You can tell if certain physical laws are deterministic just by looking at them. In particular, if they are time-symmetric, then they are deterministic. — tom

Yep. Our physical laws are constructed by excluding change or spontaneity. That aspect of existence is instead the job of measurement. We are left to measure variables like initial conditions and plug them into the "computable" models.

So time symmetry in equations is the way we construct the no-change that a measurement can then meaningfully break.

Scientific modelling is based on this epistemic dichotomy. We work to separate the symmetries and the symmetry-breakings. The laws are the frozen view. The measurements are how the laws are animated.

Importantly, the measurement part of the deal is incomputable. One simply has to ... enter the picture as an "observer".

Realist non-collapse quantum mechanics is also time-reversible therefore deterministic. More than that, it predicts a stationary block-multiverse in which all instants and universes coexist. — tom

Fortunately the fact that the measurement part of the deal is informal and thus incomputable means we can dismiss such metaphysical flights of fancy. We already know the epistemology of the scientific method doesn't support it.

So the measurement issue in physics plays the same role as the axiom-forming issue in Godel's critique of mathematical formalism. In the end, the whole point about eternal symmetries is that as some stage they did get broken and there was something to actually talk about.

What does pragmatism have to say about two competing theories of equal plausibility and appeal? — darthbarracuda

If that is the case, then of course it doesn't matter which theory you employ. But is that a realistic scenario? How often would you get such perfect symmetry?

Of course, in arriving at theories, you almost always need two such rival approaches that capture the research communities imagination. Any well organised academic field always organises itself in this dialectical fashion. If it seems possible to be a lumper on some issue, then there will be a matching camp of splitters. This dichotomisation of the possibilities is the most efficient way of ensuring the whole of the explanation space is being canvased.

But then eventually, the aim is to find the optimal theory - usually the one that most efficiently connects a purpose to an outcome.

You say you are a realist about an external world if I remember correctly, whereas I am actually leaning towards straight-up idealism. Both are able to capture the same things. They are empirically equivalent. Realism, in my view, could be seen as a historical and biased prejudice. — darthbarracuda

Well, given that I'm a pragmatist, I'm neither a realist, nor an idealist.

Realism vs idealism is an expression of the dialectical dynamic in academia that I just spoke about. It is natural that these two extremes would be pushed in intellectual history so as to discover the most complete opposites of what might be the case.

But then the successful theory can't be some simplistic belief in one or the other - the reduction to a monism. Pragmatism is instead the acceptance that there is an irreducible triadism at work - a modelling relation. The world actually is divided not into world and mind, but world and sign. And that is the theory that best accounts for the empirical facts of human psychology.

...expecting a direct correlation between our conscious awareness of our actions or expecting to elaborate on physical processes beyond our conscious awareness is a too harsh of a demand to decide on (potential) moral competence. — Gooseone

I agree that freewill is really about moral competence or socially constructed habits of self-regulation.

Animals of course are perfectly good at making smart situational choices. They have a biological level of attentional deliberation that you could call ecologically competent.

But then humans have an overlay of language-enabled, socially-focused, deliberation where we are meant to be "moral agents". And this sets up the counterfactuality deemed to be at the heart of free-will.

We are conscious of the fact that we are indeed agents whose actions within social contexts have meanings that need to be judged. There is meant to be a balancing of self interest and collective interest. And so everything that we might think about doing is framed by the rational possibility of not in fact doing that. Our own actions are put at a distance from both ourselves, and our social contexts, to make it possible to then think about those actions in a properly weighted fashion.

So the focus on neurology, or habitual-level actions, is off the mark. All smart animals develop ecological competence. They get good at making decisions in an unselfconscious fashion that allows them to negotiate their worlds efficiently.

But humans - as sociocultural creatures - have the new thing of a culturally developed habit of self-regulation. We are trained to run all our action planning through a social filter. We have to insert the possibility of not acting in the way we are thinking of acting so as to be able to play the part of moral agents in our moral cultures.

The impulsive action deal is then about the fact that intelligent reflex-level motor planning takes about a fifth of a second to organise, while deliberative and attentive level motor planning takes more like half a second, and even longer.

So we can often preconsciously emit a response before we have time to consciously deliberate on a response.

If we are talking about tightly time-constrained action - as is usually the case in neurologically-focused "freewill" experiments - then the best that can be achieved in such circumstances is "free won't".

As the action centres of the brain brew up a quick automatic response that is ecologically competent, that causes the "broadcast" of an anticipatory sensory image - a feeling of what you are just about to do so that you will know it is you causing the sensory change about to happen. If you are going to push a button "at random", then it helps if the whole brain knows to expect fingers to be moving, buttons to be felt on finger-tips, etc, in a way that won't be sensorily confusing and alien as it happens.

And it is this anticipatory image that can be caught at the conscious attentive level as "the moment of decision". And if you set things up so that you want to block that rising impulse by a countering "don't", then that is another objective you can set yourself up primed for. You can halt an urge in its tracks, with enough prior preparation and careful attention.

So the point is that we are well set up for two levels of willing.

At the biological level, we are very good at automating smart action habits. That's how we can climb stairs or hit tennis balls with minimal attentive effort.

Then at the social level, we are very good at moral deliberation and viewing our actions through a self-regulatory lens. This is particularly so when we have a normal amount of time - seconds, hours, days - to make such behavioural choices.

But most "freewill" research gets these two levels of action mixed up, believing freewill is somehow an aspect of biological consciousness. So the research tries to atomise freewill by analysing human action on the smallest possible temporal grain. You get the vexed question of whether conscious deliberation caused the preconscious gestation of some actual decision to press a button, or whatever.

So the freewill debate is just another example of the atomising tendency in causal explanation. It manufactures its own paradoxes by trying to analyse deliberative choice as if it were reductionistly simple.

But even at the biological level in animals, the brain is set up to balance fast unthinking habits against slower attentive deliberation. And in humans, there is a further learnt habit of negotiating between the personal and the social in making decisions - which itself has to execute on timescales ranging from the impulsive to the "however long it takes to work through all the information and variables".

So your bottom line is scepticism about hallucinations and credulity about pixies. Cool.

The fact that I am not a drug taker, do not suffer from mental illness or have any other unusual ecperiences. — John

Thus proving my point. All one can do is constrain one's uncertainty as to what might be the explanation by adding further constraining information. You can work to rule out empirical possibilities in this kind of fashion.

And yet, one can indeed constrain one's uncertainty like this. It is reasonable. And also, as I say, it starts with the attempt to eliminate the most obvious explanations, not by jumping straight to the most incredible.

In any case you are simply prejudicially assuming that the default assumption should be hallucination; — John

Yes. Of course I start with the most reasonable belief. It would be crackpot to do anything else.

rather you who are being asked to provide an argument as to why I shouldn't trust my experience — John

But that reason has already been stipulated. All your friends joining you at the bottom of the garden can see the hedgehog, but are now looking at you wondering about your sanity as you chatter away to the little pixies only you think you see.

Or maybe they slipped you the drugs and are now having a good laugh. That would certainly be a more plausible explanation rather than that you were experiencing something real, wouldn't you say?

And if you don't, then explain just why.

what would it matter if I believed there were pixies there, — John

Err....

I'm baffled which stipulated condition you think rules out hallucinations here. Your point stretching makes it clear you don't have a good argument.

The dichotomy is not between knowledge and learning but hinges on the distinction between constraint and construction.

So in Pragmatic thinking, minds come to know the world by forward modelling - creating states of expectancy. And that Bayesian probabilistic reasoning then sets the mind up for discovering what is new, surprising, hoped for, or otherwise can count as a difference that makes a difference, a signal among the noise.

So the mind forms a state of constraint. It has a positive view about future probabilities. And that is why the improbable sticks out.

But then construction also plays its complementary role in building knowledge, or habits of interpretance. Every difference that makes a difference is a new fact. Facts add up. New habits of expectancy can be learnt as a result. Minds become more skilful at constraining their uncertainty about the course of the future and so more "knowledgable".

It is all part and parcel of a Pragmatic or enactive understanding of mentality.

Pragmatism also emphasises the role of abduction and evaluation in the business of coming to know the world. Embodiment is what is important.

Meno was about the ability to see the rightness of mathematical/logical truths. Deduction was a big thing when it was first a new trick. But it's just inverse induction. So again it is about understanding the constraints-based thinking that the laws of thought encode.

So the OP appears to set up a view of knowledge as a library-like accumulation of dead, disembodied, facts. I don't see the Meno even being about that. But anyway, if we are talking about the full psychological arc that is about coming to know the world in a useful fashion through bootstrapping reasoning, that just is standard issue pragmatism. (Look it up in a dictionary near you.)

You are avoiding answering my question. What here constitutes reasonable evidence of this not being a hallucination?

Why wouldn't you conclude that this "unknown reeason" was a hallucination? On what grounds are you dismissing the hypothesis exactly?

I would believe I was hallucinating. Now what would you believe as inference to the best explanation?

Up to you if you want to demonstrate it was a serious question.

what would you believe then? — John

What do you say I ought to believe?

So I can believe there are hedgehogs living at the bottom of my garden and you can believe there are pixies at the bottom of yours. But evidentially we are on an equal footing.

Hmmm.

but prior to that you have already decided to place your faith in one line of enquiry rather than another. — John

How is that the case when the inquiry is framed in terms of two strongly counterposed views? The "act of faith" involves two complementary rational possibilities. And that then is what guides the empirical inquiry.

As I keep saying, you don't have an inquiry if you can't define your counterfactuals. Most professions of "faith" turn out to be simply vague pronouncements that could never be either supported or dismissed with any confidence.

So I am not claiming my methodology, or enquiry, is superior to yours; the truth is I am claiming is that they are, although obviously not the same, equivalent in that they are both rational elaborations of groundless presuppositions. — John

And of course I don't accept your characterisation that presuppositions must be groundless. At the very least, they have to be crisply posed in counterfactual manner. And at worst, they will already be our best "intuitive" guesses.

So it comes down to the nature of the evidence - which in my case would be public, and in your case private. I know which I find superior.

OK, that's a fair enough answer, but we are still left with the fact that transcendence, or not, is a purely faith-based presumption either way. — John

But how is it strictly faith based in my case?

I have clearly framed the alternatives using metaphysical reasoning. I already accept that existence is teleological. And then from there, it is either going to be the case that "purpose" arises immanently/naturalistically, or it acts on us from without in some transcendent/supernatural sense.

So that next leads to deriving testable consequences. If those are the two possiblities, which appears to have the greater weight of evidence in its favour?

So really, faith or "free choice" has nothing to do with what I end up believing. That is just your wishful thinking.

The problem is, though, that in order to to do that we must already have a notion of what flourishing is, and that notion will always already be based on whether we believe in transcendence or not. Do you see then how it cannot be reduced to a merely pragmatic question? — John

Again, if you check out the real Peirce, you will see how this is handled by abduction. The necessity of starting with a guess is taken for granted. We don't have to start in certainty for certainty (as the systematic minimisation of doubt) to be what eventually develops.

The position you are expressing is that you find yourself simply believing something for no particular reason - you grew up in some cultural setting and discovered you have "a faith". And now you are unwilling to apply a method of questioning that might require you to believe anything different.

I'm not sure why your methodology is superior to mine. Surely I'm right to say I will accept the results of a properly-conducted, open-minded, inquiry rather than dogmatically stick to the first idea I discovered myself to be holding.

how are we to assess whether a belief contributes to flourishing unless we hold some ethical position which goes beyond pragmatism, about what exactly constitutes flourishing? — John

And my answer was that your presumption of transcendence - going beyond - is at odds with my presumption of ontological naturalism.

So my hypothesis - which I submit to the test of pragmatic reasoning - is that flourishing for us as natural beings would be primarily defined in terms of our biological and cultural evolution. There is no "higher purpose" as you - apparently with theistic ontic commitments - might believe. If a naturalist looks "higher", then that is when the cosmic purpose of generalised entropification comes into view.

And then I would also again remind you that you seem stuck with the populist Jamesian notion of pragmatist philosophy - the one that best fits the "American Dream" as a notion of flourishing. :)

I have always stresssed that I am talking about the original Peircean version - and perhaps should signal that by saying "Pragmaticism". But I try to avoid extra jargon as much as possible.

The big deal about Peircean Pragmaticism, as again I have endlessly said, is that it does end up being ontology as well as epistemology. It is a theory about how meaning or purpose in any guise develops immanently via self-organisation, even at a Cosmological level of being.

So Pragmaticism as epistemology leads to Semeiotics as ontology. Peirce was of course the last truly ambitious metaphysician.

I have asked apo what amounts to this question many times in many contexts and forms; and this is just where he always seems to fail to be able to respond. — John

That's a bit rich. You quoted what was a reply to your posts and then restated your own position. I was happy enough to leave it at that. What more was there to say if you didn't offer anything new?

Is truth simply equivalent to what is useful, or is usefulness the best method of obtaining truth in the correspondence sense of knowledge? If the latter, then pragmatism seems to become more of a methodology than a metaphysical theory of knowledge itself. — darthbarracuda

The advantage of pragmatism is that it makes purpose central to epistemology - there is always going to be a reason that gives some inquiry its meaning - but then doesn't presume the nature of that purpose.

So done right, it ought to alert you to the further issue of motivations. The philosophical illusion would be that inquiry is ever dispassionate - a naive pursuit of "truth".

So for instance, you are championing some particular purpose - soteriological release from rebirth. My pragmatic response is where is the evidence that this is any kind of ultimate truth? Why should we think it true in an ontological sense?

Pragmatism - done right - would separate the inquiry after truth from the issue of whose purpose is being served. It is thus as much about the self as the world. And it recognises the philosophical self is always going to be a biological and sociological artifact. Thus it stresses that truth finds its limits in a community of inquiring minds.

The issue is not how to defeat scepticism but how to use it usefully. Doubt is always possible, but doubt can always be minimised. And it is the possibility of having minimal doubt that then becomes your best ground for holding to a belief. It is scepticism which is the ultimate basis for any conviction.

And that is just to restate standard "scientific" reasoning. We advance an idea and then try hard to doubt it. If it survives the test, you're good.

The issue with philosophy of course is that there is a tendency to avoid putting ideas to real life tests. Many take philosophy to be a purely rational exercise, and so beyond the constraints of empiricism.

But then look at the actual value of pursuing scepticism in the philosophical tradition. What it has done is clarify epistemology. It in fact used to establish what we can actually hope to know, and how we should best go about doing that.

Where scepticism goes off the rails is in ontology. It might be entertaining to consider the unlikely - like that the world doesn't exist, it's all in the mind, or it's all demonic illusion. But it is not useful to pretend to believe the unlikely. You don't really doubt unless you are fully prepared to act on that doubt. At which point it has just turned into a belief.

Such a drama queen.

Which word is giving you trouble?

What do you mean? — StreetlightX

Don't pretend that's a difficult question.

So is there some important difference from pragmatism here?

One other thought. My case has already been tested and demonstrated in the field.

Back in the 1970s, computer scientists hope to build intelligent machines using symbol processing. Recreate the syntax and the semantics would surely follow. We know what a dismal dualistic failure that exercise was.

But these days any realistic approach to machine intelligence - such as forward modelling or Baysesian neural nets - is an attempt to replicate a semiotic modelling relation.

So a particular theory of truth has been tried and tested. We are going with the one that works.

What would it mean to assign to a thing as a property, that it is in between discrete and continuous? — Metaphysician Undercover

Look up fractal geometry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausdorff_dimension

The in-between spectra are now mathematically well defined.

When we assign to a substance, a property according to a category, we cannot say that the substance has contrary properties of that category, though it can at different times. The same substance can be at one time hot and at another time cold, but it cannot be both hot and cold at the same time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Huh? We say it is cold because it lacks heat, and hot because it lacks chill. So it is about "both things at once" - except it is about that as a broken symmetry or asymmetry. At any particular time or place, we have more of the one in terms of having less of the other.

Again the logic of this just seems really simple.

It seems quite clear to me that you have this backwards. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, I've already said you can turn around and treat vagueness as the ur-category - the limit on contrariety. And that recreates Aristotle's argument for hylomorphic substance, but just recasts it in more suitably developmental or dynamic terms.

The map is language, the territory is the world, and when the former rightly depicts the latter, then they correspond. — Sapientia

You are asserting naive realism and ignoring the subtleties of my actual argument. But never mind.

Interpretation won't determine whether the map rightly or wrongly depicts the territory. — Sapientia

It doesn't need to. In the semiotic model of truth, a habit of interpretance is concerned with establishing a reliable system of signs. So I can look at a thermometer and see that it reads 14 degrees C. That is a measurement which tells me "the truth" of "the weather".

So as I say, it is about the wholeness of a triadic relation. You can't make sense of any one part in isolation.

The usual approaches to truth are dydaic or dualistic. That is why they founder. There is the mind and there is the world. Somehow they seem to connect, but no one can explain the mystery of how.

Semiotics replaces that mind~world dualism with a symbol~world relation. And the sign is what mediates in being Janus faced. It can have a foot in both camps in being both physical and mental, syntactical and semantic.

That's the point about sentences expressing propositions.

One could take the view that p is true even if p is never said (or is even unsayable?). Semantics can be taken to have its own mentalistic, reified, Platonic existence that transcends any actual saying and acting upon a belief. But that kind of dualistic divide offers no way of then reconnecting meaning to the world.

Yet it is just as much a problem to say some physical pattern carries its meaning or interpretation inherently. We can imagine the infinite number of randomly typing monkeys who cannot help but bash out every possible true statement without ever a hint of understanding. So siding with the physicality of the signs cannot help either.

That is why you have to understand what is going on as a complete relation. And a counter-intuitive outcome of that is that efficient mapping is deliberately unrealistic. The system of signs that makes a habit of interpretance most effective is the one that reduces the physical "truth" of the world to the barest play of symbols. A good map is flat and uncluttered with just a few sharp indicative marks. It leaves out everything that can be left out. It is meaningful to the degree that it suppresses information about reality - the degree to which it filters signal from noise.

That is why propositions have the binary form of being true/false. Give the relevant box a tick or a cross.

Naive realism expects the opposite. The map corresponds to the world as indeed a "mapping" - a re-presentation of what actually exists out there.

But maps are a reduction of reality to what is understood as meaningful in terms of certain expectable signs. So truth judgments track measurements, not existence. The less we actually need to concern ourselves with the messy actuality, the "truthier" our conceptions become.

Again that is why binary tick-box propositional logic is so highly valued. It stands as the ultimate limit of this desire to detach from the physics and live in a self-made realm of sign. We are telling the world, just nod yes or no to our question, we can take it from there.

If what we think is right, and we express it as a statement, then it is true - even if nobody knows it to be true. — Sapientia

Yep. The infinite typing monkeys theory of truth. It sounds kind of plausible until you really start to think about it.

A bunch of symbols on a piece of paper don't need an inherent interpretation, so whether they have one or not is beside the point. An inherent interpretation strikes me as an oxymoron, anyway. They just need to be such that if there were an interpretation, then it could be correct or incorrect. — Sapientia

Yes. But in the usual course of things (barring these rogue monkey infinite typing pools), a bunch of symbols only appears in the physical world when there is someone with an intent to state something meaningful.

Again, one could imagine that occasionally a rock face would wear in such a way that some moving poem or grave epitaph might just appear. But really, the infinite unlikelihood of such a physical act is evidence that all such physical manifestations are the product of some mind (or system of interpretance that employs signs).

No, we know that the author meant something with the symbols. That is at least possible, so, as a thought experiment, that's what we're assuming. That being the case, it wouldn't matter whether the meaning, i.e. what the author meant, is known. Nor would it matter whether or how they are interpreted. — Sapientia

What do you mean? The author at least has to "know" what he meant. He would have to understand himself. And it is he who can't in fact transcend what is only a reasonable-seeming structure of belief.

So you are focusing again on transmissible signs - words that get spoken or written. But words are still signs when they are thought.

Ascribing truth doesn't entail truth. — Sapientia

But that is merely to re-assert naive realism. You are claiming there is the claim, and then the proof of the claim, and then beyond that, the claim's truth. You want to put truth out there in the world with all the physics.

That doesn't work, which is why naive realists usually wind up talking Platonically about p being true as if propositions exist as abstract objects.

So again, the pragmatic/semiotic approach to truth instead proceeds by making reasonable hypotheses and then testing them in terms of acts of measurement. We form signs of what to expect if some idea is indeed "true".

And that approach to truth then understands that the ascriptions are essentially self-interested. Propositions are intrinsically an expression of some grounding purpose. And that also means an indifference to "physical reality" gets built in. It is a feature rather than a bug.

Success is always being able to filter signal from noise in terms of selfish interest.

As an Aristotelean you should see how this is the same as Aristotle's own argument for substance as the ur-category - the argument from contrariety.

Categories 4a10

It seems most distinctive of substance that what is numerically one and the same is able to receive contraries. In no other case could one bring forward anything, numerically one, which is able to receive contraries.

For example, a colour which is numerically one and the same will not be black and white, nor will numerically one and the same action be bad and good; and similarly with everything else that is not substance.

A substance, however, numerically one and the same, is able to receive contraries. For example, an individual man—one and the same—becomes pale at one time and dark at another, and hot and cold, and bad and good.

So it is the same metaphysical logic. The difference is that Aristotle was still talking about what sounds like an actuality - substance has primal existence - and I'm talking about a "state" of potential in talking instead of primal vagueness. So my emphasis is on the possibility of developing contrariety as opposed to receiving it.

And remember the classical importance of making the distinction between contradiction and contariety, as represented in the square of opposition for example -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_of_opposition

So I think you are fixed on thinking about categories in terms of contradiction where to get down to primal being, you have to apply contrariety as the deeper principle.

My question to you, is do you respect that there is such a thing as categorical boundaries? — Metaphysician Undercover

What I say is that (metaphysical strength) categories are in fact boundaries. They are limit states. And they come in dialectical pairs. They are the opposing extremes of what could definitely be the case.

So if a metaphysical separation is possible - such as the discrete and the continuous - then the separation "exists" to the degree it is crisp ... or not-vague.

I'm not sure why you are struggling so much with the natural logic of this.

Don't you think that we mostly assume that there is some kind of "truth" which is beyond our interpretations? — Metaphysician Undercover

But that is implicit in acknowledging we are limited to interpretations. So there is always going to be uncertainty about what is left out.

And yet also - at least for pragmatist accounts of truth - it is an important point that we are also only trying to serve our own purposes. We can afford to be indifferent about "the Truth" in some grand ontic totalising sense.

Of course I, like anyone with a deep interest in metaphysics, want the whole story. I make that completeness a purpose. But I also recognise the way inquiry is in fact limited and so that informs my approach too.

Do you think of biography as a type of naturalism? I would have thought it more a literary undertaking. — Wayfarer

Do you get to make the facts up or do you have to report them?

From the perspective of 'the natural sciences', then you have to account for phenomena in terms of causes that naturalism can deal with. But that doesn't make it comprehensive or complete. If I got your total medical history, or a DNA sample, I could find out a lot about you, in one sense - but how much would I know about your biography? Little or nothing, I would say; and that is an exact analogy. — Wayfarer

If that is an exact analogy, then you have only said you would need more empirical facts. You have not yet abandoned naturalism if you feel you need to inquire about my specific social and cultural development too.

but I would go further and say that the process of self-realisation is something other than, and greater than, what current naturalism is able to imagine. — Wayfarer

Talk is cheap. Maslow, as a scientist, did a pretty good job on humanising psychology. If you can go one better, let's hear how.

It might be a scientifically accurate depiction of physical processes, but as a philosophy...? — Wayfarer

Yeah, I was forgetting. Philosophy relies on scientific inaccuracy. :-}

My view is that human beings are in some real sense intrinsic to the Universe. We're not accidental byproducts of a random process, but the means by which the Universe discovers itself. — Wayfarer

I'm not completely against such an idea as you know. But also, I could only truly believe in it to the extent I could at least sketch out some plausible way of quantifying it as a metaphysical hypothesis.

So I would rephrase it in terms of the inexorable growth of semiotic complexity (within entropic limits). And "ascendency" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendency - is an ecological concept, cashed out in actual equations, which for instance gets at the notion of organised power.

But mystical proclamations recast in emprical form seem to loose their allure very quickly for many.

Do you mean that we construct & share a worldview, the fact that it is shared, gives it reliable meaning, it has pragmatic use. — Cavacava

Yeah. But that construction of a worldview (or umwelt in semiotic jargon) is both biological and cultural. So because we have a shared history of neural evolution - the same kind of eyes and ears - we can already rely on some basic level of shared experience or phenomenology. So I am not arguing extreme social constructionism. However when it comes to an intellectually conceived worldview - the product of collective human enquiry - then it is still just that ... the collective view which develops and survives because it somehow works for us all in a generic way.

We have consciousness of an existent object, a tree for example, and we have a claim to knowledge of how it appears & how trees appear is part of our concept of a tree. So two separate claims: a) the thing is(we understand it is separate from us) & b) what that things is (how its concept epistemologically ties into its appearance). — Cavacava

Not sure if this is what you mean, but I am saying there would be two levels of semiosis here. There would be the neuropsychology of perception - the way our brains are already designed to force us to construct the perception of a bound object like "a tree".

The naive view is we see what is there - a tree with colours, movements, shapes. Yet psychology tells us this is an elaborate process of interpretation. A tree won't even be seen if the mind finds it more meaningful to be acting in terms of there being a wood.

And then on top of that we construct our social reality where oak trees are gods, or someone's property, or a thing of natural beauty.

The point is that it is signs all the way down. If we focus on the greenness of some leaf, that is still a psychological sign rather than a physical reality. And when we say the physical reality is some wavelength of light, that is sign heaped upon sign. It is reading numbers off dials and saying, look!, there's your true reality.

I think this is really the point; that Reality is spirit; which cannot be mapped, but which does the mapping and which the maps are expressions of. — John

Yet still, what is "spirit" such that I can understand it to be doing mapping?

If you make it clearer you are talking about final cause in some fashion - the general purpose which acts as an "internal" constraint on mapping - then I could agree with you perhaps. It is a key point of the semiotic view of modelling relations that the autonomous self arises as the generic habit encoding some set of guiding self-interests.

But talking about "spirit" instead suggests a theistic reading. And this is why both Hegel, with his Geist, and Peirce, with his objective idealism, can be confusing because they seem to offer themselves equally to theistic interpretations and physicalist interpretations.

Of course you probably don't think of reality as purposive, intentional or teleological as spirit is thought; you would probably think of it as a virtual chaos or something like that — John

No. I've probably said it hundreds of times that I believe in the natural systems view and so finality is a real cause in the world. That is why the second law of thermodynamics stands out as the Cosmos's most generic constraint.

So I am cool with teleology. But I see it as immanent and naturalistic, not transcendent and theistic.

But when you get down to this level it is a matter of faith, or personal preference, as to how you think about the Real. — John

Or not. My argument is that it is about models that demonstrably work. It is about conceptions expressed clearly enough for evidence to falsify them.

Faith and preference are the weakest possible basis for truth pretty much by definition.

I would argue that culture is biology in that culture only exists because of us, and we are only biology — DanEssex

But what does the actual evidence say on this?

The human infant is born spectacularly helpless and reliant on social care. The brain is a sponge for language learning and enculturation up to the age of 7. Homo sap even evolved the further 10 year stage of adolescence to allow for social fine tuning of the higher cortical pathways.

So in many ways that aren't shared by chimps, gorillas or even moderately recent hominids, Homo sap is biologically set-up for the expectation of language-based cultural regulation.

So "we" are not just biology. The very idea of being a self - the capacity for being introspectively self-conscious - is a social construction of recent evolutionary origin.

I agree that is not part of the standard modern romantic mythology - the popular cultural view that we are souls locked inside skulls. But that is what social psychology tells us. (And yes, I have studied this particular question as a field, so at worst I'm offering an informed opinion here.)

However don't take these comments the wrong way. I thought your OP raises an important issue in an interesting fashion.

To the extent we are "machines", then how should the law apply? We face that with psychopathic killers whose brain scans might reveal a tumour in some critical empathetic and moral reasoning pathway.

Does it make sense to blame and punish the mechanical? But on the other hand, is there any issue in simply disposing of a defective machine?

We actually do have a responsibilty to understand the true nature of being human to justify our notions about justice.

The relation between mind and world is an expression of spirit; so, more primordially, truth is of the spirit. — John

But is that statement true beyond some particular mapping relation?

In talking about "spirit", you are speaking about the topological features on a map you have constructed. You know what "spirit" means to you because you believe you can recognise it in terms of phenomenology. If particular things happen in experience, you can successfully interpret them as an "expression of spirit".

Yet the next step for you and your map has to be to show you can and do actually use it to navigate a terrain in a way that meets some definite purpose.

I would say that "spirit" here sounds too vague in its ontic commitments. It's literal meaning is so ambiguous that it can be taken to mean pretty well anything one likes. It is the equivalent of a message scrawled on wet blotting paper with a fat felt-tip.

There may be some directions lurking in the putative map, but one could never really be sure that one was not merely getting lucky in eventually stumbling towards any actual destination.

So your response demonstrates how truth in terms of "maps of reality" is both model-centric - fundamentally epistemic - and yet also pragmatically comparable.

We can't transcend our epistemic conditions to inspect the world as it actually is. We are stuck with the internal signs we form as part of a modelling relation.

And yet there are objective features to this mapping - or at least features that we can socially share through language and agreement. That is, society is also a "mind" that makes maps.

The objective features would be the familiar ones of "crisp purposes" and "crisp counterfactuality". A map is true in terms of the purpose it is meant to serve (which can be either very general, or highly restricted). And for a map to be truth-apt, it must eliminate vagueness. It must render the world in as binary fashion as possible.

(And again, these are both good mapping qualities which we have plenty of reason to suspect reality itself to possibly lack. So that is how we arrive at the conundrum of how to remove ourselves - the interested mappers - from our view of reality. What does reality look like if reality were to "map itself"?)

So this made me think: why can't I identify as a machine, or a robot? I mean, I am just a biological robot/machine. Why does society get to choose my identity - an identity that apparently means that I have free will and a soul. — DanEssex

But this is the questionable presumption - that you are just a biological machine.

Biology would see it as the other way round. Life arises as a form of machinery imposed on nature - that is, constraints on material freedoms. So yes, there is mechanism involved. But it is not fundamental. It is superimposed in regulatory fashion to restrict dynamical chaos.

So if we jump ahead to humans and societies, we find that individual biopsychology is the new level of "material chaos" that is in need of mechanistic regulation. A functioning human emerges as a result of a suitable period of regulative training. Raising and educating the child, we call it. :)

And as Wuliheron points out, modern society has achieved the kind of complexity where it has systems for turning out virtual automatons. You can be put through the military mincer. You can become another call centre drone. Even being trained as a "creative" is another process of careful social moulding. If you go to fine arts school, there is a way you are meant to turn out.

None of this is a bad thing in itself. It is just the truth of the phenomenon we call life and mind.

Which ought to make you question the specific role that the current crop of cyborg mythologising plays in modern culture (and I'm enjoying Westworld at the moment).

Of what social value is this Romantic questioning of the image of humans as deterministic automata? Why would we concern ourselves, through dramas, with robots that "wake up" with "proper minds"?

So, do you think that humans should have the right to legally be recognised as machines or robots? — DanEssex

In part, that does happen. There is some recognition that crimes may have been committed under orders, or due to "biological hardware" incapacity.

But the main task of society - if it wants to impose its mechanistic regulatory frameworks on our chaotic psychologies - is to convince us all that we have a soul. We are selves. We are moral agents.

So the legal system goes along with that (in modern "civilised" democracies). It wants to foster the belief that we are entirely accountable for our every action and as unlike a machine or robot as it is possible to be.

There is cute irony in all this. We can't be coerced by a system of rules and regulations until we have first learnt how to be a "we" that can function that way.

And as I say, none of this is inherently bad. Humans after all are evolved to be this kind of composite creature - a mix of biology and culture held together by language.

7. You claim I have no interest in Philosophy. For real! — tom

You must admit that you come across as having the one true interpretation of quantum physics when the interpretation issue is famously wide open. And also you fail to respond to specific challenges concerning the ontic commitments that one might reasonably have even under a broad church view of MWI.

A bunch of symbols on a paper is neither true nor false without an interpretation. How many different ways must I spell this out? — Metaphysician Undercover

And don't think I haven't noticed your sly wording, taking advantage of the ambiguity in "without an interpretation". What does that mean? If there being an interpretation means there being a correct way for it to be interpreted, then I don't see why that would actually need a mind there interpreting it. — Sapientia

Truth arises as a property of a relation between mind and world. So MU is in the right here, but needs to take it a step further.

The crucial thing is that minds form maps of the territory for themselves. So truth becomes an interpretation of the map having some definite reliable meaning. Thus a triadic relationship is formed where we deal with the signs of what we think exists, rather than the noumenal things-in-themselves.

So it is right that a bunch of symbols on a paper don't have an inherent interpretation. The interpretation is a habit that has developed. A mind comes to recognise the map as saying something truthful about a territory.

The territory is then understood to "really exist" in the way it has been imagined. The map is presumed to describe it well. It must do because the map can be used reliably to get places we want to go.

But then - if we stop to think about it more carefully - all we really "know" is that these are the signs we interpret in such and such a way. So we can ascribe truth to that habit of interpretation. We can point to the robustness of a relation. But the territory itself stands beyond the map. And we might not really "know" it at all. It is only our particular habit of relation that is ever actually tested, and so has its "truth" demonstrated, by some act of interpretation.

But carry on with the usual useless idealism vs realism debate....

So as I see it particle physicists are trying to discern the probabilistic points in the projection I refer to, unaware of the pre-noumenon, or the reality in which the projection was constructed. — Punshhh

It is hard to make sense of your post. But in a general fashion, physics does make use of this kind of "projection from a higher dimension" thinking. For any dynamical system - like some dancing sea of particles - you can step back to a higher level view that sees it as a now frozen mass of vectors or trajectories.

This is the trick that quantum mechanics relies on in invoking an infinite dimensional Hilbert space. There is room enough in Hilbert space for every alternative history. And reality can then be a projection of that frozen realm. If you look through it, you see the average state, the least action sum, that becomes what is most likely to actually happen.

But the ontological issue is whether the mathematical trick is just a mathematical trick or - as MWI might want it - the higher reality is the true reality, and the projection is merely some kind of localised illusion.

You get exactly the same issue arising in frozen block universe notions of time, based on special relativity. Or now with the AdS/CFT correspondence in string theory (where the 3D quantum play of particles is treated as projection of a gravitational string theory that sits on the holographic boundary of this "reality").

My own view of course is that it is simply a mathematical trick. It is how modelling works. And to get carried away by it is mistaking the map for the territory.

But folk find it weird and seductive to believe our physical existence is some kind of projective illusion. It's been a popular point of view ever since Plato and his shadows on the cave wall.

l say constructed because I consider that the projection is an artificial fabrication conceived in a real world in which multifarious forms or species of projection, even fabrication are discussed, generated, and then individually put into practice on ocassion in a fabricated world, our world. — Punshhh

And here you seem to be trying to introduce some mind behind the scenes and directing the action. So you are really stacking up theism on top of the mathematical Platonism. I'd call that doubling down on everything I would disagree with as a natural philosopher and systems thinker here. :)