Are we talking about the defining feature of the model or the reality. (You understand the difference by now, right?)

Let me hold you by the hand and give you a childish example: An equation may have a solution, which you may prove must exist, but that does not mean you possess the solution. Is that a bit complicated? — tom

But you were saying something about reality itself being comprehensible. We might certainly be inclined towards such an ontological belief given a supporting epistemic framework of theory and measurement. However you seem fixated on a naive Platonism when it comes to this issue. For you, the deductive truths of mathematics appear to bypass any need to demonstrate that the world is as the models say, rather than those models merely placing strong notional constraints on our speculations.

Even mathematics has had to accept that it starts its modelling with the "good guess" of an axiom. The point of Godel was to show that axioms are modelling hypotheses, not self-formalising truths. They become secured over time due to the fact they deliver - in terms of our also rather human purposes.

But all this is Epistemology 101. Curious.

Except that quarks, leptons, and bosons are point particles. — tom

Why do you keep avoiding the "modelled as" point particles? I mean it is normal in physics to understand that it is a specific kind of useful idealisation.

A point particle (ideal particle[1] or point-like particle, often spelled pointlike particle) is an idealization of particles heavily used in physics. Its defining feature is that it lacks spatial extension: being zero-dimensional, it does not take up space.[2] A point particle is an appropriate representation of any object whose size, shape, and structure is irrelevant in a given context. For example, from far enough away, an object of any shape will look and behave as a point-like object.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_particle

The key idea is that a point particle lacks internal structure. So even with quantum HUP fuzziness, you can still exactly locate it as a quantum superposition of itself. There are no observables resulting from further internal structure to blur the picture.

But equally - if we are talking about ontological reality - you run into problems trying to get close to a massive point particle. There is the Compton wavelength at which your point will start spewing other points. In trying to get close observationally, we produce more particles due to the energy density. And which is now the one we claim to have been there?

So is there some reason you take a monstrously simple approach to your ontological claims about particles. Or do just believe the pictures of things are those things due to some kind of naive realism (kind of like your happy literal acceptance of branching multiverses)?

Which means, according to you, the Standard Model is wrong. Please explain. — tom

So if particles are modelled as strings rather than points, the SM is "wrong"?

Sounds legit.

Some people wonder why Americans are so religious. (They are compared to Europe, especially). I would say it is (at least to some extent) BECAUSE there has been so much splintering. Every time a group divides, it is re-energized. — Bitter Crank

Hah. That's a very good point. The Anglican church in the UK is pretty relaxed about actual belief in God these days. The social service aspect is what counts. So mysticism ending in politics as you say. And the Anglican traditionalists are in Africa now, wondering what happened.

No. Totally legit. Complete sense. [Backs away nervously, feeling for the door...]

So God is moving the whole of time as a block. Is He pulling off that feat by shifting it to some other point of ... time?

Sounds legit.

What I was originally pointing out to you was the big difference between reacting to Newtonian vs modern understandings of space/time.

So for instance you were imagining Leibniz running a relativistic argument against Newtonian time by God turning back the universal clock by four hours and seeing no difference.

Well great. Newtonian mechanics is reversible like that. It does have that time symmetry. That is why time seems like a dimension one can freely time travel in.

But once you admit energy into the picture - global time as entropically-directional change - then going back in time is actually going to break a symmetry. If you go back four hours, the whole universe is now four hours hotter ... as well as four hours smaller. There are actual consequences that a thermometer would reveal.

So Einsteinian relativity tries to recover some of the good old Newtonian scale indifference. It gives you a formula for handling "energetic Lorenzian boosts" - the symmetry-breaking effects of going at some other speed less than c.

So on the one hand, we still seem to have backdrop time - and quantum mechanics says thank goodness for that.

But then next up on the batting plate is quantum gravity theory and now we really have to rethink our notion of time so that it does align with a thermal view - uni-directional emergent energetic change.

Talk about time is tricky because really it is about relative rates of change - change overall in a cooling/expanding universe versus change locally due to relative energy scale. And each is the backdrop against which we read off the other - that is the lightspeed view (of a thermalising bath of cosmic background radiation) vs the restmass view (of these lumpy, sluggish particles of "mass" that can "move through time" just by, relatively speaking, not moving at all).

Again, I have no idea whether you have a concrete thesis or any actual interest in the science involved. But a thermometer would tell you if you have wound the Universe's clock backwards (just hold it up in deep space and measure the temperature of the CMB).

I'm still mystified by what you mean. But I guess I shouldn't hold my breath hoping you will explain. Opacity is your weapon of choice again it appears.

Do you mean spacetime? I don't follow. Why do you think it doesn't relate to the dynamical view I described?

As you say, that is what he argued directly against. So he may have been reacting with a religious/idealist point of view. But the context was still a particular model of spacetime that lacked direction or growth and was considered to be statically eternal.

I mean do you think his arguments work against the relativistic view and its particular features, like the Einstein hole argument?

They can sound similar, but then they may be quite opposite in fact...

Thus in Leibniz-style thought experiments, worlds that at first sight [appear] physically different, turn out to be mathematically identical, [but] in the [Einstein] hole argument, apparently mathematically different worlds reveal themselves as physically identical.

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/9676/1/Giovanelli_-_Leibniz_Equivalence.pdf

Leibniz and Kant may not be much help then as they were still operating in a Newtonian reference frame in which the best that could be imagined was Galilean relativity.

Modern physics changes things by bringing change directly into the picture as action or energy. Nothing has substantial being - neither massive objects nor the massless space they occupy. It is all just shapes given to energy transactions. So it becomes natural - if not formally expressed in that fashion - to measure time in terms of energy units.

The greater the momentum, the slower the local clock runs. The speeding particle gains "more time" because it takes longer to decay. Or conversely, you can say it loses the potential for change and becomes more the changeless object. Like the photon that goes so fast it never really exists so far as it is concerned.

By contrast, a static mass is in a least energetic state and so experiences the actuality of global temporal dimensionality the most fully. It can actually fail to change in knowing itself to remain in the same location while everything else has moved. And then know that is itself moving as mostly everything else is staying the same now.

So the picture of time is completely changed by including energy or action as part of the co-ordinate system. It may still sound a spatialised description - as when we count the revolutions of a clock hand making its exactly repeating round trips (a way to watch something move, but not let it run away out of sight). But the clock has to be wound up. So the spatialised trickery is still the measurement of some energy potential. Which we soon discover when accelerating the clock in a rocket.

Is time an aspect of an object, even? — Moliere

Time is either going to be a global dimension through which things move or it is instead a measure of local change. And as usual when faced with a compelling dichotomy, the answer is going to be you need to combine both to get a full answer.

So time is clearly about a local potential for change - what could happen in the future of some object or substance in terms of its degrees of freedom. How could what is currently the same become something different.

And time is just as clearly about a global constraint on all that. Time has a universal direction in which the past represents an accumulation of all the ways the present has become historically limited. And that leaves then the localised degrees of freedoms - the possible future of all those existing objects or substances.

So time measures change against some notion of stasis. It measures the differences that make a difference. When we say an object moves through time, we mean that it doesn't change while the history all around it is changing - eliminating degrees of freedom in many other locations. And then there comes the moment where the object does itself change - becomes further historically marked in some way we consider different enough to make a difference. Now it is the changing object being seen against a static backdrop.

So it is all about flux vs stasis. And we can read that off the world either as local flux seen against generalised stasis, or local stasis against generalised (cooling and expanding, thermal arrow of time) flux. It's all relative, as relativity says.

Whether or not people actually believe in materialism is kind of null vs. the fact that a materialistic ethos controls how society functions, in relation to technology. — Noble Dust

I agree. But then that is the target - the way we have wired in a machine-like approach to life in our general social institutions.

You can blame the scientists to an extent. They have jobs because society values the economic return on technological control over the world that their modelling efforts provide. And then some may endorse this at a metaphysical level as the only way to be - a giant resource consuming machine.

But the Dawkins and Dennetts then become symptoms of the disease, not its causes. And to attack what is going on in woolly spiritual terms just ain't going to work. Marx tried it. The hippies tried it. The new agers tried it. Wishful thinking just doesn't scale.

It may also be a struggle for ecological or systems thinking to make a difference. But at least that has a hope if it is a correct basis of analysis. So the only cure for scientism is better science.

On the lowest level is the material/physical world, which depends for its existence on the higher levels. On the very highest/deepest level is the Infinite or Absolute — Wayfarer

My problem with this is that it is so vague that it can be interpreted as being true either way.

So a systems scientist at least would say that the world is both matter and form - or energetic actions and organisational constraints. So the infinite/absolute is understood rather Platonically as mathematical necessity. There are forms of organisation that simply have to be (because they are the most symmetric states, the ones that have the least action).

And although modern physics doesn't proclaim that it thinks this way, in fact it does. The materiality of atomism has long been replaced by the pursuit of the global mathematical symmetries that are the possible forms of localised excitations. Actual matter has been reduced to nothing but some measured constant to be plugged into the equations. Where the forms feel really concrete, the material bit has become as ethereal as can be imagined.

I think it is important to respect this actual shift in scientific thought. In quantum ontology, a particle has become a sum over all its possibilities. So hammering scientists for being dull materialists has become completely wrong.

So yes, science (as an institution) does still reject transcendent or spiritual causation. But if you are making a comparative religion point, science has shifted away from a material substance reductionism towards the other end of the spectrum - seeing mathematical form as the eternal organising force.

And in doing that, it returns towards ancient immanent metaphysics where chaos, or apeiron, or pure potential are the "material grounds" upon which rational necessity imposes its organisational desires.

So science is pre-Christian in going back to first philosophy notions - that you find also in Taoism, Buddhism, Judaism.

That is the irony. Scientism and Christianity would have more in common in framing the world as matter vs mind or spirit. They accept those two apparently conflicting choices as what they either fight for or against.

You want to crusade against materialists? Actual scientists stopped being that - in terms of operative metaphysics - about a century ago.

So in broad terms, what I think has happened to Western culture is that it has been hijacked by a hostile force, almost a parasitic entity, namely scientific materialism. — Wayfarer

Certainly you can name your hate figures - Dawkins, Dennett, Krauss ... er, I guess there are a few more who like the limelight and book sales that come with being the Church's loyal opposition.

And certainly, science in general (as an institution) thinks of itself as doing naturalism. So it would reject any transcendent explanations at a gut level, because its successful working presumption is the world is closed for causality - immanent in its material organisation.

But rather than a hijack, you have the Enlightenment creating its very useful machine model of reality. It was a mode of thought that was great at turning us into technological beings. Then you have the variety of responses that turn of events provoked.

I would say the illegitimate response was Romanticism - or at least that aspect of Romanticism that tried to retrieve a transcendent metaphysics.

The legitimate response - in the sense of being metaphysically correct in its analysis - would be the organicism or systems thinking that persisted in the corners of the larger scientific enterprise, and understood its deeper connections to the ancient metaphysical paradigms.

So this is where we are at. Science did take the view that the world is a machine. Culture did respond by saying that "materialism" is fine as far as it goes, but misses the larger metaphysical picture. But that larger picture is either going to include spirit or some other notion of causal rupture - which at worst becomes "a big daddy in the sky" - or it is instead going to presume that the world is an organic self-organisation out of pure possibility, and build some useful scientific model of that.

As I say, we are a century into that new way of thinking about the world. Yet news of that is being drowned out by all the physics-bashing (and I admit, also by the fact that the computer scientists and neuroscientists - reflecting medicine's belief that the body is another machine - do continue to promote the technologist's metaphysical creed).

However dig into the ontology of modern physics, and it seems as immaterial as it gets. You are dealing with mathematical forms imposed on pure possibility - constraints on actions. But the fact that the metaphysics is now mathematical abstraction makes it also rather inaccessible to most. So that is another ingredient here - why the cultural war takes the shape it does rather than engaging with the real philosophical issues.

But I think the historical evidence for the role of Christianity in the formation of the modern liberal state, and the principles I mentioned in the quotation at the top of this thread, are unarguable — Wayfarer

Of course it plays a role. But don't we find the origins of the notion of individuality in ancient Greece - overtly in Athenian democracy/Socratic philosophy, and then pragmatically in the earlier Milesian trading cities where being a cross-roads for travellers was already broadening the mind?

So I take the cynical view that a new kind of religious meme was born that involved telling folk they had a soul and a personal relation with God. This disconnected them from their attachment to a traditional communal setting - the local sacred places, customs and spirit figures - and tied them instead to the abstracted institutional notion of a holy church. Even kings were just other humans. Only you and God mattered in the end. Pass the hat around the congregation and funnel the proceeds to Rome.

So sure, Christianity was a good way of organising humans as it was all part of the detaching people from their very local social institutions and creating the kind of organisational scale that an abstracted religious institution can sustain. Just as the Romans also turned Greek city states into organised empires by institutionalising abstract laws of behaviour and governance.

The structural commonality is thus the creation of the abstracted individual to match the abstracted social institution. We teach people they are "unique selves", and that is powerful because that means people start acting in accordance to culturally-evolving abstractions - philosophical or rational ideas like moral codes and rules of law.

The active philosophical question then is, if we understand that to be the game, how should it be played now that we realise it? Christian behaviour does sound like a good way to run a society. It has pragmatic merit. So what would it be in tension with exactly when viewed perhaps from an atheist/enlightenment libertarian camp? Why would we give it special credit except in terms of its practical results (which could be a sense of wellbeing and purpose, as opposed to the nihilism that appears to be grounded on some versions of enlightenment scientism - the line I'm guessing you would take)?

know Schrodinger's point was that it was ridiculous to think the cat would be in a superposed state of alive and dead before we look, but a lot of people have taken it to mean the opposite. — Marchesk

Thermal decoherence adds extra constraints on those probabilities now, keeping the weirdness suitably quantum scale. The observer/collapse issue is not solved as such, but there is a commonsense work around where the statistics of the decaying particle (which causes the rather classical death by a shattered vial of poison) gives you a good argument for how soon the death is likely to happen.

No, all I'm saying is that aletheist's solution to the problem of counterfactuals doesn't work. He said that "if X then Y" is true if the laws of nature determine that if X happens then Y will happen. But when it comes to quantum events, the laws of nature don't determine that if X happens then Y will happen; they only determine that if X happens then Y might happen – even if "if X then Y" is true. — Michael

You do realise that you keep trying to build in a classical notion of causality where the past constrains the future in some general fashion? So you are making what since QM - as in delayed choice quantum eraser experiments - has become a questionable presumption. Instead - retrocausally - the future can constrain the past.

So the laws of nature can be real generals, or actual constraints. But they are not as anchored in the general thermodynamic arrow of time or causality as classical metaphysics would presume. The quantum scale of action sits outside of this flow - doing its non-classical sum over all counterfactual possibilities so as to take even its unhappened future into account as part of its wavefunction.

Gravity is pulling on the stone in Peirce's hands. So that sets up a reasonable expectation in our minds. It would fall, but he is stopping that. However the stone has some remote possibility of quantum tunnelling through Peirce's mitts. That too is part of the natural law here. You just would treat it as a remote possibility as you are unlikely to think it reasonable to spend the rest of eternity waiting for that to happen.

So quantum natural law simply defies your preconceptions with regards to counterfactuality both in time and space. Counterfactually, the stone could be on the other side of Peirce's hands. Hence tunnelling really happens.

Honestly, you are only demanding to be given a "better law of nature" here - one that conforms to your bent for counterfactual definiteness at all times and places.

So for you, if QM's indeterminism is a falsification of your preference for metaphysical determinism, then you reject QM as an adequate account of nature. The world has to adjust itself so that it conforms to your notion of how to be truth-apt.

You started off backwards on this whole issue, and now you are aiming to be as backwards as it could possibly get.

Yeah sure. Just like a coin toss. Because we can only give a probability of heads vs tails, we must abandon foolish notions about there being heads or tails. :-}

Really, you just appear to be being argumentative and not even trying.

I just said that QM gives you a probabilty of either statement being the true one. So physics says counterfactuality is not just epistemology but looks to be ontology. Nature itself takes all its future conditionals into account in a way that is robustly measurable.

So to do physics now, we actually have to be able to sum up possibilities in concrete fashion. Counterfactuals are real not just for general physical laws (altheist's point), they are real for individual quantum events.

A logicist concerned with the deductive truth of a conditional arguement might well think that there is a problem here in drawing a true conclusion from a false premise. The Peircean view then instead seeks to make sense of why people in fact quite routinely make use of counterfactual conditionals in their reasoning. Counterfactuality is in fact necessary for our ideas to be testable. It is the opposite of a bad practice when truth is the outcome not of deduction but an inquiry motivated by abductive/retroductive thought.

QM then is a further complication here as it says that even when the choice of future outcomes is constrained to be bivalent, all you might be able to say by way of prediction is something probabilistic. But even classically, that is the case with a coin toss - ahead of the flip, you know the outcome is going to be heads or tails, but your guess is 50/50.

So the OP raised a concern about valid deduction using counterfactuals. But they have other uses in reasoning. And even modal logic tries to get at that in imagining ensembles of worlds where it is as if some experiment has been run using an infinity of slightly different conditions.

how do you falsify the counterfactual "if X had happened then Y would have happened"? — Michael

My point was that counterfactuality amounts to having some theory in play. You can be sure of X because you are sure of what would count as not-x. So counterfactuality becomes the basis on which we can verify or falsify.

You are thinking of counterfactual conditionals- a strictly logicist issue. I'm talking about the place of counterfactuality in pragmatic or scientific reasoning.

Remember that I was replying on your specific question about Schrödinger's cat/Peircean epistemology. So I'm talking about counterfactuality in the context of what QM would call counterfactual definiteness.

Sure, how would you distinguish between the accidental and the necessary when dealing with particular conditionals? Especially when the Peircean view - now backed by quantum theory - sees the world as irreducibly spontaneous (because never completely constrained by its own habits).

So you have to take the probabilistic big picture view - as in, Popperian falsification. Pragmatism only claims to minimise our uncertainty about some proposition. In that sense, absolute verification is a naive realist's pipedream.

[altheist beat me to it. :) ]

So verificationism? — Michael

Yep. In the end, the default position has to be some bare instrumentalism.

But Peircean epistemology wants to offer more that that. It recognises also the fact that we are modelling the world with evolutionary purpose. There is an internal criterion in operation because - contra the simple positivist - we have interests at stake.

So that is deflationary of our truth-making. On the other hand, accepting we are motivated by purposes in modelling means we could decide to "tell the truth of reality" as our goal - leading to the usual search for maximum invariance in statements. And also it means that we can trust to a community of like minds - expect that a common purpose will drive the evolution of ideation towards some best outcome in the long run.

Verificationism is the bare bones position. Pragmatism fleshes out that view of truth so that it gives us choices about where we might want to sit on some scale of subjectivity~objectivity. It is a model of the modelling relation. So more interesting than mere instrumentalism.

That is the position seemingly endorsed (at least taci — Pierre-Normand

But modern physics - the path integral or sum over histories view - is more sophisticated in realising that many possiblities are contradictory in their actuality. If a particle could take the left slit, it could equally take the right, hence self interference as a statistically real fact.

So the quantum ontological view we have been forced to is that every possiblility is "virtually" actual, and yet much of that actuality is a self contradiction that suppresses actual actualisation. Instead what exists is the counterfactuality of all those possiblities not having happened ... and yet existing in a wavefunction fashion to have definitely constrained the space of the possible.

At the quantum level, counterfactuality is very real. It is the actual constraint on possibility by possibility itself.

Of course many find this weirdness too difficult to accept - hence the retreat back into deterministic interpretations like many worlds and their actual multiverses.

Then how do you make sense of counterfactuals being true? If the laws of nature are not such that if we had done this then that must have happened (i.e. chance is involved), then your initial explanation doesn't work. — Michael

The role of counterfactuals is provide the empirical definiteness - the possible acts of measurement - by which we can take a statement or concept to be true.

So in Peircean terms, the world may not be completely constrained in the way we like to imagine, and yet still we can impose our conceptual map on reality and read off measurements (of the presence or absence of x) as a sign of the truth of something we might say.

So in folk physics, the audience watching Peirce with his stone will have a simple counterfactually framed expectation - that stone will fall when he lets go because it is heavy. And then when it does drop, that is the observable fact which is a sign that their belief structure was true. There was no counterfactual surprise to explain.

To then talk about a theory of gravitating masses is a more sophisticated mental framework. Part of what would be the sign of the theory's truth would be to be able to measure the earth being pulled towards the stone - and were that not the observed case, the theory is in trouble.

Likewise quantum mechanic predicts certain counterfactually-based outcomes - some chance of unpredictable fluctuations. And even thermodynamics predicts the unpredictability of all the atoms in the stone happening to thermally fluctuate upwards at the instant of release. That has to be a possibility - perhaps infinitely remote - if the deterministic statements of thermodynamics are true.

So the Peircean view of truth is triadic. Concepts are truth-apt to the degree they support a counterfactual-based notion of the signs or measurements that would make them so. This puts the act of measurement back in the mind of the observer of course. But it makes what is going on explicit. Truth is based on the signs that seem close enough to what we would expect to experience if x was the case, vs not-x being the case.

So the OPs problem was with counterfactuals being granted too much apparent reality. But it is instead the notion of the factual which is granted too much realness by naive or direct realists. Truth is always a judgement that we have been given the proper sign that some thought is right. And we can only aspire to that kind of certainty if we could also know for sure what it would have looked like instead for that belief to have been matchingly false.

This really bites when our ideas are in fact framed vaguely and so we can't possibly imagine what would count as evidence either way.

From a natural phillosophy POV, I would say rather than distancing us from psychological value, we need to see money and power (the ability to expend energy) as a semiotic relation within which modern society inserts itself.

So the modern economic mode of life involves these two complementary kinds of abstraction. On the one hand, we have worked towards universalised flows of energy - principally the electricity networks and petrol stations that any kind of human productive activity can hook into. And then money acts as the abstract sign of the cost of a unit of material action, as in the price of a barrel of oil.

Obviously the world is more complex than that. Status matters, and so people pay a lot for paintings and other tokens of cultural value. Although conspicuous consumption is also just showing you can afford to waste energy.

But the point is that in creating these universalised energy sources and universalised energy tokens, we maximise our human freedoms then to do "anything we want to imagine" within the limits we have thus socially constructed

So rather than dollars distancing us from the true value of nature, they are our way to abstract the essence of nature itself - put a single market price on it's raw energy value - and thus give ourselves the most possible freedom to mobilise nature in ways that seem to meet our desires.

The plover when caught on its nest staggers away, feigning a broken wing. A neat little evolutionary trick known to any ornithologist.

But I'm sure this presents no problem at all for a Weinbergian metaphysics. It is all just meaningless atomic motions in the end, no messages or semiotics in play.

Or if we must admit to something more than just brute material physics here, then we can still pretend that is covered by an analysis of electrochemical action at synapses and within muscles controlling a wing. We can stick to talking about the physics of symbols rather than their meanings.

Indeed, rather like the plover frantic about the prospect of its nest being trodden on, we will be found racing about in a distracting fashion - throwing out a succession of enticingly lame evasions - in the hope of leading any pursuer far from our threatened belief system.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

Nothing matters. — Frederick KOH

Sounds pretty religious to me.

This locality suggests that no single metaphysical account of hierarchy for causal relations to obtain within emerges from the epistemology of scientific explanation. Instead, a pluralist perspective is recommended—many different kinds of top-down causation (explanation) can exist alongside many different kinds of bottom-up causation (explanation). — Pierre-Normand

But this confuses epistemology and ontology.

Of course our causal accounts of nature might well be varied and poorly connected due to accidents of history and differences in interests. But the naturalist perspective would expect - for rational reasons, accounted for in hierarchy theory itself - a deep unity of nature, and so the potential for some actual nested hierarchy of theories.

So sure, pluralism could be the epistemic case if we had no particular desire to get the whole story of nature right. But on the other hand, it is very reasonable to expect that nature does have its one unified story to tell - even if it is also agreed that a lot of the actual story involves historical accidents along the way that add random elements of a degree of "living" spontaneity.

A theory of birds is contingent on there being birds. Yet still that evolutionary accident fits into a greater hierarchical story of an intersection between ecological constraints and organismic possibilties. Something like a bird would have had to fill that niche.

So a totalising discourse would be ontically pluralist in that strict sense - the history of the Cosmos has its accidents too. But that still leaves as our main target the formal backbone of all that counts as its integrative necessity - the hierarchy that is simplicity building into complexity via the semiosis of level-creating symmetry breakings.

As an aside, biology is going through what could be its "standard model" style causal revolution. There is an argument that life can only exist because of the chemo-structural possibility of a respiratory chain. And that involves a symmetry breaking depending on which way protons are pushed across a membrane (in to out, or out to in). Nature of course had no choice but to do both - giving us bacteria and archaea. Then have dichotomised respiration, again it was inevitable that the two modes would become mixed in the one organism to produce the large complex cells of the eukaryota.

If this is true - and we are talking about work only a decade old - then almost all the old evolutionary contingency when it comes to the evolution of life is removed at source. There is in the whole universe only this single way that the potential of chemistry could take the next step to be organised as living dissipative structure.

And this is just like particle physics with its tale of gauge symmetry breaking. The destiny of Universe - once its bath of radiation had cooled and expanded sufficiently - was completely locked in by Platonic-strength constraints on particle production.

Even human social, economic and political structures are likely to have very little that are truly contingent about them - http://pontotriplo.org/quickpicks/constructal_theory_of_social_dynamics.html

So I would say we are learning that nature is far more unified by some general organisational principles - mainly to do with closure for causality (symmetries) and least action principles (symmetry breakings) - than we ever really expected. Simplicity and complexity are being united under the one set of metaphysical rules.

When a protein "acts as a message to a system" the steps can either be broken down into interactions explained by chemistry or there are people trying to do that. — Frederick KOH

Hah. I'm glad this turned out to be just an extended in-joke and you don't want to make any serious point.

What is never silly is the perspective, provided by reductionism, that apart from historical accidents these things ultimately are the way they are because of the
fundamental principles of physics. — Frederick KOH

So these "historical accidents", are they all material events or instead are some of them symbolically meaningful interactions?

When a protein acts as a message to a system, is that covered by Weinberg's reductionist ontology? And why would so many biologists strongly disagree? Are they just bad at reductionism/abstractionism?

Should they all defer to Weinberg. :)

Using calculations by hand you can't model anything more complicated than the hydrogen atom. Computers are used for more complicated atoms. — Frederick KOH

Huh? It doesn't matter how you do your calculations when it comes to NP completeness. This is about whether you can do them.

Ornithologists don't expect to be able to derive everything from chemical bonds either. — Frederick KOH

So what is stopping them in your view? It would be possible right?

Isn't the very idea of abstraction leaving things out? — Frederick KOH

So reductionism = abstraction? Have we changed the subject just to avoid you answering my question about a failure to be able to compute protein folding even from a complete knowledge of the local bonds in play?

And who knows whether you are defending an epistemic-strength or ontic-strength position. You are still refusing to say.

It's OK to admit to being a pragmatist on these issues you know?

All you had to do was quote a comment of mine. — Frederick KOH

All I've asked you is whether it matters that protein folding can't be completely modelled as an addition of local bonding forces. Surely you accept that as proof that "something" goes missing once one tries to reduce the rate-dependent dynamics of the real physical world to a rate-independent informational description?

Have I said anything to suggest otherwise? — Frederick KOH

You tell me. I'm unclear whether you are simply defending reductionism on the grounds of epistemic utility or - as it does sound - trying to make a strained ontic claim.

Would it be reductionist to say that why they and related molecules behave the way they do is because of chemistry and physics? — Frederick KOH

Does reductionism fail in your view if protein folding via free energy minimisation counts as an NP complete problem? Or is it OK to be hand-wavingly approximate about even these "simplest" computations that nature appears to carry out in holistic fashion. Does it harm your case to admit the sum of the parts are not literally "a sum" when it comes to chemical and physical systems?

I think I answered this just a moment ago over in the "what do you care about thread".

But briefly, the very idea of making that measurement - claiming to see a constant conjuction (to the exclusion of everything else that is always going on) - is the tendentious step. We have already imposed a conception of "an event" on the world at that point.

This doesn't seem troublesome at all when it is a couple of balls colliding on a billiard table. But say you wanted to measure a particular whorl in a turbulent stream. Can you do that by dipping in a bucket and bringing it over for me to examine? In what way can I repeat the physics of the situation with sufficient completeness so that I can claim to understand its causality mechanically?

So causation is complex in reality. Yet Newtonian mechanics is an incredibly useful simplification of that causal reality - at least when our main interest lies is in building machines rather than building nature. And yes, the mechanical view of causation harbours paradoxes if you start to take its modelling literally. But why would philosophy do that? How could it become "a crisis"?

Why did Hume think we couldn't perceive causation? Because we only see the constant conjunction and not the underlying cause? Hume assumed that if there is such thing as causation, it had to be something unperceived. — Marchesk

One thing not being mentioned is that causation - out there in the world - is heavily contextual. Things happen in predictable fashion because the world is organised in some way that constrains what is possible. And that history accumulates over multiple spatiotemporal scales.

So the car crash couldn't have happened at that junction unless 100 years ago the road hadn't been built. Or if two seconds earlier, the driver hadn't been distracted by the phone ringing.

But physics of course is a reductionist modelling of causality that plays the useful trick of imagining timeless laws animated by instantaneous measurements. So when it comes to conceiving and perceiving the causes of events through this lens, it leads to the Humean situation where the perceived event seems to take up no time and thus have no causal history, nor future. We imagine the event to be punctate and contain no information apart from some number that gives it an instantaneous value - like a momentum or inertial velocity.

So everyone was reacting to Newtonian mechanics - a new metaphysics that broke the world apart in this particular fashion. And if you took it literally, perception became identified with acts of measurement. It was imagined that events had punctate value that could be abstracted away from all the surrounding context. Causality became bound up in a property like momentum that a mass possessed. These values could be plugged into rules - the equations - that were like Platonic ideas.

Thus causality was pushed out of sight. It either became hidden in timeless laws. Or it was concealed within the value assigned as the identity of some timeless event. Causation was reduced to correlation as an act of the abstracting scientific imagination. Real things got replaced by the numbers that stood for them within a new system of sign.

If that's the way we find best to model causation, then it makes it quite legitimate just to count events and treat a regularity of conjunction - a matching of theory and prediction - as "seeing causality at work". The damn thing - Newtonian mechanics - works. The philosophical error is then to pretend to be confused - to start claiming an epistemic crisis like Hume, and even Kant.

Logic itself is the same trick - the abstraction to the timelessness of a syntax of rules and variables. A system of pure sign that leaves its semantics outside of it as something to be determined in some other "informal" fashion. Someone has to decide the meaning of the words in a proposition, just as they have to decide what counts as properly measuring some event in the world with sufficient care.

So it should be clear to us - as the inventors - that we have developed a powerful modelling trick (one that takes modelling itself to its formal extremes). And the world "in itself" is exactly what had to be left out so that we could choose precisely what then to include back in as the abstracted elements of a formalised and timeless approach.

Hence events became perceived as contextless, memoryless and historyless as the way to assign them some punctate value (like some weight of motion in a direction). And from there it became difficult to see why one thing leads to another except that we have constructed some laws as an act of conception. The events themselves - due to the way we measure them - can no longer give us a necessary connection to some actual lived past that is the world "in itself". We no longer seem to see (at a scientifically modelled level) what we in fact do feel we see (at a regular biological Bayesian brain level) with our own eyes.

The animal brain is evolved to reason inductively. It works by taking a guess and predicting its future states, and that creates a context in which the suprising can stand out. The unexpected - the breaks with expectable causality - is what is being looked for. The lack of Humean continguity is the feature, not the bug, as it is the failures of causal reasoning which are the teachable moments for the critter.

But philosophy turns nature on its head with this new language-based trick of deductive thought. It flips us into the timeless view of the world where causes are eternal ideals - like laws - or essentialist properties, like the numbers assigned as the values of instantaneously measured events.

And now there is no connection that can be seen between one instant and the next. But that is just the way our formalisms operate - the timeless view we have imposed so as to make time itself an abstraction within the modelling.