https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/05/25/ask-ethan-what-is-the-fine-structure-constant-and-why-does-it-matter/?sh=3f6f77145671 — apokrisis

I do read Ethan Seigel's posts although I notice that he's been dropped from Forbes. He's a great explicator.

From that article:

Unlike [the] other constants, which have units associated with them, α is a truly dimensionless constant, which means it is simply a pure number, with no units associated with it at all. While the speed of light might be different if you measure it in meters per second, feet per year, miles per hour, or any other unit, α always has the same value. For this reason, it's considered to be one of the fundamental constants that describes our Universe.

Sounds awfully like 'an idea' to me.

(Apparently, 1/137 turns up in a wide range of contexts.)

what in the opening sentence of my last post isn't clear ... — 180 Proof

Nothing at all, but no need to go to any further trouble.

Nothing can exist except by being a system that marries Aristotle’s four causes in bottom-up “material” construction and top-down “immaterial” constraint fashion. — apokrisis

I wonder if those could be conceived as analogous to the fundamental existence-enabling constraints identified in cosmology (e.g. Martin Rees' 'six numbers')?

This striving to reduce foolery (& stupidity) seeks to align expectations with reality as an adaptive habit, or, to use P. Hadot's phrase, as a daily spiritual practice. — 180 Proof

Then I can't see the point of you're introducing with ' Buddhism's "anicca", "anatta", "dukkha-karma"'. Are you saying that these are examples of the 'ruses or delusions' by which humans deny their own inevitable decay?

Is that so? Well, in other related dharmic traditions, I understand that it is 'detachment from the psychological habit of permanence' (e.g. anicca-anatta) that facilitates 'liberation'. — 180 Proof

To what end, though? The theory is, that ignorance is the attribution of permanence to that which is by nature impermanent, i.e. arising of thoughts, sensations, and one's sense of ownership and so on - clinging to what is impermanent. So it is ending the attachment to the impermanent that is the aim of the discipline.

All you're saying wisdom consists of is resigning yourself to the inevitable natural fact of death and decay, isn't it? 'Surrender' in the sense of abandoning hope of anything beyond that. Which is precisely what Buddhism describes as nihilism.

he rejected both the views of "nihilism" and "eternalism" as constituting obstructions on the path to liberation. — Janus

Eternalism is the belief that through the appropriate rituals and practices, one can return forever in favourable states of birth (including heaven) rather than seeking emancipation from the whole cycle of re-birth.

It seems plausible to think that acceptance of another world above this one was mainly on account of it being the authoritative dogma, as well as being motivated by fear of death and wishful thinking that there might be a world more perfect than this one. — Janus

In this case, the issue is one of accounting for, or explaining, why there is a 'natural order'. As you will probably recall, in Greek philosophy, there was a principle that the explanans has to be of a different order to what is explained. So, for example, the faculty of reason was thought to provide a higher level of explanation than sense-perception, because of its ability to discern causal factors not perceptible to the sense alone - that being the logos (according to Heraclitus and the Stoics), the reason things are as they are. This was the probable origin of the idea of 'natural law'. According to view there can't be a natural explanation for the natural order, because both explanandum (what is to be explained) and explanans (what explains it) are of the same order.

I never used the word 'blindness'. I simply said that the popular rejection of the notion of the divine origin of natural law is a factor in the debate.

Whereas in reality all you will end up with a heap of feces-smeared and broken typewriters. (Although I do sometimes wonder if they're not harnessed elsewhere, entering content via social media.)

I didn't intend to imply wilful blindness but that could equally be said of your second sentence, as, at the time, the Christian worldview comprised a distillation of whatever historical wisdom and science the culture possessed. But, let's not get into that - my only point was that whenever a discussion about 'the order of nature' is entertained, a sub-text to that debate is the possibility or non-possibility of there being a higher intelligence.

1). Let's assume that reality is ordered - consistent. Governed by laws and constants. (objective).

2). Lets also assume that the mind can perceive reality, receive data or input from it and store that data. — Benj96

I think it foolish to deny that there is an order in nature, but I also think that the answer to the question of why there is such an order, and what this order means or implies is not at all obvious. And also the question of whether natural order extends to the human order - the framework within which we make decisions about values or assign meaning. What the place of humans is, in relation to this order.

(A Christian philosophical view would be that this natural order is instituted by God, and the appropriate response is that of obedience to divine commandments, which I will leave aside in favour of philosophical analysis. However it should be understood as part of the background of this question as modern culture has been shaped by rejection of that view - it defines what not to believe for a lot of people.)

Then, we could say that the degree of awareness or logic vs delusion of an given individual = the degree in which their minds internal relationships and associations or paradigm parallels/falls into alignment with that of external reality.

Proof of such a case is in predictive value - such an individual would be expected to have immense foresight (prediction) ability, as well as memory (accurate recall) , as well as explanatory power (their logic paralleling the innate logic of an objective reality). — Benj96

Aren't you describing here precisely the enterprise of science? Is it not the discernment and quantitative analysis of the objective order of nature which science is engaged in, and which has given rise to immense control over physical conditions and accumulation of information? Doesn't science already create predictive, mathematical models of the behaviour of nature with unprecedented levels of accuracy?

'the business of philosophy' is primarily to reflectively discipline the human mind with study, dialectical engagement and praxis in order to gradually unlearn the maladaptive habit of 'denying the human mind's inherent disorder' while learning to be antifragile because of this fact. — 180 Proof

Would you consider the possibility that this 'inherent disorder' is what is designated by 'avidya' (ignorance) in Buddhist and Hindu philosophy? And that in those schools of traditional philosophy, it is precisely detachment from the imperatives of nature that provides the pathway to liberation (mokṣa, Nirvāṇa)? Whereas the identification with 'what decays and passes away' (in their terms) binds to the 'wheel of saṃsāra' (detachment from same being the aim of 'daily spiritual practice').

Fair enough.

Ok, but it was just an example. It could be anything else. — Eugen

When you get down to 'fundamental constituents of existence', what are the choices? Any suggestions?

if we replace matter with another substance, e.g. information, — Eugen

‘Information’ is not a substance (in the philosophical sense.) The word has no meaning without specifying what information is being referred to.

Whether consciousness can be explained in terms of physical processes is a different question than whether it or the physical (or neither) is ontologically fundamental. — Janus

How is it a different question? For the physicalist, the physical substrate is fundamental, consciousness is epiphenomenal. So explaining consciousness in terms of physical processes is at the same time making the claim that the physical is ontologically fundamental. After all, it's what physicalism means.

It might be worth mentioning Science and Non-Duality. This started as a conference in San Rafael in California in 2009.

The mission of Science and Nonduality (SAND) is to forge a new paradigm in spirituality, one that is not dictated by religious dogma, but that is rather based on timeless wisdom traditions of the world, informed by cutting-edge science, and grounded in direct experience.

They now have conferences in many other locations and a large number of recorded lectures and seminars on Youtube. Their web homepage can be found at https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/ and on youtube https://www.youtube.com/@scienceandnonduality

what does "fundamental" mean? — IP060903

It is about establishing a reduction base. The reduction base is the set of concepts, entities, or principles that are considered fundamental or basic to a philosophical position. It serves as the starting point for explaining and analyzing other phenomena or concepts that are deemed less fundamental or derivative.

In philosophy of mind, physicalists will argue that mental states can be reduced to physical states of the brain. In this case, the reduction base would consist of the physical entities and processes that underlie mental states, such as neurons, synapses, and neurotransmitters. Other phenomena, such as conscious experience or thoughts, would then be explained in terms of these more basic physical components.

Those opposing will argue that mental acts, such as speaking and reasoning, and perhaps even the very quality of subjective experience itself, cannot be explained in terms of physical processes.

Concepts might or might not be reducible to matter — Eugen

Trying doing that without employing concepts :wink:

Do processes such as metabolism, homeostasis and reproduction 'emerge from' simple lifeforms such as single-cell organisms? Or are those metabolic processes inherent to what makes them organisms in the first place? As soon as they die, they cease from being organisms and exist only as decomposing collections of elements. In that sense, life itself is irreducible, because as soon as it is reduced to its material components, it's no longer alive.

Snippet on the view of enactive or embodied cognition: Enactive cognition is a theory that suggests that the mind is not something that is contained within the brain, but is instead a process that emerges from the interactions between the organism and its environment. In other words, the mind is not just in the head, but is distributed throughout the body and the environment.

Evan Thompson argues that this enactive perspective on cognition is closely tied to the concept of life, because living systems are characterized by their ability to actively engage with and shape their environment. According to Thompson, the mind is not just a passive observer of the world, but is an active participant in the process of life.

A word on the cultural sensitivities of the hard problem of consciousness. David Chalmer's 1996 essay on that topic touched a nerve, because it had the gall to suggest there was something fundamental about consciousness which could not be explained in scientific terms as a matter of principle. Not because we didn't have the instruments, or we didn't have the concepts, but because of the very nature of subjective experience, of 'what it is like to be...'. The obvious foil for this argument was prominent materialist philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett, who refuses to acknowledge that there can be anything about human nature which is beyond the purview of science. Dennett, you see, is an exponent of 'scientism', which is the view that the scientific method is the only reliable way to acquire knowledge about the world and that any knowledge that cannot be obtained through the scientific method is either trivial or not worth knowing. So there's a 'culture war' going on here, between those who suggest 'dualism' or some sense in which the mind is spookily not amenable to guys in white coats, and the guys in white coats.

The questions are:

1. Is the logic of the model correct?
2. There is an alternative to this model, i.e. a model in which ''absolutely anything you could think of" is not fundamental, but it is neither 100% reducible nor strongly emergent?
3. Does this model apply to any type of reality? I mean, if instead of matter we assume that the most fundamental thing is an immaterial computer or information, does this change have any impact on the model? — Eugen

The problem with this OP is that the 'model' is not well expressed. The phrase "absolutely anything you could think of" is a place-holder for "whatever you think consciousness to be" - but you might just use the word "consciousness". So you're really just asking, is consciousness (whatever you consider that to be) fundamental, or is it not?

You then bring in weak and strong emergence. These can be summarised as:

Weak emergence refers to the idea that mental properties or states can be explained by the underlying physical processes, but grants that the explanation is complex and cannot be reduced to the physical processes alone. In other words, the mental properties or states are emergent in the sense that they are not predictable solely from knowledge of the physical processes, but they can be ultimately reduced to physical processes, by means as yet unknown.

Strong emergence refers to the idea that mental properties or states cannot be explained by the underlying physical processes because they are ontologically distinct from them. In this view, mental properties or states are not simply the result of physical processes, but arise from some other, presumably non-physical source.

The debate between weak and strong emergence is an aspect of the broader mind-body debate, which concerns the relationship between mental states and physical or neuro-physical processes. While weak emergence is more widely accepted among philosophers of mind, others say that strong emergence is necessary to account for the subjective nature of conscious experience. The counter to that is that strong emergence is incompatible with scientific explanations of the mind, and that weak emergence is a more plausible account of mental properties and states.

Yet others reject the idea of emergence altogether, saying that a physicalist account of subjective experience can never describe or capture "what it is like" to be the subject of experience (e.g. David Chalmers). In Mortal Questions, Thomas Nagel criticizes the idea of 'emergence' because of the impossibility of specifying the relationship of conscious states with the supposed physical constituents that are supposed to cause them. Do they supervene on those processes, or are they independent of them? How can we explain the causal relationship between mental and physical states if they are ontologically distinct (i.e. of basically different kinds)? It is easy to assume that neurochemical interactions cause thought, but demonstrating the nature of that causal relationship remains elusive.

That out of the way, hereunder is my basic stance on the question. Consciousness is fundamental not as a constituent of objects, but as the ground of cognition. And as all objects appear within cognition, objects (and their relations) appear for us. The million-dollar question is whether those objects are real independently of our cognition of them, or whether their reality is imputed to them, by us, on the basis of our experience of them. That is the vital point to understand, because in my view, the idealist argument is not that objects are composed from some mysterious mind-stuff as a constituent, but that whatever reality we impute to objects is dependent on our cognition of them. See the difference?

The view that the reality of objects is 'constructed' or 'constituted' by our cognitive acts is now quite commonplace amongst cognitive scientists and philosophers. One example that has been discussed here recently is the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman (see here and here), but there are many others with different attitudes and interpretations. But all of them, at least, acknowledge the constructive role of consciousness.

Swap you, I’m on grandparent duties :scream:

Precious little is done on an online forum. It’s all talk.

it’s that there is the suggestion of something important ‘over the horizon’, so to speak, in those pregnant concluding aphorisms, such as:

Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.

Ethics is transcendental.

(Ethics and aesthetics are one.)

You can see how this lends itself to the positivist’s ‘boo/hurrah’ theory of ethics - that there are no intelligible criteria for ethical judgements and that they’re simply matters of feeling. I’m sure that was not what he meant but it’s easy to read it that way. (Elsewhere I’m sure we’ve discussed the Stuart Greenstreet article on the folly of logical positivism.)

More broadly, language has many functions beyond the descriptive. There’s poetic language, there’s symbolic and metaphoric language, there’s literature and drama; and the perplexities of existence are due to much more than just ‘confusions of speech’. Apophatic silence has a place but it’s not, pardon the irony, the last word.

I notice in the Greenstreet article there’s another pregnant phrase “The great problem round which everything I write turns is: Is there an order in the world a priori, and if so what does it consist in?” (Notebooks p.53)’ That is a question of great interest to me, so I’d love to know where he explores it.

Don't forget that God plays dice. Always annoyed Einstein, but there it is.

The showing part is all the metaphysical language used in the T. — Sam26

An example being.....

I think much more could be said, but I won’t press the point,

It might be worth mentioning the penultimate paragraphs:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. — 6.54

Any insights on what 'surmounting these propositions' means (discounting the logical positivist interpretation)?

I've seen "beyond being," i.e., beyond existence, taken to mean that the source and foundation of all existence must itself be, in some sense, independent of existence... — Art48

There's a crucial point behind this, which is the meaning of what exists and what is, are not necessarily synonymous, whereas it is usually assumed that they have the same meaning: to say 'something exists' and 'something is', is to say the same thing. That is made explicit in positivism generally, and logical positivism in particular, which says that only statements about matters of fact carry any meaning. But it is also characteristic of empiricism and naturalism: that what is real are natural phenomena, which can be known objectively - what is 'out there, somewhere', ascertained to exist, or inferred as existing based on observed phenomena. But 'what is real' holds a larger sense than that, because (among other things) it includes the observing subject. It also includes the ever-shifting network of dynamic causal connections that together comprise the unique attributes of this moment.

It is the intuitive insight into that totality which has been called 'the unitive vision'. In Western philosophy, it is associated with Plotinus:

Plotinus's philosophy is difficult to elucidate, precisely because what it seeks to elucidate is a manner of thinking that precedes what one terms discursive thought. Discursive thought is the sort of thinking we do most often in a philosophical discussion or debate, when we seek to follow a series of premises and intermediate conclusions to a final conclusion. In such a thinking, our minds move from one point to the next, as if each point only can be true after we have known the truth of the point preceding it. The final point is true, only because we have already built up one by one a series of points preceding it logically that are also true. In the same way, the meaning of the sentence I am now speaking only builds itself up by the addition of each word, until coming to its conclusion it makes a certain sense built of the words from which it is constituted.

Because discursive thinking is within ordinary time, it is not capable of thinking all its points or saying all its words in the very same moment. But Plotinus wishes to speak of a thinking that is not discursive but intuitive, i.e. that it is knowing and what it is knowing are immediately evident to it. There is no gap then between thinking and what is thought--they come together in the same moment, which is no longer a moment among other consecutive moments, one following upon the other. Rather, the moment in which such a thinking takes place is immediately present and without difference from any other moment, i.e. its thought is no longer chronological but eternal. To even use names, words, to think about such a thinking is already to implicate oneself in a time of separated and consecutive moments (i.e. chronological) and to have already forgotten what it is one wishes to think, namely thinking and what is thought intuitively together. — Plotinus, Class Lecture Notes

Plotinus' philosophy was enormously influential on the successive ages of philosophy, up until and including Hegel, although subsequently deprecated, at least in English-speaking philosophy. The point being, that something like this 'unitive vision' is required to make sense of philosophical monism, if it is not to be reduced to a kind of caricature which takes 'the one' to consist of a kind of agglomeration of everything that exists. It is within the context of that unitive understanding that the distinction between 'what is real' and 'what exists' is, at least, intelligible, and which provides a framework for the meaning of monism.

:lol:

So Biden versus Trump, again — Mikie

Early days yet. I'm sure 2023 has many surprises in store.

The argument would be "there are not multiple types of rationality, multiple, discrete logical necessities, and thus the intelligible aspect of the world must be, at some level, a unified type. The unintelligible aspects of the world, if such things can coherently exist, don't enter into the question because how can one know the unknowable?" That does seem like it could qualify as monism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you could plausibly trace the lineage of an argument of that kind from traditional philosophy (not saying I know how it would be done, but something along the lines of every discrete thing being derived from the One). The other issues you bring up - the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, and Galileo's dualism - are also very interesting topics in their own right.

:pray:

Buddhism generally doesn't accept the existence of any ultimate substance (in the philosophical sense of 'substance'). But interpreting that is quite a subtle matter. Buddhism also rejects nihilism, the belief that nothing is real. The thrust of Buddhist teaching is not in positing or believing in some putative ultimate, but insight into the cause of dukkha (suffering) through the operation of the chain of dependent origination. Buddhism is very much a path of disciplined insight and discernment of this principle in operation, with the goal of the cessation of grasping or clinging, by which one is bound to repeated rebirth. That's pretty much the textbook description. But it's very easily misconstrued as a nihilistic philosophy, which is how it was always portrayed by its Brahmin antagonists, and also by the early European interpreters of it (see The Cult of Nothingness.) That comes from the understandable (but nevertheless mistaken) view of 'cessation' (nirodha) as simply meaning non-being or non-existence. Grasping the 'right view' is quite a subtle matter and the first step in the 'eightfold path'. (Some of the recent Buddhologists, such as Jay Garfield, do a much better job of interpretation. Garfield compares the suspension of judgement that is deployed by Buddhist meditation with the 'epoche' of the original sceptics, and the possible connections between Buddhism and Pyrrhonism has received a lot of attention.)

Pseudo-Dionysius is much nearer in spirit to the Platonic tradition and one of the principal sources for Christian Platonism. There's an intriguing connection in the philosophy of the early medieval monk, John Scotus Eriugena, who translated Pseudo-Dionysius into Latin (much to the astonishment of his peers). Have a read of the SEP entry on him on the 'five modes of being and non-being'. My heuristic for this, is that premodern philosophy retains a sense of levels of reality, which has generally been abandoned by modern philosophy. When you read the ancient and medieval description of the divine intellect as 'beyond being', I take that to mean 'beyond the vicissitudes of coming-to-be and passing-away' - an expression that is found in both the Western and Buddhist sacred literature. This is related to the ancient iconography cosmological philosophy of the Great Chain of Being, which has generally fallen out of favour since the scientific revolution, I think due to its association with Aristotelian and Ptolmaic cosmology. But I think it's within that general philosophical framework, incorporating the neoPlatonic principle of levels of being, that the idea of 'the One' is meaningful. I don't know if there's anything corresponding to that in today's scientific cosmology (hence why I mentioined Heinrich Pas' book on Monism above.)

Alvin Bragg files 'shoosh' order.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sought a protective order on Wednesday barring former President Donald Trump from spilling grand jury and other sensitive materials. In a 26-page motion, Bragg’s assistant district attorney Catherine McCaw noted Trump’s history of trying to undermine the various criminal investigations against him in New York, Georgia and Washington, D.C. “Defendant has posted extensively regarding these investigations on social media and has discussed these investigations in speeches, at political rallies, and during television appearances,” her motion states. “His posts have included personal attacks on those involved in the investigation, including witnesses, jurors, and those involved in conducting or overseeing the investigations. In many instances, he has even posted regarding their family members.”

Is this like the emptiness of Buddhism? — Art48

Again, the key in such discussions is to refrain from objectification or reification: there is no ultimate thing, substance, entity, or anything of the kind that can be conceptually described and grasped (something especially emphasized in Buddhism). That is the realisation that underlies the 'way of unknowing' that has analogies in all the contemplative traditions East and West. It is also why entering into it requires more than verbal analysis, it requires access to other planes of understanding that are innaccessible to philosophy and science (and not the popularised 'macmindfulness' of talk show hosts and wellness gurus, either.)

Śūnyatā, translated as 'emptiness', has often been depicted in Western culture as a 'monstrous void' or 'the complete absence of anything' but I'm sure that is also is a consequence of attempting to conceptually represent a realisation that is outside the framework of conventional discourse (one of translator Thomas Cleary's books on Chinese Buddhism is called 'Entry into the Inconceivable'.) But those kinds of insights are firewalled off from Western philosophy by being categorised along with religions, even though they are very different to the prophetic religion of the Biblical traditions. (I think they're descended more from shamanism.)

It's worth noting that the idea that everything is in fact "determined by" a "multitude of minute particles," pre-dates anything resembling science by centuries, showing up in ancient Egyptian thought and the earliest Greek thought. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The original impetus behind the idea of the atom was to solve the problem of the relation between the One and the Many. Atomism proposed that all matter is composed of indestructible units, eternal and unchanging. These atoms are constantly in motion, colliding and combining to form larger structures such as molecules and compounds. By positing the existence of these fundamental particles, atomism provided a way to explain the diversity and complexity of the world while maintaining its unity and coherence. This was the foundation of the legendary prose-poem of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, which was re-discovered by the French philosophes of the Enlightenment. Regardless of whether it really does describe the ultimate facts of existence, it has obviously been an extraordinarily fruitful paradigm for the advancement of science. But as is well known, the idea of the atom itself has now been absorbed into the more ethereal concepts of fields and waves, besides which there is also quite a strong tendency towards an idealist metaphysics in modern physics due to the 'observer problem'.

//I should add that the pole of the dialectic in ancient Greek thought opposite to that of the atomists, was represented in the Parmenides and the teaching that nature is One, and that only the One is an object of proper knowledge, as the world of phenomena is constantly changing and passing away and so can only ever be the object of opinion.//

all water under the bridge, apparently.

Q: Where would you look in modern English-language philosophy for discussion of the concept of 'the unconditioned'?

A: In modern English-language philosophy, you might look for discussions of the concept of 'the unconditioned' in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. Some specific philosophers and works that address this concept include:

Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason": In this work, Kant discusses the idea of the unconditioned in his critique of rationalism, arguing that human reason cannot reach knowledge of the unconditioned because it is beyond the realm of possible experience.

Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time": Heidegger explores the concept of the unconditioned through his analysis of human existence and the structures of being that underlie it. He argues that the unconditioned is the "groundless ground" of all that exists, and that it can be accessed through a process of "authentic" self-discovery.

Alvin Plantinga's "Warranted Christian Belief": In this work, Plantinga defends the rationality of belief in God by arguing that the concept of the unconditioned is essential to any adequate account of human knowledge and that belief in God provides a coherent explanation for the existence of the unconditioned.

David Lewis's "On the Plurality of Worlds": Lewis explores the concept of the unconditioned through his analysis of possible worlds and the idea of a "compossible" set of properties that can coexist without being dependent on each other.

Graham Harman's "Object-Oriented Ontology": Harman argues that the unconditioned can be accessed through a process of "withdrawal" in which objects reveal their hidden, inaccessible aspects. — ChatGPT

I would have nominated the first three, the second two I have heard of, but would not have thought of them.

Of course, but again, the point that I'm making is that there's an association of metaphysics with a kind of religious attitude - you see that even in neoplatonism, which at the time it was active was antagonistic to Christianity. Go back to the question- what is the unconditioned? Where in philosophical discourse do you encounter discussion of that? There's some discussion of it in German idealism but I contend that there is nothing which corresponds to it in most modern English-speaking philosophy.

Yes. And having discarded everything that used to be understood as metaphysics on account of its association with religion, then it verges on the impossible.

Predictions work perfectly well. Recall that Kant’s theory of nebular formation (slightly modified by LaPlace) is still considered current science and that Kant used to lecture on scientific subjects. Even though we may only ever know things as they appear to us, those appearances are consistent across a vast range of empirical facts. But empirical observation doesn’t amount to metaphysical insight. That’s the crucial distinction. (Beware of taking the thread into Kant, however, it’s almost as notorious a derailer of threads as interpretations of quantum mechanics.)