, but their functional roles are about the same. They both propose preconditions that are cognitive frameworks for knowledge and experience to take place — schopenhauer1

For Witt they are not just cognitive but affective and valuative. Most importantly, for Kant innate categories make possible normative experiences but they themselves are non-normative and non-natural, whereas for Witt they are both normative and natural in that they consist of practices in the world. Witt’s practice-based concept of use unifies categories and experience via the same norm-generating processes, whereas Kant maintains a split between what is normative and non-normative, what is rational and irrational, what is categorical and what is not.

Are Wittgenstein’s notions of a language game, form of life and hinge proposition indebted to Kant’s categories? Of course, but one can say the same of the philosophies of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Heidegger Nietzsche and most other philosophers who have come since Kant. As has been said, in a certain respect we are all Kantians now. But it is one thing to show the indebtedness of modern philosophies to Kant, and quite another to claim that thinkers like Wittgenstein have reached “conclusions which Kant already implied with his ideas of "synthetic a priori truths"”.

His having a hand is a commitment to a set of practices? The fact is, he either has a hand or he does not. This may be "fluid" in so far as his hand might be cut off, and then the fact is he doesn't have a hand any longer.

There are practice which involve having or using our hands, but this is not a commitment to a set of practices. The practices follow the fact that we have and use hands. Without hands the set of practices would no longer exist. — Fooloso4

Practices aren’t what we do with factual objects which precede our actions on them. Practices precede and make intelligible the meaning of a those objects.

↪Sam26 Banno
Why do we need to read Wittgenstein's "On Certainty" to get back to conclusions which Kant already implied with his ideas of "synthetic a priori truths"? — schopenhauer1

We don’t. We need to read On Certainty to reach conclusions that move beyond Kant’s thinking. Synthetic a priori truths begin by splitting off the world in itself from the activity of the subject and then piece them together again.

It is not one or the other, either the fact "alone" of landing on the moon "or" the system underlying the fact. We would remain doubtful if we were not made aware of the fact and we would remain doubtful if it could not be justified within the system — Fooloso4

Wittgenstein’s saying that there are kinds of facts which are fluid, which can change their truth value.
A language game within which such facts makes sense is not fluid. It is certain in a way that such individual empirical facts can never be. No facts with the system can cause us to become doubtful of the system itself. ‘No one has ever been to the moon’ is not a fact ‘alone’ , it is the expression of a system of belief.

As to Moore, it is not his certainty that is at issue, but whether this is an adequate response to the skeptic. Unless someone has a prior commitment to some philosophical position that puts it into doubt, the response to Moore saying "this is my hand" would be to be as certain of it as he is. My dog does not require a system underlying the fact that this is my hand:

359. But that means I want to conceive it as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified; as it were, as something animal.

That this is a hand is in no need of justification. No need for a system of convictions underlying that fact. — Fooloso4

Moore thinks this sureness is the result of a huge bank of empirical evidence, but Wittgenstein entertains the idea that it’s something else altogether, sometimes described in terms of context and culture, but in §359 of On Certainty described as “something animal.”

Elsewhere, however, Wittgenstein rejects the idea that Moorean propositions are in some way innate to humans as animals. Instead, he repeatedly returns to the idea that these propositions are held fast by the games and activities they are used for—that they are in some way contingently certain, but certain all the same. Wittgenstein writes:

“I have arrived at the rock bottom of my convictions. And one might almost say that these foundation-walls are carried by the whole house.”(OC §248)

I agree it is not Moore’s certainty that is at issue. It is his treatment of his certainty as an empirical fact rather than as a tacit commitment to a set of practices that hold together facts.

Much had to change within the system for it to be certain that someone has been on the moon. This includes having landed on the moon and our being aware of it. If the moon missions had been kept secret we might know that the science had changed enough that it might be possible but there would still be good grounds to doubt that anyone has ever been on the moon

It is not either the fact or the system of grounds underlying the fact — Fooloso4

Only the system of grounds provides the relative certainty that Wittgenstein is talking about throughout the book. You’re making the same error as Moore, when he looks at his hand, articulates the proposition ‘this is my hand’, and declares this to be a certainty, beyond all doubt. He believes the facts are so strong in his example
that they speak for themselves. You and Moore are confusing an empirical fact with a holistic structure, a system of convictions underlying that fact. Youre conflating a testable proposition with a rule of testing. This system is not a disconnected collection of separate facts, but a unified gestalt i. which each conviction depend on the others for its sense

98…the same proposition may get treated at one time as something to test by experience, at another as a rule of testing.

102. Might I not believe that once, without knowing it, perhaps is a state of unconsciousness, I was taken far away from the earth - that other people even know this, but do not mention it to me? But this would not fit into the rest of my convictions at all. Not that I could describe the system of these convictions. Yet my convictions do form a system, a structure.

105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system.

Nuh. The river bed is silt, sand and rocks. It stays relatively fixed while the river flows past. If it didn't, we wouldn't have a river - we'd have a swamp or a delta or some such. — Banno

When I have exhausted my justifications, I come
face to face with the limits that define the boundaries of a language game. This bedrock is fixed, but only relatively so.

If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."

It was not too long ago that the proposition: Man has never been on the moon, was beyond doubt. Although there are still some who doubt it, it is part of our scientific world picture that man has been on the moon. It is beyond doubt that we have been there. As before it was beyond doubt that we were not — Fooloso4

So what do you think it means to say that some proposition is part of our world picture? Is a world picture simply a set of facts that we believe are verifiably true? Or is a world picture a system of relations that include certain possibilities and exclude others? Is it the fact that man has been on the moon that alone constitutes the ground for its indubitably, or is it a system of grounds underlying this fact which make the fact indubitable (our awareness of the the science of space flight and our trust of media)?

108. "But is there then no objective truth? Isn't it true, or false, that someone has been on the moon?" If we are thinking within our system, then it is certain that no one has ever been on the moon. Not merely is nothing of the sort ever seriously reported to us by reasonable people, but our
whole system of physics forbids us to believe it. For this demands answers to the questions "How did he overcome the force of gravity?" "How could he live without an atmosphere?" and a thousand others which could not be answered. But suppose that instead of all these answers we met the reply:
"We don't know how one gets to the moon, but those who get there know at once that they are there; and even you can't explain everything." We should feel ourselves intellectually very distant from someone who said this.

I do not recognise Wittgenstein as having theorised anything called a 'hinge-proposition' in 'On Certainty'. I accept that he used a door hinge as a metaphor for the way we reason, in sections 341 and 343 and again in 655. But the metaphor was not very thoroughly pursued in any of these cases, and did not strike me as particularly crucial to his line of inquiry.

Of course, the academic consensus would strongly suggest I'm wrong – that 'hinge-propositions' do indeed form a key part of Wittgenstein's argument in 'On Certainty'. I just can't seem to make that out in the text itself. — cherryorchard

I consider the notion of hinge proposition to be redundant; it’s just another way for Wittgenstein to talk about language game and forms of life, as a hinge on the basis of which we organize so many empirical claims that it makes no sense to subject it to doubt.

The river-bank analogy refers to empirical propositions (96), Bedrock occurs once (498) and refers to what is beyond doubt. — Fooloso4

The river-bank analogy refers to the way that empirical
propositions can harden and change into conditions of possibility for empirical propositions. Wittgenstein distinguishes thoughout ‘On Certainty’ between empirical propositions and those propositions which we do not know through the test of experience, but which instead ground a way of interpreting experience. This is the distinction between the riverbed’s bedrock ( what is beyond doubt) and the shifting waters of the stream (empirical experience) that runs through it.

98. But if someone were to say "So logic too is an empirical science" he would be wrong. Yet this is right: the same proposition may get treated at one time as something to test by experience, at another as a rule of testing.

The riverbed is not bedrock. It changes, sometimes slowly and other times rapidly. The axis around which a body rotates is not bedrock and is not held fast by bedrock. — Fooloso4

The riverbed is bedrock. Bedrock changes slowly, because it itself is held in place by its relation to a slowly changing surround.

Mathematics is certainly a part of our form of life and mathematics does have its language games, but this does not mean that mathematical propositions are neither true nor false. The bridge would collapse if the calculations are wrong. We would not have landed on the moon if the calculations were wrong. Building bridges and moon landings are part of our form of life, but unlike our form of life the mathematical propositions are not arbitrary or t.a matter of convention or agreement. — Fooloso4

Of course they are true or false. Wittgenstein isnt denying this. He is making a distinction between a micro and macro level of analysis. A particular qualitative system of interconnected logical elements ( the macro level). is implicitly used as a framework of intelligibility within which individual propositions can be true or false ( the micro level).

A hinge is not a foundation:

OC 152.
I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility. — Fooloso4

Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty” was a response to G. E. Moore’s essays which aimed to identify propositions that are beyond skepticism.Wittgenstein examined the idea that certain propositions serve as the bedrock or foundation for other empirical statements. He likened these foundational statements to a riverbed that must remain stable for the river to flow.For Wittgenstein, the certainty we feel about some propositions stems from their deep integration into our daily activities or “forms of life”.

https://www.thecollector.com/ludwig-wittgenstein-on-certainty/

Where does he make the claim that we do not dispute 12+12=144 but it is not true or false that 12+12=144?

Engineering calculations do not depend on lack of dispute. — Fooloso4

He is linking hinge propositions with forms of life and language games. They are all incontrovertible for the same reason. Not because they are true, but because they form a system of logic on the basis of which true and false statements are intelligible. It is not that the sum of proposition 12+12=144 is not either true or false, it is that the practices that allow us to know this are not themselves true or false. Before we can answer ether 12+12=144 is true or false, it has to be intelligible. Hinge propositions provide the bedrock of intelligibility.

657. The propositions of mathematics might be said to be fossilized. - The proposition "I am called...." is not. But it too is regarded as incontrovertible by those who, like myself, have overwhelming evidence for it. And this not out of thoughtlessness. For, the evidence's being overwhelming consists precisely in the fact that we do not need to give way before any contrary evidence. And so we have here a buttress similar to the one that makes the propositions of mathematics incontrovertible.

655. The mathematical proposition has, as it were officially, been given the stamp of
incontestability. I.e.: "Dispute about other things; this is immovable - it is a hinge on which your
dispute can turn."

The third is the only example explicitly called a hinge. It is both a proposition, and true. — Fooloso4

Wittgenstein is arguing that we conventionally equate the fact there can be no dispute concerning the meaning of a mathematical proposition with its being true. This is not how Wittgenstein treats hinge propositions. His critique of Moore’s supposedly ‘true’ statement ‘this is my hand’ revolves around Moore’s confusing an empirical truth claim with the indisputability of a hinge proposition (form of life, language game).

Godel showed that there would always be true but unprovable statements within any axiomatic logic system. If these statements are incorporated into the system as axioms (which are precisely those statements that are accepted as true without being proven), either those new axioms will contradict the existing ones, or they will result in the emergence of further true but unprovable statements. No system can ever fully incorporate all these true statements as axioms and remain consistent. — cherryorchard

An important difference between Gödel and Wittgenstein is that for the latter the synonymous concepts of hinge propositions, forms of life and language games are neither true nor false. They are outside all schemes of verification, since such schemes presuppose them.

Philosophy might ask what reality is, but it wouldn't necessarily be particularly interested in describing it. — Ludwig V

I wonder if you could flesh this out a little. Doesn’t philosophy attempt to answer its own question concerning what (as well as how and why) reality is? Isn’t that what is entailed by a metaphysical position? In my view, both philosophy and the sciences describe reality. The main difference is in the conventionality of the vocabulary.

There is an unusual - to me - twist to this, however, in the phrase "material phenomena". There's a perfectly respectable use of the word in science to mean "that which needs to be explained" or, possibly "data". But the limitation of phenomena to "material phenomena" is unusual, and puzzling. I scent reductionist tendencies here. — Ludwig V

Philosopher of science Joseph Rouse is one of Barad’s biggest champions. He considers her notion of materialism to be a version of naturalism that avoids the pitfallls of other naturalistic conceptions of nature.

I interpret Barad as developing a revised conception of metaphysical natu­ralism. The crucial point at which she departs from other naturalists is in the conception of nature itself as disclosed through scientific work. The familiar naturalisms treat nature in terms of regularities, laws, causal powers, or causal functional roles. Nature so conceived is anormative. The semantic and epistemic normativity governing how one ought to think and talk about the natural world, and the ethical or political normativity of how one ought to act within it, must be understood as either arising from or reducible to an anormative natural world. Although she does not put the point in quite this way, I take Barad to claim instead that nature as revealed by the sciences is itself normatively constituted.

This claim needs careful exposition, however, both to clarify the sense of “nor­mativity” being invoked, and to understand Barad’s argument for it. Barad starts from a commitment to both strains of naturalism. On the one hand, an adequate ontology must be accountable to the scientific work through which an understanding of nature is achieved; otherwise, it would be an arbitrary philosophical imposition upon science. On the other hand, such scientific work must itself be comprehended as part of nature to be understood. Her position then develops in three distinct steps. First, she argues for the ontological priority of “phenomena” over objects. She then argues that phenomena in this sense must incorporate conceptual-discursive normativity. Conceptual-discursive norms are not something imposed upon phenomena “by” us, however. On the contrary, we ourselves only become agents/knowers as material components of the larger patterns of natural phenomena.

Thus, Barad neither reduces conceptual-discursive normativity to anormative causal relations, nor imposes already-articulated conceptual norms upon the material world. Instead, she is arguing that the natural world only acquires definite boundaries, and concepts only acquire definite content, together. Once that conception is in place, Barad goes on to argue that our participation in the phenomena we understand scientifically makes ethical and political responsibility integral to conceptual-discursive normativity as well.

https://digitalcollections.wesleyan.edu/_flysystem/fedora/2023-03/28634-Original%20File.pdf

I mean, clearly she is not a physicist — Apustimelogist

Suit yourself. Barad's Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. She held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces.

↪Joshs
I don't think this example is actually apt to what you said it was going to demonstrate in the first sentence. You are more or less comparing quantum mechanics under a specific interpretation with Newtonian mechanics; but quantum mechanics is not going to satisfy the requirements of apokrisis for explaining higher level things like complex biology any more than Newtonian mechanics; so this demonstration doesn't really say anything about the relationship between different scales or levels — Apustimelogist

It may not satisfy the requirements of apokrisis, but the model of causality it expresses is designed to apply equally to the micro and the macro level.

what you are saying is very clearly interpretation dependent and so I don't see any reason why I shouldn't just reject Barad's ideas (Maybe you have a link to them? The quick search I did earlier didn't give me anything immediate) given that I advocate a completely different interpretation. At the same time, some would argue that you don't need to conceptualize quantum mechanics as non-linear since on face-value it is linear and deterministic in terms of Schrodinger equation. — Apustimelogist

Reject it only after you have demonstrated that you understand it. Have a look at Meeting the Universe Halfway.

https://smartnightreadingroom.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/meeting-the-universe-halfway.pdf

“In an agential realist account, matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity. Phenomena—the smallest material units (relational “atoms”)—come to matter through this process of ongoing intra-activity. “Matter” does not refer to an inherent, fixed property of abstract,
independently existing objects; rather, “matter” refers to phenomena in their ongoing materialization. (p. 151).

“On my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components.” That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations without preexisting relata. The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual
“interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful.”

“In my agential realist account, scientific practices do not reveal what is already there; rather, what is ‘‘disclosed’’ is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world’s differential becoming. Which is not to say that humans are the condition of possibility for the existence of phenomena. Phenomena do not require cognizing minds for their existence; on the contrary, ‘‘minds’’ are themselves material phenomena that emerge through specific intra-actions. Phenomena are real material beings. What is made manifest through technoscientific practices is an expression of the objective existence of particular
material phenomena. This is, after all, a realist conception of scientific practices. But unlike in traditional conceptions of realism, ‘‘objectivity’’ is not preexistence (in the ontological sense) or the preexistent made manifest to the cognitive mind (in the epistemological sense). Objectivity is a matter of accountability for what materializes, for what comes to be. It matters which cuts are enacted: different cuts enact different materialized becomings….

This is a reworking of causality that not only goes beyond its classical conception but also goes beyond that of complex systems theory as well: ‘‘emergence,’’ in an agential realist account, is dependent not merely on the nonlinearity of relations but on their intra-active nature (i.e., on non-separability and nontrivial topological dynamics as well). Events and things do not occupy particular positions in space and time; rather, space, time, and matter are iteratively produced and performed. Traditional conceptions of dynamics as a matter of how the values of an object’s properties change over time as the result of the action of external forces won’t do. The very nature and possibilities for change are reworked.

I'm still curious about this. It sounds to me like you are describing a priesthood (of which you are a part?) which you think should be listened to as authoritative on all matters related to human minds.

Can you say how I am getting something significantly wrong there — wonderer1

You likely wouldn’t refer to the scientists whose work leads to replicated, accepted results according to the consensus of a worldwide scientific community as a ‘priesthood’. I’m assuming the reason is because you are making a distinction between ideas which must be accepted on faith and those that have been validated through accepted scientific method.

Let me put it this way. I believe that what the testing aspect of scientific practice does is conventionalize and define precisely a set of ideas so that they can be shared among a larger community. Scientific practice is not able to render a paradigmatic set of ideas true or false, what it validates or invalidates is particular aspects within an already established paradigmatic framework that it operates under. The creative, world-changing work of science has to do with its movement from one paradigm to another, not its validating or invalidating facts within a given paradigm. This movement is more revolutionary than evolutionary, and the genesis of paradigms relies on faith , not empirical test.

A new paradigm is not ‘more true’ than one it replaces. This is not to say that there are not good reasons to prefer one paradigm over another. To say one has faith in a new scientific paradigm is to see it as aesthetically more pleasing than the alternatives , as organizing the world in terms of more intimate and harmonious patterns than its rivals. I endorse the work of the researchers I mentioned not because their ideas are empirically more ‘true’ than their rivals, but because they introduce a new way of organizing experience that I see as less arbitrary than the paradigmatic framework employed by the current consensus. Their work will only seem authoritative to you if you perform the gestalt shift they are attempting to get you to do and you see for yourself what they see. Their world either pops into focus for you or it doesn’t , like those magic eye hidden 3-d images. No amount of vetting by empirical test will make this happen. You have to do the work yourself to make it authoritative for you. You are your own priesthood when it comes to paradigms, worldviews, metaphysical groundings.

…any kind of observation or perhaps description about the smallest scales of reality will have more information about reality than all the scales upwards simply by the fact that descriptions on higher scales necessarily coarse-grain over details, while at the same time all the observations on higher scales are effectively redundant in terms of how they would correspond to a mind-independent reality. Doesn't matter what the descriptions are, which is why in previous posts I tried to make an effort to not mix up physics and smallest scales of existence. If you were to take a correspondence view of truth, then obviously the smallest scales would carry the most information about distinctions one could make about the mind-independent reality beyond one's senses. Because if higher scale descriptions are coarse-grained over, they lose information about correspondences — Apustimelogist

Let’s look at an example where this dependence of a higher on a lower scale of explanation falls apart. Newtonian analysis of colliding billiard balls or falling dominoes assigns fixed , universal qualitative causal properties to physical bodies, measured in relation to fixed temporal and spatial girds external to these bodies. Because these qualitative properties are assumed to be fixed, if we know the initial conditions completely , we can simply run off the future behavior of the interacting billiard balls or dominoes on a computer programmed with the right correlations between qualitative attributes and numeric relations.

Now let’s take a non-linear model of a particular sort, an account which begins from the assumption that no attributes of a physical object pre-exist its actual interactions with other objects, and that each actual interaction subtly changes the qualitative properties of the objects involved. Karen Barad is a physicist who uses this approach to interpret the results of the double slit experiment in quantum field physics. Put differently, when a cause produces an effect, the object being affected mutually affects its cause such as to modify the qualitative nature of that cause,

When we compare this model with the Newtonian one, it reveals to us that the latter description produces its universal, fixed results by ignoring and flattening the subtle quantitative changes in the nature of the phenomena (the ‘bodies’ and their temporal-spatial frame) that take place through their interactive reciprocal affecting. Such idealizing distortions don’t present a big problem with respect to the needs of the lower sciences. Conceptualizing the world in abstractive , generalizing and flattening terms is what makes possible a field like physics or chemistry, and the useful technologies which emerge from them. But what is useful when we want to build an iphone is profoundly less useful when we are trying to understand human behavior or the nature of living systems. The simplifying, universalizing of abstractions of physics obscure all that is most relevant and meaningful about how we understand each other (the fact that they also obscure much about the physical world doesn’t keep our planes from staying up in the air).

I'm not seeing how how that is a source of evidence, as to the views of most everyone well informed in the life sciences. — wonderer1

That isnt a source of evidence concerning the views of most everyone informed in the life sciences, its a source of evidence concerning the views of a particular community of scholars who integrate phenomenological insights with pragmatism, biology and embodied , enactive cognitive science. They would lose the popularity contest, but It should be added that the kind of evidence that matters to them doesn’t concern whether today’s physics is correct or incorrect in some objective sense, but how its practices and results can be viewed under a different light, according to a model which doesnt invalidate it but leads to alternative ways of relating the physics, the biological and the cultural.

I would think that most everyone well informed in the life sciences would recognize the usefulness of physics in such an interdisciplinary project. Do you have evidence to the contrary? — wonderer1

I certainly do, but it involves a familiarity with the substance of scholarship integrating naturalism with phenomenology. And again, the issue of usefulness has to do not strictly with the results of physical experimentation but with the theoretical interpretation of those results.

…we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental). (Evan Thompson)

It seems strange to me that someone would even consider the question of whether physics is up to the job. To me, it is so clearly a matter for extremely interdisciplinary thinking. — wonderer1

.

I didnt say that all physicists are not up to the job. There are a handful who try to force an interpretation onto the established body of results which allows the field to bridge the conceptual gap between itself and recent thinking in the biological and psychological sciences. Without such significant work of reinterpretation, I don’t believe that physics can be a useful participant alongside the life and social disciplines.

Biology is not reducible to physics because a living body, though it is a physical object, cannot be explained without reference to concepts that have no place in physics. They cannot be understood without taking a holistic view of the organism and what helps to keep it alive - a concept that physics has no room for.
Except I heard that some physicists are talking of causality as information. But I don't know anything about the background. — Ludwig V

So I think the point here isn’t that psychology and biology are not in principle reducible to a more fundamental description like physics. It is that today’s physics is not up to the job because it is mired in older metaphysical assumptions. It would have to re-invent itself as a new kind of physics. Maybe it wouldnt even call itself physics anymore.

So the concept of ontological grounding is not perspective-dependent? H'm

Consider what philosophers have said:-
1 Everything is physics
2 Everything is language
3 Everything is experienced
All true. They are all perspectives and there can be more than one perspective on anything. Physics, from my perspective, is not unique in any respect. — Ludwig V

As you are aware, the Continentalists are fond of ontological groundings that have built into their very premise the genesis of perspectivalism as an irreducible primordial a priori ( Nietzsche’s Will to Power, Heidegger’s Being, Merleau-Ponty’s Flesh of the World, Deleuze’s desiring machines, Husserl’s Transcendental Ego).

What I was implying is that all of the events that led to the development of neuronal structure- whether on an evolutionary or developmental scale - can be in principle described purely in terms of particles and how they move in space and time. In principle, such a thing could be simulated using a complete model of fundamental physics - it would just obviously be orders of magnitude too complicated to ever be possible to do.

From this, it would follow that higher-order descriptions are both in principle: redundant, in the sense that they are describing behavior that could be described purely in terms of smaller scales; and also incomplete, in the sense that any higher-level description would have to be missing out on details that actually occur in reality on the smaller scale but are not included in the higher-order description.

Obviously that doesn't mean we don't need the higher level description - but clearly, higher level descriptions will be grounded on the details of smaller scales. How could it not be? — Apustimelogist

What you’re calling the lower level physical description, the irreducible ground floor for the understanding of all higher order descriptions (chemical, biological, psychological and cultural) has evolved over the history of philosophical and scientific inquiry. And it has evolved in such a way that all of the higher order resources of cultural knowledge arebrought to bear on redetermining in each era of inquiry the nature of the lowest level. Another way of putting it is that the very highest level of cultural understanding is inextricably intertwined with our models of the very lowest level. This may not seem like an objectionable claim in itself, but what if I were to suggest that it often happens in the historical course of scientific inquiry that insights gained from scientific and philosophical investigations of phenomena seemingly far removed from the subject matter of physics, that supposed ground floor level of study, can point the way toward paradigm shifts in the models describing the nature of that lowest level?

But how can new theories of language, intersubjectivity, perception, cognition and affect pertaining to a higher level like psychology challenge the way we understand causality at the lowest level, rather than simply representing more complex manifestations of these physical laws? The answer, as physicists are increasingly discovering, is that, try as they might, they cannot bracket off the external world from our psychological relation to it. As a result , just as models of the world that physics employs lurk under the surface of many human sciences as guiding presuppositions, psychological and philosophical presuppositions lurk beneath the surface of physical models. Given that physics emerged out of Enlightenment presuppositions assuming a split between subjective phenomena and a world of objective, external causes, physics can be slow to recognize when it has fallen behind the insights of higher order fields like evolutionary biology and human psychology. An example of this is the way that time has been treated within physics as irrelevant. In recent years, physicists like Ilya Prigogine and Lee Smolin have argued that physics desperately needs to learn from evolutionary biology how essential time is to the very essence of physical reality. Jean Piaget wrote:

In all fields of knowledge the situation arises periodically where the concepts in use divide into two levels, of which one is more complex, hence 'higher', and there is then a tendency to reduce the higher to the lower or a contrary tendency as a reaction against the excesses of the former. In the field of physics, for example, mechanical phenomena have for long been regarded as elementary and for that matter as the only intelligible elements to which everything ought to be reduced: whence the futile attempts to translate electromagnetism into the language of mechanics. In the biological field there have been attempts to reduce living processes to known physico-chemical phenomena, attempts that failed to note the possibility of change in Aa discipline which is continually being modiied; and the reaction was an antireduvtonist vitattsm, whose sole merit was the entirely negative one of denouncing the illusions engendered by such pre- mature reductions. In psychology there has been the attempt to "reduce' everything to the stimulus-response scheme, to associations,etc.

If these remarks appear strange, this is no doubt because physics is far from complete, having so far been unable to integrate biology and a fortiori the behavioural sciences within itself. Hence, at present, we reason in different and artificially simplified domains, physics being up to now only the science of non-living, non-conscious things.

Why use the higher-level description then? Obviously it is required because it is less complex and doesn't require precise resolutions, maybe it is also closer to our everyday levels of descriptions. The reasons for using the higher-level description or a lower-level description are clearly about epistemic, explanatory needs, not ontological ones - — Apustimelogist

This was true in the early days of the social and psychological sciences, when they were consumed by physics envy. But this is not true any of the high level, psychological and philosophical accounts that are important to my understanding of the world (embodied, enactive cognition, phenomenology, poststructuralism, later Wittgenstein, etc). Relative to these perspectives, it is the physical account which is less complex and closer to our everyday understanding. It seems to me that there are one of a number of reasons for your view.
1) You are not actually treating the higher order psychological account as consistent with the lower order one, but you are just assuming without examining the details that the higher must be reducible to the lower since of course the physics has been rigorously validated empirically.
2) You interpret the higher order as subsumed by the same theoretical logic as the lower one, and so miss the radical departure of the former from the latter’s grounding assumptions.

So how do you derive the structure of a neuron from the laws of physics?
— apokrisis

You pretend to be doing physics; but you are merely reworking Hegel — Banno

And why not? Physics was until recently ( and for many still is) a reworking of Leibnitz and Kant.

The fact that you may need higher levels of explanation to make a dynamic system intelligible doesn't negate the fact that ot may be at the most fundamental level just a consequence of simple billiard ball causality. It could not be any other wa since such explanations you talk about are by their very nature not fundamental — Apustimelogist

Physicist and philosopher Karen Barad is among the community of ‘new materialists’ who argue that “relations are not secondarily derived from independently existing “relata,” but rather the mutual ontological dependence of “relata”—the relation—is the ontological prim­itive. The notion of intra-actions constitutes a reworking of the traditional notion of causality.”

I suggest that such non-linear reciprocal affecting between cause and effect is more fundamental than the mechanistic billiard ball or domino form of description we might try to foist onto neural processes as their ‘real’ basis.
— Joshs

This doesn't make any sense since all of the complex behaviors neurons do are emergent from very simple ones at smalled scales - described by morr fundamental laws of physics - such as ions crossing a membrane barrier — Apustimelogist

I am not denying that complex psychological phenomena can be analyzed in terms of a supposed grounding that is itself irreducible to something more fundamental. What I am saying is that while some believe that complex dynamical processes are phenomena that simply emerge out of a lower level of nature that physics already describes perfectly adequately, I’m arguing that the full implications of the non-linearity of complex systems in living beings makes it impossible to derive them from physical models as they are currently understood. At least not without the modification in interpretation of causality that writers like Barad offer. Given the fact that it is through our conceptual
models that we come with theories of the oldest , simplest and most primordial beginning of empirical reality, it is not surprising that new insights into the nature of conceptualization can lead to new ways of thinking about that oldest, simplest origin. As apokrisis argued,

“How we can develop a logical understanding of the world is then our best model for how the world itself could come to have that logical structure. Epistemology becomes ontology in its most direct possible fashion.”

Does physics ground mathematics?
— Ludwig V

Do the smallest scales of existence ground our use of math?

Absolutely. — Apustimelogist

Actually, the most complex scale of existence grounds our use of math. Mathematics is a conceptual invention.

Can you explain in what sense you do mean "mechanistic"?
— Ludwig V

I just mean mechanistic in the sense of one event causing the next event and the next event in a way that is divide of any kind of extra meaning. Like knocking down dominos where one falls causes the next and the next and the next in a mindless ways. But I am not assuming any limits on complexity or non-linearity or recurrence or anything like that — Apustimelogist

The billiard ball model of causality does assume a limit on non-linearity. More precisely, it ignores it entirely. Efficient cause is itself a theoretical perspective, one which only emerged at a particular point in the history of science and has undergone numerous modifications. It was developed for , and is most useful for dealing with the behavior of non-living phenomena, but runs into trouble when we try to explain living systems this way. I would go even further. What we learn from the models we develop to describe cognitive systems can be applied backwards to natural
science domain. This is the only way to get beyond the hard problem, which resulted from taking the sorts of causality physics deals with as the gold standard. For instance, what makes the fall of dominoes ‘mindless’ is the determination of an effect as the mere consequence of a pre-assigned cause. In a dynamical system, the effect is not the mere product of a pre-assigned cause, but modifies the cause. Cause and effect are reciprocally affected by each other. This provides such processes with an anticipative intentionality that may be characterized as mindful in some sense.

As chatgpt says

Complex dynamical systems exhibit nonlinear effects and a type of causality called causal spread, which is different from efficient causality. The interactions and connectivity required for complex systems to self-organize are best understood through context-sensitive constraints

I suggest that such non-linear reciprocal affecting between cause and effect is more fundamental than the mechanistic billiard ball or domino form of description we might try to foist onto neural processes as their ‘real’ basis.

I know Apustimelogist already answered, but I want to add the following link to flesh out the very literal sense in which synchronization occurs — wonderer1

I prefer the somewhat less reductionistic account of intersubjective coordination that enactivism offers:

“Interactions are not simply bits of information to be processed by individual cognizers, but rather, interaction processes move the participants in their sense-making activities, and these include affect. Participatory sense-making reaches directly into the precarious network of self-maintaining processes that constitute a subject's identity. Thus, our encounters with others may not only modulate our very self-maintenance, but to some extent even enable and constrain it. This means that the constitution of our subjectivity can be strongly dependent on the history of social encounters. Thus, self-constitution and self-affection happen with and through others while-importantly and basically-at the same time always retaining an aspect of closure.

This sharing in inter-affectivity comes through participating in a process that is not simply the summation of individual activities, but a jointly created and literally embodied pattern that affects each of our affections. (Hanne De Jaegher)

One of the obvious features of life in general and people in particular is that they are autonomous. Whether those systems approaches can answer all the questions is another issue. On the surface, it looks as if they leave out the notion of a person, which implies that their scope will be limited — Ludwig V

How do you reconcile the notion of person with philosophical and psychological approaches which deconstruct the concept of self?

Francisco Varela provides “a great amount of neuroscientific detail about distributed neural networks to explain the idea of a selfless virtual self, an agent that emerges from a pattern or aggregate of personal processes” ( Shaun Gallagher).

As unenlightened beings, we mistakenly believe on a deep emotional level that there does exist a real “I” or ego within our mind and body, and therefore our experience of ourselves and others is profoundly egocentric… One mentally imposes an intrinsic “I-ness” and an intrinsic “otherness” onto phenomena, but “I” and “other” are simply relative designations imputed onto elements in which there is no inherently existing “I” and “other.” Each “I” is an “other,” and each “other” is an “I.” (Evan Thompson)

“The 'I' (which is not the same thing as the unitary government of our being!) is, after all, only a conceptual synthesis - thus there is no acting from 'egoism'”…
The concept of the 'individual' is false. In isolation, these beings do not exist: the centre of gravity is something changeable…
“If I have anything of a unity within me, it certainly doesn't lie in the conscious ‘I' and in feeling, willing, thinking, but somewhere else: in the sustaining, appropriating, expelling, watchful prudence of my whole organism, of which my conscious self is only a tool.(Nietzsche)

I wanted to revisit this, and ask about the reading habits of these three men, and whether there was a lot of similarity between the reading habits of these three and what you would expect of religious monastics?

Even someone who superficially appears socially isolated, may be interacting with diverse others via reading and writing. I'm not sure that comparing those three to monastics is very apples to apples, but you tell me. — wonderer1

Both Heidegger and Nietzsche felt isolated from the ways of thinking of their time. Heidegger believed that Nietzsche and Holderlin were closest to his own philosophy, but that even they fell short, and Nietzsche believed that he was writing for an age to come. Certainly in Heidegger’s case, I think his core philosophy was developed in his 20’s, and the interaction he had with his students and colleagues over the course of his life had only the most peripheral effect on the further development of his ideas. The greatest influence on his new work was his old work, not the ideas of those around him. In this sense , his intellectual life was monastic by necessity, and I think this is true of most philosophers.

It's treated the same as any relatively scarce illness — AmadeusD

Did you get Covid?

↪wonderer1 Yea maybe my word choice wasn't the best. I guess I think emotions provide the motivation for thinking, but I suppose a thinking process can work just fine once it gets going without further emotional input — Brendan Golledge

You sure about that? Is the sense of why and how something matters to us ever absent from a task? Is there ever such a thing as an absence of mood? Heidegger would say no. He refers to such concepts as affect, feeling, emotion and mood as attunements:

“Attunements are the fundamental ways in which we find ourselves disposed in such and such a way. Attunements are the 'how' [ Wie] according to which one is in such and such a way. Certainly we often take this 'one is in such and such a way'- for reasons we shall not go into now-as something indifferent, in contrast to what we intend to do, what we are occupied with, or what will happen to us. And yet this 'one is in such and such a way' is not-is never-simply a consequence or side-effect of our thinking, doing, and acting. It is-to put it crudely-the presupposition for such things, the 'medium' within which they first happen. And precisely those attunements to which we pay no heed at all, the attunements we least observe, those attunements which attune us in such a way that we feel as though there is no attunement there at all, as though we were not attuned in any way at all-these attunements are the most powerful.

At first and for the most part we are affected only by particular attunements that tend toward 'extremes', like joy or grief. A faint apprehensiveness or a buoyant contentment are less noticeable. Apparently not there at all, and yet there, is precisely that lack of attunement in which we are neither out of sorts nor in a 'good' mood. Yet even in this 'neither/nor' we are never without an attunement. The reason we take lack of attunement as not being attuned at all, however, has grounds of a quite essential nature. When we say that a human being who is good-humoured brings a lively atmosphere with them, this means only that an elated or lively attunement is brought about. It does not mean, however, that there was no attunement there before. A lack of attunement prevailed there which is seemingly hard to grasp, which seems to be something apathetic and indifferent, yet is not like this at all. We can see once more that attunements never emerge in the empty space of the soul and then disappear again; rather, Dasein as Dasein is always already attuned in its very grounds. There is only ever a change of attunement.

a mechanistic component cannot be inherently interpreted in terms of a semantic component. If you look at a brain performing a plus task, our description of 'plus' is not interpretable in terms of our description of how neurons are actually performing the task.

Neurons are precisely what is performing a plus tasks for you. The biology and dynamics of neurons account for everything about your ability to do a plus task.

Physics describes the smallest scales of existence which grounds everything else and upon which all higher scale behavior depends and emerges from. — Apustimelogist

In principle it is true that physics grounds all ‘higher’ scales of natural phenomena , but in practice it is not true that that a mechanistic account based on efficient, linear causality describes the neural processes underlying conceptual thought. There is no such thing as an inherently mechanistic component, only an account which explains the functions of a component in mechanistic terms. This is a useful account for describing phenomena in the service of accomplishing certain kinds of scientific and technological tasks, but is inadequate for others. Looking at the neural activity at the level of detail of chemical reactions will only reveal a chain of linear causality. Looking at the level of global self-organizing processes of a living system will reveal a non-linear reciprocal causality that moves between the global and the elemental.

As Alicia Juarrero explains:

The bottom-up causality of nonlinear far from equilibrium dynamics is thus truly creative; it produces qualitatively different wholes that are not reducible to sums, com­pounds, or aggregates. Once self-organized, furthermore, these emergent global structures of process actively and dynamically influence the go of their compo­nents, but not qua other. In contradiction to the received views on causality, that is, the whole also actively exerts causal power on itself top down. Self-organization, in short, strongly counsels for a wider denotation for the
term cause, one reconceptualized in terms of “context-sensitive constraints” to include those causal powers that incorporate circular causality, context-sensitive
embeddedness, and temporality. On this interpretation deterministic, mechanistic efficient causes become the limit of context-sensitive constraints.