...and back to spit and the one true faith.

But it was worth it. :wink:

There is still this tendency to slide from an epistemic to ontic position in your choice of words. — apokrisis

Between the iron posts and the paper maché, you mean?

You fool no-one but yourself with those kinds of comments. Your butt is stinging. :wink:

It might help to try and look at why we keep coming back to these same arguments. I think it to do with the vanity of small differences — Banno

It also had to do with ignoring much of what I’ve been saying.

Ok, tell me what I ignored.

Between the iron posts and the paper maché, you mean? — Wayfarer

What was the Newtonian dream? A single act of measurement - the initial conditions of a logically determined system - would tell its story for all time. Indeed backwards or forwards in time with equal ease.

But then even that encountered the three body problem, the Galilean relativity problem, the spinning bucket problem, etc. The holism missing from the reductionism.

So the reductionist can’t live without the holist to complete their schemes. But the counter logic of the holist is actually intellectually challenging. As a debate, the energy gets diverted into the trivialities of idealism vs realism or other mock-tournaments of metaphysical yore.

Holism means that epistemology and ontology can be divided, and yet they must also remain connected. There must be the two-way interface of the epistemic cut. An Umwelt. A point at which the informational models can do real work in their worlds in a way that is transparent and undeniable in its causal plausibility. That is, in the testable theories of biosemiosis.

In quantum theory, Copenhagen interpretation made the right kind of dialectical start. Decoherence brought in thermodynamics, but not the epistemic cut needed to stop the kind of classical logic splurge banjo is talking about in the way it seemed to entail a Many Worlds interpretation.

I have outlined many times how biosemiosis now adds the epistemic cut to the business of quantum interpretation. As a mechanism, a modelling relation, even our enzymes and respiratory chains are actually doing that - preparing states of coherence with the intention of collapsing them and so ratcheting the entropy flows of a Cosmos guided by the telos of the newly NASA-rediscovered concept of dissipative structure.

But as I agree, none of this is intellectually easy. So much always to be learnt!

You're an odd fish. — Banno

I might be insulted if this wasn’t confirming my point.

I may be idealist, but I recognize a brick wall when I encounter one.

I have outlined many times how biosemiosis now adds the epistemic cut to the business of quantum interpretation — apokrisis

Indeed, I didn’t know what biosemiosis meant when I joined this forum, and I’ve come to appreciate it. But there’s also a spectrum of views in that community, I’ve learned, and not all of the scholars in that field are as committed to physicalist principles. I’ve found a recent book on biosemiotics and philosophy of mind which I mean to get back to. Meantime, grandad is being paged ;-)

Classical logic can't handle all sorts of stuff. Hegel's logic has generally been dealt with in a category theoretic framework. Or: here

Not that this makes a difference for the arguments about world history. Obviously we can't model out world history (or test such models for that matter). Classical logic would be even more useless here. You can however make a broadly empirical case for such arguments. For example, Fukuyama butchers Hegel, but he does provide better case studies and empirical support than most political philosophers. Honneth stays truer to Hegel and has a similar methodology.

Hegel's logic has generally been dealt with in a category theoretic framework. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Such an approach might be interesting, but the link has little content and I could find little else. Can you say more? It might be interesting to see some sort of formalisation of dialectic.

I'd certainly be interested. It's sorta the thing I've attempted to do and failed at :D

I recognize a brick wall when I encounter one. — Wayfarer

Ok. To my eye, it looks as if my critique has hit home and there is no difference to be given between your idealism and my realism.

I added a more detailed link. Lawvere would be the guy who got the ball rolling in this.

Anyhow, we both know "but it doesn't work in classical logic," is a terrible argument in most philosophical contexts. You seem to want to fall back onto formalism (and a simplistic one at that) thinking it can "set the record straight." But this is not what formalism can do for us. Hell, "it does work in classical logic," is not a particularly good one either.

Edit: The system in Spencer Brown's "Law's of Form" is another one that has obvious parallels to the Logics.

I’ve learned, and not all of the scholars in that field are as committed to physicalist principles. — Wayfarer

There you go. Sniffing after the idealist faction and so being able to set it against some realist counter-faction.

Finding the political divides as a distraction from the metaphysical meat. The bit that is the difficult chewing.

Cool. Thanks for the link. More stuff to work through . . .

I added a more detailed link. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Thanks. I'm not reading that this morning. Maybe later.

I'm only using formalism in order to set out with some clarity the argument at hand. Putting Hegel's work in a model-theoretical formalism is presumably a way of set out more clearly what Hegel is up to. That's where formalism helps.

My critique is that dialectic approaches do not fix the nature of the synthesis. So given any thesis and antithesis, any of a number of syntheses are possible.

Can a model-theoretical approach show this not to be so, or in some way fix the positively rational moment? How, at least in outline?

There is a lot of interesting stuff on the contradictory nature of "sheer indeterminate being," or a "sheer something." A lot of time it's death with in an information theoretic context. Floridi writes a bit about this in his Philosophy of Information on "digital ontology" (although it's not specifically on Hegel). David Bohm's implicate order stuff, e.g. "why difference must be fundemental and come before similarity," is another.

From Terrell Bynum's chapter in the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Information, "Informational Metaphysics:"

Note: dedomena is Floridi's term. It means: “mind-independent points of lack of uniformity in the fabric of Being” – “mere differentiaedere” (he also refers to them, metaphorically, as “data in the wild”).

"Let us consider what a completely undifferentiable entity x might be. It would be one unobservable and unidentifiable at any possible [level of abstraction]. Modally, this means that there would be no possible world in which x would exist. And this simply means that there is no such x. [ . . . ] Imagine a toy universe constituted by a two-dimensional, boundless, white surface. Anything like this toy universe is a paradoxical fiction that only a sloppy use of logic can generate. For example, where is the observer in this universe? Would the toy universe include (at least distinguishable) points? Would there be distances between these points? The answers should be in the negative, for this is a universe without relations. "

(2011, Chapter 15, p. 354) [This is Bynum quoting Floridi's 2011 "The Philosophy of Information," which is quite good, but dense.]

Thus, there can be no possible universe without relations; and since dedomena are preconditions for any relations, it follows that every possible universe must be made of at least some dedomena. (Note that there might also be other things which, for us, are forever unknowable.) There is much more to Floridi’s defense of Informational Structural Realism, including his replies to ten possible objections, and I leave it to interested readers to find the details in Chapter 15 of The Philosophy of Information. Floridi views the fact that his ontology applies to every possible world as a very positive feature. It means, for example, that Informational Structural Realism has maximum "portability,” “scalability,” and “interoperability.”

Regarding portability, Floridi notes that:


"The most portable ontology would be one that could be made to ‘run’ in any possible world. This is what Aristotle meant by a general metaphysics of Being qua Being. The portability of an ontology is a function of its importability and exportability between theories even when they are disjointed ([their models] have observables in common). Imagine an ontology that successfully accounts for the natural numbers and for natural kinds."

Hegel's logic has generally been dealt with in a category theoretic framework — Count Timothy von Icarus

Thanks for the reminder! I had quite forgotten that Lawvere had found Peirce’s antithesis between generality and vagueness to be a full categorical adjunction between the universal and existential quantifiers.

See Zelamea's Peirce’s Logic of Continuity. P41.

Or as he quotes Peirce on this move from the merely dyadic to the properly triadic:

Looking upon the course of logic as a whole we see that it proceeds from the question to the answer -- from the vague to the definite. And so likewise all the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite. The indeterminate future becomes the irrevocable past. In Spencer's phrase the undifferentiated differentiates itself. The homogeneous puts on heterogeneity. However it may be in special cases, then, we must suppose that as a rule the continuum has been derived from a more general continuum, a continuum of higher generality.

Digging out the paper, I see Zelamea offers no proper source for this.

But generally speaking, being jogged on the connection is useful. Quantum field theory – as our current nearest candidate to a theory of everything – does set up this tantalising dialectic of free material potential and its necessary emergent topological constraints.

This is an emergent and holistic systems metaphysics. A particle exist in some substantial way as a topological constraint on an excitable field. Reality is hylomorphic. Ontic structuralism is its metaphysics. And our epistemic task is to reduce that to some mathematical model.

Dip into Peirce and you can see where he arrived as his own view of what this looked like and it was his existential graphs. Logic as topological order to be imposed on the vagueness of mere possibility.

And Lawvere on category theory as the follow on to topos theory. I can now see this in the same terms as again a bid to split the world into this dialectic of global topological order – in the thermodynamic sense now entering maths – and the vagueness or firstness of a simple tychic potential. An everythingness that – in its own "sum over histories" contradictions – must organise itself dissipatively and so arrive at some kind of global balance of tensions. An emergent topological order.

Zalamea writes on this in a more recent paper which I need to read – Peirce’s Inversions of the Topological and the Logical.

But really for my current purposes, it is the fact that QFT encodes exactly this relation that matters. The dots are joined by the way gauge symmetry constrains particle physics, and even Poincare invariance constrains relativity, in an ontic structuralist fashion. Topological order is what shapes a world into being out of the vague potential that is what, for want of more precise terms, call the quantum foam. An everythingness that includes spacetime along with its supposed content.

My critique is that dialectic approaches do not fix the nature of the synthesis. So given any thesis and antithesis, any of a number of syntheses are possible. — Banno

Again, this could not be more wrong. Dialectical argument is no use unless it achieves the rigour of a dichotomy – that which arrives at where it is going by showing itself to be "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive."

A dichotomous distinction – such as local and global – has to show itself to frame the opposing limits of a reciprocal or inverse relation. How do you define local? As 1/global. How do you define global? As 1/local.

The point is that neither local nor global can exist alone as absolutes – as generalities or unversalities. But they can exist together as opposing limits that then encompass the third thing of the action which is a moving towards one pole that is thus a complementary moving away from the other.

This is your mischaracterised "synthesis" step. Thirdness is where a dichotomy itself has become so generalised as the limits of a system that all the middleground is now a place of concretely-specified possibility.

The world that classical logic merely presumes to exist now in fact emerges due to a self-organising dialectical process of growth.

I've told you this innumerable times. One day I'm sure the penny will drop and you'll be able to happily exclaim: "See, you agreed with me all along!"

No more indigestion as lunchtime lasgna approaches. :ok:

metaphysical meat. — apokrisis

My favorite!

A dichotomous distinction – such as local and global – has to show itself to frame the opposing limits of a reciprocal or inverse relation. How do you define local? As 1/global. How do you define global? As 1/local. — apokrisis

To use your own example, where is the synthesis between global and local? Is it the nation? The state? The city? the neighbourhood? All of these - and what use is that?

And if anything will do, then nothing has been achieved.

Struth. Just read my thread on is/ought ethics as an exercise in applied systems science.

Local-global bound the thirdness that is their hierarchically-ordered connection. A powerlaw or scalefree network is the mathematical model that describe its equilibrium growth. The balance that is a log/log statistical distribution.

So as an ideal, that is how we find societies organised as scalefree networks of interest. The world looks the same in its human essentials whether you’re in your own home, living in a village, living in a nation, or forced to share the one planet in some orderly fashion.

A fractal world where competition and cooperation, lumping and splitting, integration and differentiation, etc, are present in the same way over all practical scales. If justice is a good, it is being implemented in ways suitably scaled from the toddler to the tantrumming president or nation.

And if anything will do, then nothing has been achieved. — Banno

Take your metabolism as exactly the same kind of dynamic, and one close to your heart.

Your body must have some ability to self-organise to be a body. If it metabolises, it needs a hierarchy that achieves an effective balance across all its scales of integration, from the solitary mitochondria to the whole person. And natural logic says that a sharp dichotomy is the route to allowing this systemic level of regulation. The metabolism must become metabolically switchable - to be crisply counterfactual in terms of its immediate aims - so as to be able to strike then a general balance of any useful kind at all.

And we see this dialectic built into the body’s structure over all its levels. Insulin to signal anabolism, glucagon to signal catabolism. Sympathetic nervous system to turn the knob down, parasympathetic NS to turn it back up.

The whole of biology, and neurology, becomes about understanding the organism in terms of its thermodynamically rooted dichotomies.

If you haven’t realised this about reality yet, you really have missed its essence. You’ve been aboard the wrong logic train.

Local-global bound the thirdness that is their hierarchically-ordered connection. — apokrisis

:roll: Back to abstruse verbosity.

I'll leave you to it; no doubt this post will be followed by another round of spit, but at least you now recognise that we are more than passive observers.

Back to abstruse verbosity. — Banno

More spit from you as expected. You asked, I answered, you fled. :kiss:

Is it simply the case that idealists are able to accept more 'supernatural' claims because they have determined that nature is ultimately no longer limited by laws of physics? — Tom Storm

Does idealism break physics?

Does idealism break physics? — bert1

What you often hear from idealists (Kastrup and Hoffman are good examples) is that materialism and a physical world is debunked and quantum physics tells us reality comes into being by the act of observation. Therefore idealism is a more reasonable and parsimonious explanation for our experience. I've often thought that the arguments in favour for idealism are actually more arguments against old school materialism than any great championing of an 'it's all consciousness' style metaphysics.

But I am neither a physicist or an idealist, so my comment was meant to capture the usual tropes provided.

[1]So for some reason it is OK for you to use commonsense to make inferences about things you can’t directly know, but science as a formal method for making such inferences does not enjoy the same privilege? [2]It is defeated by the zombies in which you don’t believe? Curious.

[3]So what does your commonsense tell you about the consciousness of the chair you are sat on? [4]Given the zombie argument that is so legit, how can you know it is either conscious or not conscious[?] It might be just keeping very quiet and still. It might be aware but suffering locked in syndrome.

Your commonsense is this magical power that transcends mere scientific inference. Please clear up these deep riddles of Nature. — apokrisis

I'm not sure if these questions are rhetorical or not. I'll have go anyway, I'm a sucker for a quiz.

1) You introduced commonsense and science, I was just going with your terms. The inference from analogy, which I suggested was done instinctively by most people (or maybe not, maybe people develop theory of mind some other way, it doesn't matter) might be called commonsense, or it might be philosophy. It doesn't matter. The point is that it isn't a theory of consciousness. It's a conjecture of which other things are conscious. Scientific theories of consciousness are typically functionalist ones, such as yours, the IIT, and others. They do make predictions about what other things are conscious based on the structure and function of those things (less so by analogy, although that may be part of it), but those predictions are not checkable except perhaps by reference to our instincts or common sense or philosophical arguments from analogy. It's entirely understandable that when commonsense and functional theories yield the same predictions, they are considered plausible. Neither are testable though, because we don't have a consciousness-o-meter. And the functionalist theories are wrong, and the inference to other minds is not taken far enough.

2) The functionalist theories are defeated by the zombies in which I don't believe, yes, because the functionalist theories seem consistent with there being no experiences present. So they might be valuable in some way, but not as explainers of consciousness.

3) That's an interesting question. My commonsense instinct is that they are not. Of course, what constitutes commonsense I suspect is somewhat culture-relative. I do think they are conscious though, just not in a way that particularly matters to me. I suspect that the content of the consciousness of my chair is so minimal to be of no interest to anything, possibly including the chair.

4) Several reasons. I have rehearsed the argument for panpsychism from the non-vagueness of the concept of consciousness many times on the forum. There may be an argument from psychological causation and non-overdetermination of the physical, but I have yet to develop that. It's important to keep in mind the broad landscape of theoretical possibilities. Out of those panspychism is the least problematic of the three basic possibilities: panpsychism, emergentism and eliminativism. Eliminatism is false by introspection. Emergentism is extremely problematic for a number of reasons already rehearsed. Panpsychism is problematic, but less so.

Fair enough

Nope.

Hi apokrisis, all,

I have outlined many times how biosemiosis now adds the epistemic cut to the business of quantum interpretation. As a mechanism, a modelling relation, even our enzymes and respiratory chains are actually doing that - preparing states of coherence with the intention of collapsing them and so ratcheting the entropy flows of a Cosmos guided by the telos of the newly NASA-rediscovered concept of dissipative structure. — apokrisis

I think that the problem of this view is that it does not explain how those 'complex' objects/processes like 'enzymes' or 'respiratory chains' arose in the first place. Was everything in superposition back then? What happens when these kind of object 'cause' a collapse?

I think that all positions of what consitutes an 'observer' are susceptible to this kind of objection and it is a serious objection if QM is interpreted ontologically. I think that it is best to interpret it epistemically: wave-function, Born Rule etc are all useful concepts, computing techniques etc that enable us to make correct predictions. In this view the 'collapse' is just an update of knowledge and QM is silent about what 'happened' before the appearances of 'observers' (and it is also silent on what constitutes an 'observer'). QM is IMO best seen as a theory that does not make any ontological commitments: it does not give a 'picture' of 'how reality is'* and it does not say to us what an 'observer' is but is still very useful to make predictions, applications and so on. (My favorite interpretation is QBism, althought I think that, unfortunately sometimes its proponents seem to present it as an ontological interpretation of QM, perhaps unwittingly... especially when they talk about 'participatory realism')

As an aside, I do not think that 'decoherence' alone is enough to solve the measurement problem. It does explain (at least 'for all practical purposes') an appearance of a classical world, but it does not IMO explain why we observe a single outcome in quantum experiments (MWI supporters like decoherence because it explains why 'branches' of the wave-function separate. But MWI makes the additional assumption that all outcomes are actually observed even if they are inaccessible to us)

*I actually think that we tend to do that also in classical physics. For instance, an ontological interpretation of the concept of 'force' in newtonian mechanics is clearly inappropriate but it is an useful conceptual fiction that helps us to make predictions, build things etc (like, say, the concept of 'sunrise' or 'sunset'). The same IMO holds for QM.