Don't know what you mean

Continentals
Scholastics
Ancient Greeks
Postmodernists

So do you say that relationship is hierarchical up to down or down to up or just mutual. — Ludwig V

Mutual in the sense of just reflecting how we choose to apply labels and where those labels end.

we need to say that the explanation in physics is an analysis of the rainbow, not a cause. — Ludwig V

Yes, I would say so; but I would say what we would call a genuine cause is also just an analysis in the same way, so no distinction here imo.

Does our picture of pictures/maps at large and small scales - and there's nothing wrong with it - or a piece of furniture with parts that constitute the whole, make sense of the rainbow? I think they are all different from each other. That's all I'm saying. — Ludwig V

Not sure what you are saying here

Wow, this is a genuinely interesting position.

No, because you can have observations at multiple different scales and independently apply the abstract concept of design to each scale. It has nothing necessarily to do with the relationship between different scales in a way that is different from how the observations at different scales relate to each other.

The design is not a physical object; it is an abstract object - it belongs in a different category from the parts. — Ludwig V

True, though this could apply to any scale of description I think.

Yes, true; though they still have a correspondence to the same area of reality, which injects redundancy. By virtue of coarse-graining itself, the coarse picture also loses information about distinctions or events in reality, like blurring over the details in a photo.

So a map of a single grain of sand cannot signal distinctions between grains, and a map of the inside of a grain cannot signal the whole grain — Ludwig V

Well I don't want to take this example too seriously but surely these distinctions are more or less at the same scale or granularity? At the same time, the mapping of a whole grain is mapping to the same part of reality as mappings to different parts of the grain so there is a redundancy. The parts mapping is mapping to the same part only it makes more distinctions, more information. The coarser grain mapping ignores distinctions that exist.

What is what you are saying to do with? — Ludwig V

Simply that observations about reality naturally carry more information about it at the smallest scales when looked at through a kind of correspondence view of truth.

You really hate an example, don't you? Nothing but large-scale generalizations. So you miss the detail. — Ludwig V

What are you implying? I don't understand what you are saying here. My answer reflects the fact that I am saying something much more general than the status of specific contemporary theories in physics or chemistry.

But then you don't get the bigger (larger-scale) picture. Then you can't see the wood for the trees. You may know the wood is there, but that's only because you've looked at a larger scale picture. The larger-scale picture doesn't tells you about the wood, but not the trees. The smaller-scale picture tells you about the trees, but not the wood. — Ludwig V

Yes, I agree. But that has not much to do with what I am saying imo. Hence why I can agree with this and also uphold what I said. What I am saying isn't to do with the pragmatics of navigating one's picture of the universe. It is not really about strong reductions as in the wikipedia descriptions I gave.

You don't get information about the unobservable reality beyond the picture. It's unobservable in the picture. So it is observable, but only in a different picture. — Ludwig V

What I mean by information here is purely about distinctions one can signal that map to distinctions in reality. There doesn't have to be a fact of the matter about the meaning or content of the signal for the observer and the observer doesn't need to know anything else about the unobservable reality causing the signal. The only assumption is that in principle there is consistent mapping between some area of reality and a signal being made by the observer. Coarse-grained distinctions will obviously smooth over and blend finer-distinctions that would have only been possible with a more fine-grained observations - and they are both caused by the same areas of reality.

That seems to fit what you are saying pretty well. — Ludwig V

Not at all. I haven't been talking about prescribing explanations to get smaller.

I'm not sure whether you are saying that the analysis of water as H2O captures all the information about it. — Ludwig V

I'm just saying when you make observations at finer, smaller scale, you get more information.

What do you mean "more information"? — Ludwig V

In the sense of distinctions. When we make obaervations we are forming a map between our acts and the external world, distinguishing parts of reality. Finer-grained observations make distinctions that do not exist for coarse-grained observations even though they may be mapping to the same sets of events.

but wider scope. — Ludwig V

But this is a pragmatic issue that doesn't negate the idea that, in principle, it is always missing details in our mapping to reality.

A picture of something close up which is 5" x 7" or 100,000 pixels has the same amount of information whether it is a picture of a landscape or a picture of a molecule. — Ludwig V

Its not about information in the picture but information about the unobservable reality beyond. Neither is it about the picture as a.whole but simply the fact that any coarsed-grain observation of events in reality could be swapped for a finer-grained pne which reveals more distinctions or details whether you're talking about the cameras or the weather or bishops or whatever. The point has nothing to do with what information is "relevant" or useful for us to do science, which is why it has nothing to do with methodological reductionism.

And you!

How is that not reduction? All the information is given the smallest scale description. — Ludwig V

I think its a lot weaker than reduction: e.g. consider these descriptions from wikipedia.

"Ontological reductionism: a belief that the whole of reality consists of a minimal number of parts."

"Methodological reductionism: the scientific attempt to provide an explanation in terms of ever-smaller entities."

"Theory reductionism: the suggestion that a newer theory does not replace or absorb an older one, but reduces it to more basic terms. Theory reduction itself is divisible into three parts: translation, derivation, and explanation"

I don't think what I said resembles any of these. On the other hand, it seems almost tautologically the case that if you examine reality at the finest details, you will have more information about it in the sense of being able to make distinctions - specifically in the sense of correspondence ideas about truth.

I should also probably refer back to my post here:

- — Apustimelogist

I wonder if maybe you are applying the criteria for science to philosophy? — Ludwig V

No, I just think what was being talked about implied a scientific comparison based on things that are not disputed scientifically. Either way, I don't think Joshs's initial comment really engaged eith the nature of the discussions about different levels.

That's fair enough then! :up:

Specifically whether the assumption that all the different descriptive perspectives that are available to us dovetail neatly into a single hierarchy. — Ludwig V

What do you mean?

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

Well I am just implying that her work isn't actual physics, its philosophy and what she is saying is not a description of reality with scientific consensus which is relevant because it means that introducing her into a comparison with newtoenian physics is more or less just postulation.

If that isn't reductionism, I'll eat my hat. It's the "higher scales are effectively redundant" that does it. — Ludwig V

I mean redundant more in the informational sense wherein it just means that these descriptions are already repeating information about reality (in a correspondence theory of truth sense) that is already in the smaller scale descriptions.

Ok. But what about uniformity/universality of physical laws?
Why, say, do electromagnetic interaction and gravitation seem to behave the same everywhere?
If there weren't any kind of 'top-down' constraints, how can one explain this universality? — boundless

I don't think of the fact that laws may behave the same everywhere as holism.

With regard to explanation, you could equally ask why should there not be universality without reason?

This objection is of course not a problem for dBB as far as predictions go but it would be certainly strange that when we measure velocities, the 'real' velocity is something else.

It seems that stochastic interpretations do not share this conceptual pecularity. Interesting. — boundless

The Bohmian formulation is very closely related to the stochastic one. Effectively The stochastic mechanics momentum / velocities are equivalent to the standard quantum ones. Bohmian mechanics includes very similar kinds of momentum /velocity to the stochastic ones abd then essentially adds extra deterministic particle trajectories on top of it. The way I personally see it, the main difference between Bohm and stochastic mechanics is that the latter eschews this last assumption of additional deterministic trajectories. Without that, the natural way to viee trajectories is stochastic and we see this directly in the path integral formulation of standard mechanics because the paths in this formulation that are used to calculate ptobabilities are the same as the stochastic mechanics particle trajectories. Because quantum mechanics is so bizarre though, it is always assumed these paths in the path integral formulation are not real but purely computational tools. Stochastic mechanics just takes them at face value.

I mean, clearly she is not a physicist and there is no mathematical model here. It's just speculative interpretation withiut the benefit of a formal model that demonstrates anything tangible.

but the model of causality it expresses is designed to apply equally to the micro and the macro level. — Joshs

I don't think the "model of causality" is as much at stake as the question of whether models at one scale can give satisfying explanations of higher levels. You can have complicated non-linear complex models of interacting particles. You can have complicated non-linear complex models of economics. It doesn't necessarily mean that the satisfying explanations for former can come from latter.

Ok, I think I can get what you are sayinh. However, to be fair, it seems to me even in this kind of 'bottom-up' model, conservation laws, symmetries seem like something that happens due to some kind of 'happy chance'. — boundless

Imo it would only be 'happy chance' if one of the equivalent descriptions could be the case while the other (e.g. conservation laws) failed, but clearly that isn't the case if one follows from the other formally.

but IMO the picture is simpler. — boundless

I don't think it is simpler imo; because, if these conservation behaviors are properties of individual interactions, and individual interactions can only propagate locally, then there is no reason for me to attribute this as a holistic property of the whole system. The principle applied to the system would be rendered redundant if it holds for subsystems, subsystems of subsystems... right down to local interactions. It would be explanatorily simpler to say that the conservation property holds for the whole system in virtue of the fact it holds at any interaction propagating in some local part of the system.

Ok, interesting. Just for curiosity, but in this interpretation do the 'real' momenta of particles coincide with the 'observed' ones? — boundless

Not sure exactly what you mean but stochastically behaving particles (whether classical or quantum) do not have well-defined velocity / momentum in general so in stochastic mechanics velocity fields are constructed using averages regarding particle motion.

You have jumped to a conclusion. — apokrisis

Which conclusion?

Friston aims to generalise his Bayesian mechanics so it can capture this level of semiosis as well. — apokrisis

What do you mean, specifically?

Your comments simply brush that major project aside. — apokrisis

Don't know what you mean, I am literally just reporting Friston's account to you. I actually don't know what your specific objection is in this passage you have written.

You believe things that other folk don’t believe in. Positional certainty may be matched by momentum uncertainty. However the reverse also applies. — apokrisis

Well actually Bohmians believe in positional certainty also.

But most people are completely ignorant about the stochastic interpretation and the literature on it. Even in standard quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies to the probability distribution of particles in a way that can only be realized when you measure a system many many times. There is no empirical fact about quantum mechanics that contradicts the stochastic or statistical or Bohmian interpretation of Heisenberg uncertainty. Any confusion comes from thinking the wavefunction has to be the actual physical particle as opposed to possibly a construct that holds information about statistics.

Again, uncertainty relations are inherent in stochastic systems. They were first discovered for Brownian motion by Furth in 1933:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=218273391326247766&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

I have already mentioned a Friston source that shows it too for classical stochastic systems and there are many other sources I could give you too if you wanted. Classical stochastic systems describe things like a dust particle floating in a glass of water, behaving randomly. Yes, under certain conditions, uncertainty relations like Heisenberg's would show up in the statistical behavior of a system like this. This is a classical system you can observe with your own eyes and in fact, the Heisenberg uncertainty relations exist in quantum mechanics for the same reason as they do in the classical case - you can mathematically derive them from the non-differentiable (i.e. randomly behaving) nature of quantum paths as in path integral formulation, which have exactly the same fractal properties as the random motion of classical Brownian paths: e.g.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=9621050886572313269&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

Similarly, non-commutativity in path integral formulation is derived for the same reasons and this is explicitly states on the path integral wikiedia page.

The fact of the matter is that Heiseinberg uncertainty is perfectly compatible with the idea of definite particle positions and it must be so because classical stochastic systems have definite particle positions and they also have uncertainty relations. Furthermore, given how uncertainty principle can be derived from quantum mechanics for the exact same reason it can in classical stochastic systems, there is no barrier from that kind of formal angle of interpreting quantum Heisenberg uncertainty from the perspective of definite particle positions.

Quantum mechanics can be derived in its entirety from unremarkable assumptions concerning statistical systems where particles are always in definite positions or configurations. It is just not very well known at all though I am pretty sure I have already shown you papers. Even the strangest quantum phenomena such as Bell violating perfect spin correlations fall out of stochastic mechanics models: e.g.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=15973777865898642687&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_ylo=2024&as_vis=1

It is just a mathematical fact that stochastic systems where particles are in definite configurations can reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.

Stochastic mechanics also can be applied to field theories: e.g.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03188

And the nice thing about this paper is that you can watch some of the simulations on youtube (links in paper, youtube channel below):

https://youtube.com/@quantumbeables?si=hOVFbzHhEZAvManc

Given that stochastic formulations are empirically consistent with quantum mechanics in a formally demonstrable way, I cannot agree with your idea that this kind of "classical" view of reality has been debunked.

The point you were making here is covered by reality modelling being a nested hierarchy spanning four levels of semiotic encoding in modern humans. — apokrisis

Well, the point I was making in that passage was to deflate representation, meaning and encoding purely in terms of dynamics.

You are just talking past the distinction between information and dynamics. — apokrisis

Not sure what you mean here but I think from the free energy perspective, information can be more or less equated with dynamics. In fact, some recent free energy papers have started using the phrase "Bayesian mechanics". Central to this is the fact that free energy minimization can be generalized to any kind of random dynamical system as first seen in the A free energy principle for a particular physics paper where Friston also goes through quantum, statistical and classical mechanics through this perspective. Therefore, any physical system can be interpreted as encoding information from beyond the Markov blanket. Markov blankets can be recursively nested; for instances - regarding the more interesting biological cases - in terms of genes translation and regulation, cell boundaries, neuronal axons and synapses, long-range connections between brain-regions, the human body, social groups, eco-systems, societies. They all come under the same generic informational surprisal minimization framework in terms of the dynamics of these systems.

The genetalization of free energy minimization to anything has its precursor in the following paper / result in which the fokker-planck equation - which can generically describe time-evolutions of probability density functions - can be interpreted in terms of variational free energy minimization:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=17970774975628711245&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

You again talk past the point. Fine graining in the real world means not just cutting smaller and smaller in spatiotemporal scale but going hotter and hotter in energy scale. Whatever seemed to exist in the form of topological order at your coarse grain scale just got melted as you zoomed in. — apokrisis

I don't really know what you mean or what exactly is in conflict here.

From my perspective on quantum, subatomic particles have definite positions all the time (and when you zoom in), they just have random motion (the randomness less apparent as you coarse-grain). Heisenberg uncertainty is a property of the statistical distributiond regarding those particles. From my perspective, no point was talked past here.

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

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

I want to emphasize that I think all of the descriptions are "just models" or at least, none are any less so than others; but, they are all being applied to the same reality and thats why I thought the distinction "physical" and "unphysical" seemed misleading. Sure I guess you were probably meaning literally physics but I always use the word in a much more general sense that may even be closer just to the idea of naturalism.

Yeah. But the brain isn’t literally minimising free energy is it? It is minimising information surprisal. — apokrisis

Friston appeals to more or less exactly the same thing Schrodinger is talking about in his original motivations for the free energy principle.

So Friston is talking about the modelling relation just like the biologists. An epistemic cut has to be involved — apokrisis

Well this role is taken on by Markov blankets but is much more general than what is implied by Patee. It isn't special in any way, and markov blankets are nested within markov blankets ubiquitously. "Observers" then just reflect the slowly evolving regularities of their components on smaller scales.

Something unphysical is going on even if it must also have its physical basis. And whether you fine grain or coarse grain the physics ain’t going to make no difference. — apokrisis

"Unphysical" just seems like a misleading word imo when you are just talking about the utility of high level explanations that trace over and present what we observe in a nice, useful way.

And the higher level explanations are coarse-graining over physics if they supervene on it, e.g. the self-regulatory dynamics of homeostasis can plausibly be re-described or re-modelled in terms of the behavior of particles under the laws of physics.

Imo, the fact of the matter is that there is only one reality. Nothing about observation or coarse-graining due to observation changes that, but we can only maximize information about reality by being able to make distinctions at the smallest possible scales.

On the other hand, toss a Bayesian inference engine into the mix - armed with the need to repair and reproduce itself — apokrisis

I believe that in the free energy perspective, the describing of things in terms of the former effectively follows from the latter, tautologically.

In a sense, yes, they would describe the behavior of the interactions. But whereas the 'bottom-up' perspective says that conservations law are 'contingent consequences' of the behavior of interactions, the 'top-down' picture (i.e. interactions are more fundamental) says the reverse. — boundless

Not sure I agree. I've only started to think more deeply into this after a conversation I am having in another thread and it is beginning to dawn on me there are potentially a number of ways to view this kind of thing. Maybe too off point to go into those thoughts though; so, to skip to the point:

The kind of "behavior of interactions" I had in mind would be effectively equivalent to the conservation principles. Just alternative descriptions of the same thing though this I imagine depends on the nature of specific statements, formulations, descriptions. An example special case could be:

https://www.engineering.com/whats-the-similarities-between-these-principles-1-dalemberts-principle-2-law-of-conservation-of-energy/

It seems to me that whatever is conserved is always implied in the described behavior of the interactions. Obviously you might be able to apply these principles as a blanket description of various systems of different sizes and claim holism in virtue of the fact you could be talking about large spatially separated systems. Thinking about it then; for me, I would accept a holistic explanation if say, the forces and displacements in the above link were non-local. But if they are solely local or mediated locally, then I don't see the need for a holistic description. Sure I may not be able to directly explain why these descriptions apply, but if everything interacts only locally then I don't see the need for holistic descriptions. The blanket description for the system would not be distinct from compatible descriptions applied to all the sub-components of a system.

Obviously, you this may seem to not apply for quantum non-locality and so holism seems the case there. My reply again would be that quantum non-locality is not a real example of the exertion of forces over space and time, but a correlation whose origin is local.

I don't see how this isn't some kind of 'non-realism', thought. It seems to imply this rejection of 'unicity' — boundless

Based on the Stanford article, I would say the stochastic interpretation manages to fulfil unicity in the sense of: "a single point represents the exact state of a system at any given time" ehich applies to particles but not the wave-function.

You keep saying you don't see there is a problem. But the sciences of life and mind exist because physics can't even model physics with a computational notion of laws and initial conditions, let alone jump the divide once semiosis enters the chat. — apokrisis

Because what current physics can or can't model has nothing to do with my point, otherwise I wouldn't be defending it with a simulation that can't be built. At the same time, I'm not entirely sure how far biology has actually got with actual successful models of these things.

Have you read Schrodinger's classic What is Life? — apokrisis

Are you aware I advocated the free energy principle and active inference a few posts ago?

But sure. You don't care. The rate independent dynamics is the whole of the story according to your preferred metaphysics. Anything beyond that is just another model at a different level you protest in epistemic plurality as you fall back on that familiar reductionist ontology that all systems are essentially a collection of atoms in a void. — apokrisis

Its all models from physics upwards to anything else. No part of science is any less of just a model than any other.

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

And how does that pan out given Heisenberg uncertainty? — apokrisis

Heisenberg uncertainty principle is referring to constraints on probability distributions regarding the behavior of statistical systems. Uncertainty relations like this are generically derivable for all stochastic systems including classical ones like Brownian motion. Purely incidentally (I am not attributing the discovery of this fact to him), Karl Friston actually derives it in his free energy principle papers A free energy principle for a particular physics and parcels and particles as a generic property of the non-equilibrium steady state when discounting solenoidal flow, and it is also responsible for non-quantum energy-temperature uncertainty relations in thermodynamics.

I want to go back on the idea I think I have been alluding that this grounding issue has something to do with ontology in a way which is contrasted to or independent of explanation. Because, thinking about it, I don't think it is.

I think what I am talking about is just some very general idea of decomposition when it comes to all our empirical observations about reality. We observe reality at different scales where the windows of space and time are expanded or contracted, details fine-grained or coarse-grained. We can divide up and model the reality constructed from observations with various boundaries plausibly, and perhaps not in mutually exclusive ways. Following that, notions of causality are welded to particular descriptions or models. Insofar as there is a plurality of possible descriptions there is no downward, upward or horizontal causation between frameworks; after all, they are all engaging with the same reality, just under different purviews from observers.

My position becomes weaker then when I think about what it means for one scale to depend on the other in a way which is inherently asymmetrical. In my mind, implying such a relationship suggests that different scales are independently manipulable in a way that one can test a direction of causality like you might in statistical modelling. Clearly we cannot do this because they are just different views on the same reality.

Rather, maybe the importance is in the coarse-graining of our observations and conceptualizations of reality - simply, when we zoom-out we lose information about reality. There is redundancy if you allow different levels of zooming out / in simultaneously. But the more you zoom-out, the more information is lost regarding a mapping to some mind-independent reality.

Maybe the degree to which information is lost is what I mean about fundamentality here.

Describing wouldn’t be explaining. Simulating wouldn’t be capturing the causality in question. — apokrisis

Or how a non-linear system can be reduced to a linear model. — apokrisis

Coarse graining is needed because fine graining can’t deliver. — apokrisis

But my point isn't about explaining. As I have said multiple times, many explanatory frameworks are important. I don't expect all explanations to be reduced to or replaced by fundamental physics because those aren't the only explanations we need or find useful; at the same time, their incompleteness and issues of complexity prevent such things pragmatically.

The point is though that such simulations as alluded in the first quote above should be possible in principle if we had the computational power, and able to reproduce all possible events of reality above the fidelity of its description. If all biological processes are composed of things like particles moving in space then this should be plausible. I don't see why not. We may need better explanations, but that doesn't preclude the fact that in principle the lower resolution descriptions are undergirded by the higher resolution description.

Yours becomes a really odd position when physics can’t even settle on an agreement of how a classical realm emerges from a quantum one. — apokrisis

Under my preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics, the emergence of the classical from quantum is extremely straightforward and therr are no fundamental issues here

The systems view of causality is that nature is all about global constraints shaping up the local degrees of freedom — apokrisis

Like which constraints?

Atoms emerge due to the constraints of top-down topological order being imposed on quantum possibility. — apokrisis

source?

You can only assure me you could reconstruct the world as some kind of simulation of its shaped material parts. Some set of atoms arranged in space and moving “because” of Newtonian laws. — apokrisis

But in principle, why wouldn't that be enough to demonstrate my point? The only thing I am saying is that everything else you can possibly explain or describe in principle can be instantiated in that description at the lowest level, until you can find an even lower level.

The fact that it doesn't provide comprehensible explanations of your concepts in special sciences or everyday life is irrelevant if reality is indifferent to your ability to comprehend it.

As a reductionist, you can’t in fact reduce at all. You can only enumerate parts. You can’t speak to the causality of the whole. The only compaction of information you can offer is a mechanics of atoms. The offer to simulate is given in lieu of what is meant by a causal account. — apokrisis

I am asking you to ground your account in its causal principles. — apokrisis

You mean reality resolves into its fundamental atomistic detail at the level of the Planckscale? Of the quantum foam? Of quantum gravity?

Yeah. How is that project going exactly? — apokrisis

Again, you confuse my point. My point has nothing to do with explanations that we might find attractive or necessary as observers.

Its about the idea that in principle all of the possible information about reality is only attainable if it is maximally resolved, if it isn't coarse-grained, if details are not ignored.

If a description misses out details that one knows to exist by utilizing higher resolutions of observation, how can that description be considered more fundamental to reality?

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

Yes, this is a fair point. I would just question if it ever seems reasonable to say that events observed at the larger scale of existence do [not] depend on and are decomposable in terms of the smaller scales or higher resolutions.

This was true in the early days of the social and psychological sciences — Joshs

It still is true because no matter how complicated we view biology or social sciences, a description at the level of physics would be orders of magnitude more complex to describe the same phenomena and it may not even make a lot of sense.

1) You are not actually treating the higher order psychological account as consistent with the lower order one, but you are just assuming without examining the details that the higher must be reducible to the lower since of course the physics has been rigorously validated empirically. — Joshs

No, this is nothing specifically to do with physics, it is about whether it logically makes sense that observations on larger scales do not depend on lower scales. If the difference between higher and lower scales amounts to expanding the spatial and temporal scales and coarse-graining on a single reality, then I am not sure an alternative in principle makes sense for any kind of description. It would result in a radically different view of reality which would seem strange to me.

2) You interpret the higher order as subsumed by the same theoretical logic as the lower one, and so miss the radical departure of the former from the latter’s grounding assumptions. — Joshs

I have made the distinction between issues that are concerned with the actual structure and reducibility / derivability of different explanatory frameworks (what you are saying is part of this issue) vs. more general issues of ontology. I have not been making a point about the former.

Edit: first reply changed

But you didn't get the memo about categories. I'm afraid the news is that there are many different kinds of existence. — Ludwig V

Not sure what you're implying or what you are referring to in what I said. Categories are things we apply enactively like any other knowledge. They reflect things we do, rather than something inherent about fundamental ontologies.

Including physics. — Ludwig V

Yup, already said this.

Oh, to be sure they are. My brain is heavily involved. But the point is that my brain is not the whole story. Same applies to plus tasks. — Ludwig V

Well, all I can do is point you back at what I already said about why I think this kind of perspective is only rather superficial significance and doesn't really contribute much. At the same time, I have no trouble saying that a calculator does plus tasks.

You seriously mean that you live in your head? — Ludwig V

If you are not a dualist, and there is something like an isomorphism between experiences and how the brain functions, and there is only a single realm of existence, then it is clear that consciousness is in the vicinity of the brain. How could it be any other way? Yes, we all conceptualize ourselves in terms of an extended person in the physical world (or perhaps any other way you choose) but all of these concepts emerge, are constructed directly, are vicariously engaged with in experience. Experience is inside your head. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions are tied to neural activity in your head. However you may conceptualize the world, it is via experience, and experience must be situated in the vicinity of your brain if you take the isomorphism of consciousness and brain descriptions seriously, if you think there is only one realm of existence.

The idea that the self or the person is another creature like us inside our heads was the founding mistake of dualism. — Ludwig V

Well this is nothing like what I have said. What are you then if you are not a dualist?

And yet you defend your brain tirelessly. So it must be important to you even if it is not big. — Ludwig V

Not sure this makes sense. You must have misunderstood something but it doesn't seem like a significant point.

So the concept of ontological grounding is not perspective-dependent? H'm. — Ludwig V

Well no; but, by observing the world, we can make the conceptual distinction between a world that in-principle exists in a mind-independent way and the frameworks we use to engage with it. I think that the fact that we cannot talk about anything in a perspective-independent way shouldn't necessary preclude us from talking about the concept of a perspective-independent world. There may not be much at all that can be said; nonetheless, I think such a concept is important in how we see the world.

We can then note the difference between issues of derivation and reduction between different explanatory frameworks as opposed to the empirical observation of how the world seems to decompose when we zoom in at different scales. Most people's objections seem to be really preoccupied with the former. To me, objections to the latter seem to require a radically different conception of reality which frankly I know wouldn't seem plausible to me.

Looking back on my description, I think introducing the notion of "behaviors at different scales" does actually introduce perspective in a stronger way than I had desired with regard to ontology - because scale is a perspectival concept. But I still think the idea of how the world seems to decompose as we zoom-in with out observations is reasonably independent of any specific kind of field of knowledge you can invoke.

The calculator neither knows not cares whether it is correct. It cannot evaluate its own answer, in the sense of trying to correct wrong answers. — Ludwig V

True, but this just identifies a difference between people and calculators. I don't see it as necessarily meaning much for whether we should say a plus task is being performed. After all, the calculators knows almost as little about how it performs a plus task as we do.

Try stopping your heart or draining your blood. Same result. — Ludwig V

Yes, but it only does this vicariously through your brain. There is nothing in the universe that could get the same result without being mediated by your brain.

Physics, from my perspective, is not unique in any respect. — Ludwig V

But what about the smallest scales of existence. You think events observed at large scales are not grounded on what can be observed at a higher resolution?

How can I refute that in the face of your refusal to engage with the question of how physics - coarse or fine - accounts for the functional structure of a neuron? — apokrisis

I replied here:

Alot of the details are probably out there in the field of biology in terms of things like gene translation and cellular development. Is any of this not mediated through fundamental physics? Seems implausible. Does any of these descriptions require the notion of "biological information"? I doubt it. — Apustimelogist

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

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

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

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

I’m talking about ontology rather than epistemology. Life and mind as a further source of causality in the cosmos. The stakes are accordingly higher. — apokrisis

When you are asking about neuronal structure, you are clearly asking for an explanation that you can understand. Because obviously, in principle one could describe the entire process of cell development and the entire history of the world in which evolution occurs in terms of particles moving in space - it would just not be tractably comprehensible by yourself.

So I think you are talking about explanation, not ontology. Redundancy is acceptable, even useful and required, when it comes to explanation. I disagree that it is when it comes to fundamental ontology.
I don't want to crystallize descriptions from physics too much as some kind of in principle absolute perspective independent view of reality but clearly any treatment of reality that misses out on the smallest scales misses out on details that are fundamental to reality in the sense of having observable consequences which undergirds observations from a less resolved perspective of larger scales.

Smaller scale descriptions don't give us all our required explanations, but clearly a model of reality could only be in principle complete at the highest resolution, other resolutions being redundant. Our observations about reality are grounded on and instantiated in the most zoomed-in scale, fully resolved, fully decomposed - higher scale observations reflect coarse-grainings of that over space and time.

Sure. You've certainly said how it seems for you. But as a biologist and neuroscientist, I see this as question-begging reductionism. — apokrisis

Why is it reductionist if I explicitly talk about the importance of higher level explanatory frameworks?

When are you going to refute the idea that all coarse-grainings of behaviors over larger scales are grounded on higher resolution details at smaller scales of space and time?

This just shows that you haven't read or understood the stuff. — apokrisis

I feel like I read enough of what you sent to get a gist.

All the parts of the puzzle that come together to form a general theory of life and mind. — apokrisis

Show us the state of the art papers of this theory then rather than one from 2001.

The question you deny is even a question is a question I've been academically engaged with for a long time. — apokrisis

Well, unfortunately that doesn't guarantee anything. I have no doubt Bernardo Kastrup has been academically engaging in utter drivel for some time. I even would say Qbism and many worlds are as bad.

Seems you are trying very hard to do exactly what biologists complain about. Failing to understand the epistemic cut. — apokrisis

I have said a couple times in the thread I see the importance of different explanatory frameworks on different levels but just seems to me all complex behavior are grounded on and emerge from the smaller scales as described by more fundamental, simpler physical laws or descriptions. As just said, I don't think that precludes higher level frameworks but they just aren't as fundamental.

I just don't find biosemiotics compelling as some kind of foundation for biology. I don't have an issue with studying something like that, but I don't see it as fundamentally necessary to describe how things work in biology. This is partly because I am already very biased against attempts to reify meaning and against views that seem inherently strongly representational. The idea of symbols or signs in biology then seem to me something like an additional level of idealization and approximation that is another way of telling stories about biology, perhaps more intuitively - similar to teleology. But it doesn't seem fundamental to me compared to notions like blind selectionism which does not necessarily require things to be packaged up in terms of neat symbols and meanings.

I personally find ideas like active inference and the free energy principle have more clarity, eloquence and mathematical grounding than the Howard Patee stuff, in addition to being prima facie simpler to couple with my enactive inclinations. The epistemic cut idea also seems to draw from ideas in quantum mechanics which I just do not believe to be the case

So are you saying that mathematical objects don't really exist? What is your criterion for existence? Is it, by any chance, being physical? I don't think Quine's slogan "to be is to be the value of a variable" is perfect. But it's not bad as a slogan. — Ludwig V

I don't have a criterion for existence but my assumptions from what science and philosophy seems to say to me is that: there is a single realm of existence; everything is grounded on behavior at the smaller scales of that existence; there is no alternative platonic realm where mathematical objects exist. All I know is that my ability to use math comes from my brain, - and my brain and all my biology and behaviors are grounded in the behaviors of the smaller scales of existence.

I think we construct mathematical objects and impose them on the world enactively, which is not really any different from any other concepts or knowledge we use. I don't really have a problem saying mathematical objects exist, but I would not see any mystery to their existence beyond how our brain functioning has allowed us to use math.

But notice that in the latter case, the hormones do not map one to one with my emotions. — Ludwig V

Because emotions are much more than just hormones.

Nonsense. They know perfectly well how to count. Maybe they can't explain how they count very well, but that's a different know-how. So we say they act blindly. But the point is that they act correctly. — Ludwig V

Well then the only criteria I see for the plus task is that it is performed correctly in the way regular people deem it correct. A calculator can plus correctly imo.

I never said it was. All I'm saying is that what I do is not what my brain does - except by synecdoche. — Ludwig V

I just don't really understand what practical consequence saying this has when, even if I don't identify what I am doing as what my brain does, clearly everything I am perceiving and experiencing and all my acts are direct consequences of brain behavior interacting with the environment. I don't see any interesting consequences for what has been said so far by maintaining this distinction. You may not want to say a brain is doing what you are doing but lets see what happens when we stop the brain doing what its doing and knockout that occipital lobe - how that affects what you are doing.

From my perspective anyway, everything I am experiencing is literally what it is like to be some kind of higher level, higher scale functional structure in the vicinity of that part of existence which we might label my brain. So the distinction does not seem so big from my perspective. Even if I identify as a whole person in some sense that is something different from my brain, the whole person embedded in its external environemnt is still as much an inferred construct that I effectively would be experiencing from a perspective within the insulation of the brains sensory boundaries - given what I said in the first sentence of this paragraph. The self arguably might be seen as an inference like any other. Different brains may then have effectively different models or perceptions of persons or even self. And you can get hints into its constructed nature through how people perceive things like this:

https://youtu.be/9Tt7aqHFUCU?si=yHjzV0Mvr_YQJLQQ

Some people just struggle to understand these clips much more than others - they struggle to make the same inferences others do, suggesting how such concept are imposed and not directly apparent a-prior-i (perhaps in something like the Bayesian sense) from the moving images. But I digress!

A brain may not do what a person does in some sense but making the identification is where I am drawn and I personally find concepts flexible enough to allow that.

Quite so. But it doesn't follow that we can in principle describe my behaviour in terms of the same levels. You can describe my running in physical terms. But physics has no equivalent to an intention or to the rules of athletics, so you can't describe my running and winning a race in terms that physics would recognize. — Ludwig V

Yes, I get that and I have never excluded those things, after all that is the level at which we engage with the world in everyday life. But I think a distinction can be made between: the use of different explanatory frameworks and ways we engage with the world that are perspective-dependent for various reasons; and then the concept of ontological grounding in principle - that behaviors described at one scale will be grounded in those on smaller scales, even if I require different explanatory frameworks to make sense of the world in any pragmatic way.

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

Sure, the laws don’t forbid the structure. But in what sense do they cause the structure to be as it physically is? — apokrisis

Well do so then. Tell me how the physical structure of a neuron is the product of fundamental physics. Tell me how neurons appear in the world in a way that does not involve the hand of biological information. — apokrisis

Alot of the details are probably out there in the field of biology in terms of things like gene translation and cellular development. Is any of this not mediated through fundamental physics? Seems implausible. Does any of these descriptions require the notion of "biological information"? I doubt it. At the same time, you're asking about deriving neuronal structure from physics but I don't really see where you would derive neuronal structure from "information processing which entropically entrains the physical world" either any more than you can from physical laws.

and interpreting them as a 'faithful portrait' of reality is wrong. — boundless

I wouldn't say that its not like the portait cannot possibly in principle be faithful (where it does not have wrong predictions); but that it cannot tell us anything about reality intrinsically beyond tools that are used by us to essentially anticipate what comes next or came before or what could happen in some scenario.

I think that 'non-representationalist' interpretations of QM — boundless

I feel like my point should be interpretation-independent.

But IMO the 'reductionistic' picture takes conservation laws as accidental properties of interactions — boundless

I disagree. They would still be an inherent part of the descriptions of those interactions, it just doesn't have to be anything more than local to that picture.

In the thermal interpretation, as I understand it, the wave-function is a pure fiction — boundless

Not entirely sure this is the case. Hard to tell. Imo, the 'holism' can be explained away given that the wave-function isn't real and entanglement depends on local entangling interactions ans locally incompatible observables.

But you said all the complex behaviours of neurons emerge from lower level physics which is quite wrong. They emerge from the information processing which entropically entrains the physical world in a way that brains and nervous systems can be a thing. — apokrisis

I am not sure this makes sense. A neuron is characterized as a physical object made up of particles that behave according to the laws of physics. All neuronal behaviors follow from this and we put information processing on top of it. Not the other way round.

I don’t favour computer analogies but what do you think causes the state of a logic gate to flip. Is it the information being processed or the fluctuating voltage of the circuits? — apokrisis

It is obviously the latter. The most advanced models of functioning neurons are characterized in exactly the same way. It explains how neurons seem to process information.

The physics of neurons is shaped by the top-down needs of Bayesian modelling. Bayesian modelling isn’t a bottom-up emergent product of fluctuating chemical potentials. — apokrisis

You can always in principle describe whatever a brain is doing in terms of more fundamental physics. You may choose a higher level of explanation for what a brain does but that will still more or less have a grounding in and depend on the fundamental physics of brain components. The only way to dispute that is to dispute what the brain is composed of which no one would sanely do. Given that, we can always in principle describe the brain behavior in terms of those more fundamental levels. Exactly the same goes for how it got there, whether developmentally or evolutionarily - even if such things are more desirably explained in terms of higher level explanations regarding things like selectionism, canalization, gene-environment interactions or whatever.

You rephrased the question. Surely, applying math to the smallest scales of existence implies that physics and math exist independently. — Ludwig V

But this is just the application of a tool which is nothing more than what is enacted in behavior or cognitive states. In fact, applying math to the smallest scales of existence is basically physics. (though physics isn't exclusively or fundamentally about describing the smallest scales of existence).

It is then important to make the conceptual distinction between the smallest scales if existence - which grounds everything - and our use of math or physics as a tool. The caveat is that the only way we can intelligibly describe or grasp the smallest scales of existence effectively is by applying the tools. But the tools have no inherent ontological existence beyond our enacting of them.

Sure, you could argue that the objects in math are not reducible to objects in physics... they are more general and perhaps abstract than physics... but we can make any sets of arbitrary tools we want that are not inherently related or reducible in a hard way to other tools or descriptions. They are, after all, just constructs. There is no hard reductions without bridges and assumptions anywhere in knowledge. At the same time, there can be multiplicitous applications of tools - e.g. fields of math can be applied to many different areas / different areas can have strong parallels. Nonetheless, if you want to talk about ontology and existence, then it seems that all behaviors of objects must be grounded in behaviors at smaller scales.

The fact that maths does not reduce to physics - in the way that arguably certain physical theories can be reduced to each other - has no ontological significance. What is significant is that mathematical behavior, mathematical intellectual ability, information processing is grounded ontologically in the smallest scales.

Would a Popperian ontic triadism be better? I doubt it. I suppose it is time to come out. I do have a view of this. I see your claim as the classic philosophical mistake of thinking that a grammatical device, which is purely rhetorical, has some philosophical significance. "Brains do plus tasks" is synecdoche for "People do plus tasks". You may not know what synecdoche is (I had to look it up to be sure). — Ludwig V

But is what a person does independent of what a brain does? No.

Is a brain how a person does a plus task? Yes.

Are persons and brains exemplifying constructs we use whose relations come from / are about different epistemic perspectives rather than inherently about ontology? Yes.

Then - while your issues about whether brains or people do plus tasks may have semantic validity in terms of how we characterize things relying on concepts or definitions or aquaintances from different perspectives - what are the consequences it has in terms of what actually happens in existence? Absolutely nothing, but for the caveat that we cannot view existence in a perspective-independent way. Nonetheless, empirical evidence about isomorphism of experience and brains is convincing. Philosophical arguments too like Chalmers' dancing / fading qualia, etc, are also convincing. Neither do I feel the need to qualify that humans have bodies and exist in both physical and cultural environments or niches every single time I talk about them. We can acknowledge the conceptual divides between different perspectives but I think we also must acknowledge that if different perspectives map up to each other substantially, like the brain and mind, then its simply seems impossible to me to not talk about those mappings in terms of some kind of underlying commonality. To say that a person can do a plus task but a brain cannot is an epistemic clarification that, if taken too absolutely, completely obfuscates a valid ontological clarification with tangible consequences...

Unless you are a hardcore dualist.

At the same time, I question whether your distinction between brains and humans doing plus tasks is even that interesting or valid. For the ways I would talk about a plus task, I see no issue with saying something like 'a calculator performs plus tasks'. I therefore see no issue with the notion that a brain can perform a plus task either. You could get an population of neurons, put it on a petri dish, wire it up to some computer or other apparatus and teach it how to do plus tasks. I have no inherent problem with saying it was performing a 'plus task' - we set up a 'plus task' with criteria on success, and the petri dish sarisfies them.

You could say that well this petri dish doesn't satisfy some kind of unique human criteria of doing a plus task experientially... but what is that exactly? I really have no idea because I don't think anyone knows exactly how they count or do plus tasks. They just do. Mental arithmetic is almost like a brute ability (from our own perspectives). The answers just come. I don't see a good criteria that makes human plus tasks special in some way, and from the third-person perspective, watching a human doing a plus task on a computer is not necessarily qualitatively different from the petri-dish.... they both share the fundamental resemblance of neurons hooked up to a computer. One might be immensely more complicated than the other but they are doing the same task. One we might want to characterize in terms of more complex experiences but I don't think experience is necessarily important for characterizing plus tasks. At the same time, I am inclined to say that questions about experience or if other things (e.g. neurons in a petri dish) have experiences may be both intractably meaningless and meaninglessly intractable.

Yes, I understand that. So the language that you use to describe the brain process excludes the possibility of describing a plus task. So in what sense can it explain or cause a plus task? — Ludwig V

Why would I use the language of brain processes to describe a plus task? On the other hand, I can get a brain to perform a plus task.

I don't think there is anything to 'meaning' beyond enaction. So there is nothing special. 'Meaning' is entirely enacted... in the mechanistic flows of experience.

However, the synchronization that is involved here (mirroring) is not obviously the same as the one that Apustimelogist is concerned with. But I don't know what the active inference/free energy principle is, so I could be wrong. — Ludwig V

It is the same kind of synchronization.

This neatly inverts things. An informational mechanics is precisely what biology and neurology impose on the physical world. Not the other way around. — apokrisis

Well this just ignores the context about which of two things is more fundamental. In any case, under my view of enactivism, a "semiotic modelling relation" cannot be fundamental because it is the kind of representationalism that my enactive views would prefer to actually explain away.

This ignores the fact that organisms are organised by codes and so exist in a semiotic modelling relation with the world. — apokrisis

More like what a modeller imposes on the world, including their models of modelling.

But the world itself is not a machinery of linear cause and effect — apokrisis

It is if you can unmix all the interactions that would make causality non-linear.. something that generally does not occur but arguably we infer or observe in experiments... but the point is that we generally do not study the fundamental nature of the world in terms of its full complicated mixture of effects... we separate out simpler, fundamental principles latent in theory complicated behavior. When causality seems non-linear, it is because of how different parts of reality interact. "Non-linear cause and effect" therefore emerges and isn't fundamental.

For all practical purposes, we may regard a wave function as collapsed as some probe with a switch mounted on its end has been heard to flip state. Holism can be considered localised. Another bit of thermodynamic history has now definitely been added to universe's equation of state. — apokrisis

Wave functions are not real objects nor do they physically collapse.

If neurology relied on ions crossing membranes as its deep explanation, then it would be getting us nowhere — apokrisis

And that is an epistemic issue not an ontological one and I have more or less explicitly alluded to this in recent posts. Again, just because it may not be your preferred level of explanation, does not preclude it from being more fundamental or at least perform a role of grounding the other more preferred explanation so that preferred explanation itself would in principle be explained by and depend on this more small scale perspective.

Yes, these are very good examples I think.


Alot of that seems to be detailing experiments so I don't see how it can be contradictory to the view you offered in this post.

“relations are not secondarily derived from independently existing “relata,” but rather the mutual ontological dependence of “relata”—the relation—is the ontological prim­itive. The notion of intra-actions constitutes a reworking of the traditional notion of causality.” — Joshs

Just sounds like unnecessary obfuscation to me.

I’m arguing that the full implications of the non-linearity of complex systems in living beings makes it impossible to derive them from physical models as they are currently understood. — Joshs

I feel like you can in principle, it would just be extremely complicated - and that is probably an understatement.

about non-linear systems. — wonderer1

Like Hodkin-Huxley neurons!

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

Mathematics is something we enact, and in that sense it is grounded in the smallest scales of existence because our behavior and brain obviously is.

The billiard ball model of causality — Joshs

The fact that you may need higher levels of explanation to make a dynamic system intelligible doesn't negate the fact that it may be at the most fundamental level just a consequence of simple billiard ball causality. It could not be any other way since such explanations you talk about are by their very nature not fundamental. Brain message passing entirely functions by molecular interactions which is comparable to billiard ball causality. It doesn't mean that this behavior doesn't result in extremely complex or even chaotic behavior.

I just don't feel the need to qualify at every moment that the brain has extremely complex, non-linear, recurrent dynamics. This is how I inherently think about the brain all the time. That fact is simply not relevant to the point I am making in this context; nor does it even make sense to me to identify this kind of thing as some kind of different, special form of causality in any meaningful, non-trivial way. Clearly, whatever sense of 'mechanistic' you are thinking about is just much more narrow than mine.

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

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

It by definition cannot be more fundamental even if you would never want to describe what brains do purely at the level of ions crossing membrane barriers and molecules interacting with receptors.