Good lecture on how quantum systems are formally equivalent to stochastic processes (link to papers at start of video though I have linked the previous in this thread):

https://youtu.be/IBP1oxHxnpk?si=zXwj-n56sdUpBUHo

Shown in the video how the weird quantum phenomena like non-commutativity (and heisenberg uncertainty, measurement dependence), interference (thus coherence/superposition), decoherence, entanglement are all behaviors that occur in a certain (and only recently described i.e within the last 20 years) family of [stochastic processes, i.e. sequences of random variables that will always realize definite outcomes at any point in time]. Collapse appears purely as statistical conditionalization. The author goes through how you can bi-directionally translate between quantum and stochastic formalisms - the quantum representation is just a useful tool. Note, the author also says this is extremely generic and can be applied to any kind of quantum system whether particles or any ontology you like.

No many worlds.
No measurement problem.
No cat dead and alive at same time.
No Heisenberg cut.
No shoehorning deterministic trajectories and pilot waves.
No need to wonder if the moon is really there when no one looks.
No observer woo.

Parsimony demands one ignores these distractions because they are not required to produce quantum behaviors.

Quantum theory is precisely orthogonal to Kantianism or Berkelianism or Schopenhauerism or Dennettianism.



"The functional information of a system will increase (i.e., the system will evolve) if many different configurations of the system undergo selection for one or more functions."

... functional information increases if functions undergo selection"

... increases in functional information characterizes evolution"

This doesn't seem like some profound new law about the world to me; they just seem to be proposing another way of describing evolution as always been understood, just in a different and I guess more general way.

But, having thought about it, I want to emphasize the multifarious uses of language, many, but not all, of which involve communication in one form or another. — Ludwig V

Yes, true.

Could you break it down for me? — Ludwig V

I'm just stating that how an animal's communication isn't thought.

But you could also say that you don't need language to communicate — Ludwig V

True. I would say that communication just generalizes language. Similarly, what an animal communicates about is different to their actual perceptual/cognitive/physica engagement with what they are communicating about.

Yes, I would probably say so.

inaccessible — Ludwig V

Well I just mean in the sense like what is happening somewhere out of your direct perception is not accessible. You cannot know what is going on in that case.

I wouldn't fight over the question of priority. That it has multiple uses is not in question, I think. — Ludwig V

I think that quote is a bad phrasing. Its about the idea that language is not identical to thought. We don't need language to think about things. When we don't need language to think about things or engage with the world, I think this is how language becomes redundant in the private language scenarios.

Yes I thimk we agree. To me I don't see the inherent distinction between a public language and a private one other than only one person uses it. So to me it is a counterexample to the private language used by only one person. But it is not counterexample to the deeper intended point imo. So for me, maybe a more general view of the private language argument is the point that language is meaningless without the need for the communication of inaccessible information, whether that communication being with other people or yourself.

Interesting paper perhaps relevant:

Language is primarily a tool for
communication rather than thought

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=language+primarily+communication&btnG=

(top link pdf)

Abstract/Intro:

"Language is a defning characteristic of our species, but the function, or functions, that it serves has been debated for centuries. Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking. We begin by introducing the brain network that supports linguistic ability in humans. We then review evidence for a double dissociation between language and thought, and discuss several properties of language that suggest that it is optimized for communication. We conclude that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities, and only refects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition."

Someone else can read the note, so it doesn't count as private language — Ludwig V

I don't think it matters if someone can read the note, it matters if the criteria for the correctness of words is socially enforced or not.

But the fact this counterexample exists doesn't change the point of the private language argument imo. Imo the private language argument is about showing that when you have no external enforcement of these criteria, any kind of stable foundation for word meaning evaporatrs because we simply don't need words to engage with the world. The counterexample introduces the same kind of practical enforcement as the social case and so it doesn't contradict the point being made imo.

How does any individual ever know that they are properly chastising someone for following a rule wrong? Per Wittgenstein, they can't be sure that they ever understand a rule — Count Timothy von Icarus

The point is that it doesn't matter. People do whatever they are going to do anyway. They aren't even thinking about these skeptical possibilities. I think what Wittgenstein is making a point about time and time again in PI is that the relations between words or rules or whatever... and what we mean by them is chronically indeterminate or underdetermined. But people can behave coherently anyway. Wittgenstein wasn't trying to pin down rules or fix a problem.

What is happening is inverting the idea that there is some realm of fixed kind of platonic abstract meanings that determine our behavior. No, it is the opposite. Meanings and rules are metacognitive idealizations of an organism that is intelligent enough to make inferences about its own cognizing, its own behaviors, its own perceptual processes. We don't need a strict way to agree rules because all the heavy lifting regarding rules is done by the underlying cognizing and complicated percetual and behavioral abilities latent in us and that we have in common with other people.

In artificial intelligence, a common complaint is that much of what these things do are not human-interpretable in the sense that even tough these machines are very good at what they do, its hard to work out exactly why they do certain things, describable in a way that makes sense to people. And in many ways, why should it? Our abilities to do things like object recognition or motor control or mental calculations far outstrips our ability to talk about these things semantically. Our own abilities are not necessarily easily human interpretable which might make sense given that how neurons compute things shouldn't be a universe away from A.I.

Words meanings and rules are more like signposts pointing in the right direction for the rest of our highly complicated cognitive, motor, perceptual faculties to do the job. In the same way that looking at the dictionary definition of a word is just a signpost where the rest of your brain already has inside of it much of the information from our developmental histories required to generalize from the definition to using the word.

The point is that our faculties do not come from platonic abstractions of words. They are extremely messy and build skills from a long history of observations, using billions of parameters capable of extremely complex non-linear abilities.

Meanings and rules emerge from these things and just are a way of efficient communication to help people's behaviors synchronize in some sense. They are pragmatic. The behaviors they signify don't need to be rigorously determined because biological self-organization does not require it. In the same way that Darwinian evolution isn't based on perfect forms, it is based on blind, messy selection.

Its about what works, not directly tapping into some inherent kind of truth well or something. Sure you might think of "plus" as a pretty perfect concept that everyone obviously follows doing math. But if we do do this, this doesn't get prescribed from up-high by some well, determined, platonic realm of abstract rules. It comes bottom up from an extremely complicated brain which is exactly why brains have no problem acting coherently even when our metacognitive interpretations of what we are doing are chronically underdetermined. When you think about it, you won't even be able to give a nice non-circular foundational definition for what plus is that isn't underdetermined. Yet we just have a kind of meta-cognitive, intuitive confidence in out ability to distinguish and perform some kind of act. Doesn't matter how we do it. We apply the labels after the fact and insofar as there are multiple ways to draw boundaries, we can apply labels in many different chronically indeterminate ways. But that doesn't matter because our intuitive abilities do the heavy lifting. What is the criterion for "coherence" then? Just whatever people agree with, and the reason for such agreement is then open to the same skeptical games regressing ad infinitum. But again, this doesn't really matter because that is like a meta-cognitive inferential labelling process that is not necessarily identical to the development of those actual behaviors (I guess similar to how everyone has the perceptual ability to see the same colours but cultures may draw boundaries differently - there is a distinction between the seeing of the color and the metacognitive act of labelling). You don't need a theory of 'plussing' to do addition. Just like most people have no idea from a theoretical linguistic perspective what is happening in their mouths or the sounds they make when they talk coherently.

I remember hearing somewhere a view that philosophy often had a pre-scientific role in fields before those fields like physics or biology become more mature. And I think you could argue much of this analytic philosophy regards to characterizing meaning and language takes a similar pre-scientific rule with regard to things like psychology, neuroscience, machine learning etc etc. That is what this kind of philosophy will give way to if you want to know why and how people do things. Its a scientific question. Hence Quine's idea for naturalized epistemology. There is no rigorous foundation for knowledge, how we know things, what meanings are. All you can do is study how the behavior and cognition that people do works. What people do doesn't trickle down from rigorous formal constraints. It emerges and self-organizes from blind physical interactions.

In the case of my talking to my self, my present and past selves affect each other to produce new senses of meaning of the words and the criteria of rules I invoke. — Joshs

Yes, I have thought before that a.nice counterexample to Wittgenstein's private language argument is someone writing a note to themself to remind them to do something in the future, a scenario that requires someone to enforce some relationship between words and things in the world for the sake of reminding themselves.

‘internal’ cognitive system receiving inputs from, computationally representing and spitting out outputs to an ‘external’ world. — Joshs

Yes, I just mean chains of causal interactions. There is no explicit objective notion of representation, just cascades of neural impulses which then can generate outputs. My use of internal was just alluding to the fact we cannot observe most of what is going on. At the same time I think internal is justified in the sense that a brain can be separated from the external world in some sense with its sensory inputs and motor outputs as intermediaries. And that brain is the seat of our experiences. I have to say I am definitely not as much of an extended cognition person as you are though I don't necessarily disagree with it per se. I am just lezs inclined to view things that way.



Sorry, I don't think I am following any of this but to me what makes something a sign is depend on its reception by something that can use it as a sign.

My take on Wittgenstein and his "forms of life" is that absolutely everything bottoms out in behavior. Any interpretation of behavior is inherently indeterminate and interpretations we give rely on arbitrary, inscrutable foundations characterized by circular regresses in definition and ostensive pointing. From my view the point is that this indeterminacy and underdetermination has no consequence for people's behavior which can still seem totally coherent. It comes from latent, hidden kinds of blind processes; i.e. in the modern perspective, from the physical dynamics of neuronal behavior. Knowing some kind of determinate rules and forms of life people use is beside the point because people don't need that to interact. People interact successfully despite inherent underdetermination and indeterminacy.

I don't believe that saying "meaning is use" is intended to determine what meaning is. But in lieu of determinate objective meaning structure, all there is to what we call "meaning" is use. And obviously not all meaning is use since something like "History is spelled H-I-S-T-O-R-Y" is a use of "History" that isn't necessarily related to its meaning. Obviously our use of "meaning" and similar synonyms as well as our own reflections on it don't have more to them than behavior that bottom out in neural processes. But the trying to characterize that behavior just brings us back to the issues of indeterminacy. I don't believe "meaning as use" or "forms of life" are meant to be rigorous, comprehensive theories of meaning. They just point to the fact that seemingly coherent behavior co-exists with inherent indeterminacy. The idea of nested forms of life I think is quite appropriate in the sense that behavior has regularities on various different scales, and this is a general feature of complex systems in biology and physics.

I can't use the word 'to' properly if I don't know it brings about a directional relationship between two objects. — Lionino

The problem is, as they don't know what the word actually means, and only learn how to use it from examples/contexts — Lionino

As soon as we know the German word is a "perfect" translation of the English word, we are able to use productively. — Lionino

I think the answer to these issues is that there is nothing more to knowledge than use either. It is driven by underlying neural processes we are not privy to and cannot be interpeted semantically but physically.

I like this quote from developmental paychologists Esther Thelen and Linda Smith:

"We believe this answer is wrong. Knowing is the process of dynamic assembly across multileveled systems in the service of a task. We do not need to invoke represented constructs such as “object” or “extended in space and time” outside the moment of knowing. Knowing, just like action, is the momentary product of a dynamic system, not a dissociable cause of action."

"We think to act. Thus, knowing may begin as and always be an inherently sensorimotor act."

(Paper: Dynamic Systems Theories; direct pdf download when clicking link https://cogdev.sitehost.iu.edu/labwork/handbook.pdf )

We then have dynamic neural systems that can observe their environment, causing complex physical interactions in the system which we think of as learning and encompass all our complicated intellectual abilities. But we cannot cash out this stuff as "knowledge" until we see it's behavior in real time which even then is indeterminate in interpretatio . This is how we would think of "meaning as use" too so "knowledge as use" is basically a generalization.

We then have to account for the fact that we can make an observation and somehow miraculously aquire the ability to coherently use a word in a certain way that we could not before (e.g. learning what the german word for village means and miraculously being able to use it) because we have a complicated internal neural system. But that doesn't contradict the idea that there can be nothing more to what that word means than how we use it. Sure you could point to the internal neural system but we cannot interpret that semantically and we can only cash that out once we observe the behavior even if that behavior is kind of meta- such as when you just define a word... metacognitively stating the definition of a word is behavior, or saying that you could state the definition if you wanted to (without actually stating it) is also behavior, generated by internal neural processes which are capably of generating all of our behaviors. At the same time being able to use a word does not always mean we are using it in a way which seems coherent with the consensus use or that we won't "get it wrong" simply because our understanding isn't deep enough. Nonetheless when we do get it "right", there is nothing more to it than use, generated by the underlying neural systems (at the same time there is no fixed, rigid criterion of "getting it right". Again, all behavior or "use" has indeterminate interpretation; nonetheless our behavior can be coherent.

signifier to the English speaker but devoid of its meaning and use. But it is precisely to the extent that "hola" has become unrooted from its context that it is possible for its context to be learned: the English speaker learns the use and meaning of "hola" from its own context. Only then is communication possible: To the extent that the sign refers beyond the given context and usage. Significance, the most proper of language, exceeds use but does not exclude it. — JuanZu

Signifiers and significance is also nothing more than use as knowledge is - we observe symbols and physical interactions from the outside world causally affect our internal neural systems. They then can spit out future behaviour that reflects the causal interaction with the symbol in the context of the outside world... a symbol is nothing more than the associations we observe it connected to. And out understanding of the symbol is nothing more than the behaviors our internal neural systems spit out, effectively the use of the symbol, the predictions or anticipations and reactions of symbol associations which itself is cashed out in behavior, whether verbal, attentional or otherwise. Those abilities may rely on how our internal neural systems are parameterized but you cannot interpret that semantically. You can only interpret mechanistically. One physical event causes another and then another which results in eventual states and outcomes. You can also formulate this kind of thing in terms of experiences too imo... what we know, how we think is nothing more than sequences of experiences. And I think that is actually a central part of the sections in Wittgenstein's PI when he is talking about mental acts like reading, the point being that just as with language, all our capabilities are characterized by indeterminacy and that ultimately none of these things are more than the sequences of experiences when we perform mental acts like reading... analogous to meaning as use... language is nothing more than the placement of words in the context of other words and other events in our experiences and out in the world. Characterizing that is inherently indeterminate, yet the behavior occurs seemingly coherently anyway.

So on the contrary, I think nothing we do exceeds use. My interpretation is Wittgenstein I don't thing was creating a theory of meaning. But saying that what we think of as meaning is nothing above use and behavior.

Interpreted in modern terms, I believe Wittgenstein is just perhaps an early pioneer of enactive cognition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enactivism

And so meaning, knowledge, language is enactivism. Most acutely perhaps, situated cognition as alluded in the Thelen quote earlier:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition

I don’t see how this works for quantum field theory. — apokrisis

It has been applied to field theory! References for such application to field theory are given in (e.g. you'll find them if you search the phrase "field theory" and look through:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05467

Mentioned in the formulation below too that it is general enough to be applicable to fields:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10778

but quantum properties like contextuality, entanglement, non-locality — apokrisis

All occur in stochastic mechanics from assumptions of particles, always in definite locations, moving randomly. You can see that explicitly in the paper linked earlier which recreates Bell violations and perfect correlations exactly as regular quantum mechanics.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10701-024-00752-y

These weird quantum effects can be seen as very intuitive consequences of unusual statistical properties in quantum mechanics related to failures of certain assumptions concerning joint probability distributions / "global sections":

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/13/11/113036/meta

Interestingly, these assumptions also fail in areas of social science because things like human decision-making often have a context-dependent nature to them. Somewhat appropriately, quantum theory has become a valid tool in social sciences and you can find phenomena like quantum-like interference effects and Bell-like violations in human behavior and even online data: e.g.

https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-033020-123501
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10699-018-9570-2
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/9/1207
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10146180/

Also classical computer science as well as logical paradoxes too strongly related to contextuality:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.7386
https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03097

And classical light entanglement too:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=classical+entanglement+optics&btnG=

And classical Brownian particle analog of entanglement:

https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412132
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/25/11/1565 (just revisits above arxiv paper)

All because they have unusual statistical properties of joint probability distributions as implied by commutation and uncertainty relations.

The point is that these unusual statistical properties are far more "normal" than we are led to believe and seem to naturally emerge under certain assumptions when talking about particles in definite locations but whose motions are random.

A nice summary of the kind of nature of this unusual statistical property (quote from: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.13326):

For certain families of events the theory stipulates that they are commeasurable. This means that, in every state, the relative frequencies of all these events can be measured on one single sample. For such families of events, the rules of classical probability — Boole’s conditions in particular — are valid. Other families of events are not commeasurable, so their frequencies must be measured in more than one sample. The events in such families nevertheless exhibit logical relations (given, usually, in terms of algebraic relations among observables). But for some states, the probabilities assigned to the events violate one or more of Boole’s conditions associated with those logical relations.

This alludes to the fact that Bell violations are actually just a special case of inequalities discovered by Boole in the 1800s which decine conditions for a joint probability distribution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9chet_inequalities). The fact that a unique joint distribution doesn't exist doesn't mean the underlying statistics don't exist, just that they must be defined on separate probability spaces.

In the stochastic particle case this condition seems strongly linked to the uncertainty relations for position-momentum distributions - they cannot simultaneously be both concentrated. Naturally then sharp position and momentum measurement distributions cannot co-exist.

My hope are quantum interpretation turn away from woo and back toward realism. It is very underappreciated that complete formulations of quantum mechanics as stochastic processes have existed for decades. By a stochastic process, I am just talking about a process where particles are always in a well-defined position at any time and, while they move on continuous unbroken paths, their motion is always being disturbed so the particle is always changing direction on its journey, sharply pushed one way and then another. You can start from some very unremarkable assumptions:

"1. The quantum particle is driven by a Brownian motion where the coupling to the
stochastic background field is given by the diffusion coefficient D = σ^2/2. For macro-
scopic objects, the diffusion coefficient is expected to be negligible. Thus, for a particle
with mass, one can assume that it is inversely proportional to the particle’s mass such
that σ^2 = ℏ/m.

2. A properly defined stochastic acceleration of the particle is proportional to the classical
force F. This is a stochastic Newton law, also called the Nelson-Newton law, which
leads to a Brownian motion with drift.

3. The diffusion is non-dissipative and may be described by a time-reversible stochastic
process." (these assumptions all described in
https://www.mdpi.com/2218-1997/7/6/166 but quote directly taken from same author's dissertation)

The process, at least under one account, can them be summarized as:

“Write down the classical Lagrangian, augment all velocities by osmotic velocities and apply stochastic optimal control theory to the resulting Hamilton principle"
(quote from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/andp.202200433)

You can then get the Schrodinger equation and all its predictions from assumptions about particles that are always in one place at a time but moving about randomly. Two authors who have made good clarifications shown below:

(Barandes)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10778
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03085

(Kuipers)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05467
https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.07524
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_quantum_mechanics

Below is a paper that gets Bell violations and perfect spin correlations as predicted exactly by quantum mechanics from this model of particles that are always in one place at a time and moving randomly (The first Barandes paper above also directly describes how non-local correlations appear in general stochastic processes albeit not an exact spin experiment from quantum mechanics like the Stern-Gerlach one in the following paper):

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10701-024-00752-y

The author doesn't pretend to have a coherent interpretation of exactly how a model of randomly moving particles does this strange behaviour but the point is that they just mathematically follow in some circumstances when you start with some pretty unremarkable assumptions about random particle behavior. If these models can produce this behavior there is no reason to inject any additional exotic ontologies or significance for observers. By having particles always in one place at a time, the measurement problem and classical limit is completely solved and in the most intuitive way possible, because particles in one place at time is the commonsense view of the world. It can be noted that had a stochastic interpretation been adopted from the start there would have never been any real reason to introduce the collapse postulate. Its not necessary but at the same time collapse doesn't contradict the stochastic interoretation in any way because it can just be interpreted as statistical conditioning.

The only other thing you have to accept in this stochastic view is that particles move about randomly - and obviously any quantum interpretation always has to allow some kind of randomness somewhere even if it is like many-worlds "self-locating" randomness. Why do particles move randomly? The natural interpretation is that particles don't sit in an empty vacuum but in a sea of background fluctuations that disturb its movement randomly - this seems very compatible with the kinds of ontologies introduced in quantum field theory. It can be noted that the effect of quantum vacuum fluctuations in regular quantum theory on macroscopic objects has been experimentally observed:

https://news.mit.edu/2020/quantum-fluctuations-jiggle-objects-0701

So ontologies like the ones required in the stochastic interpretation already seem to be compatible with quantum field theory and empirical observations from it. The main differences is that under the stochastic interpretation, the wavefunction is not the same as the particle, but just a mathematical object used to predict the motion of particles over many many experiments. We can think of the particles in terms of contextual/non-locally behaving hidden variables.

The parallels between regular classical diffusion (e.g. a particle moving randomly in a glass of water) and quantum mechanics are already very explicit without even trying to derive one from the other.

Classical diffusions can be described by the heat equation which describes the evolution of a particles probability distribution. The Schrodinger equation is just a heat equation that uses complex numbers.

Like the Schrodinger equation, heat equations are deterministic, even though they are used to describe how a probability distribution changes in time.

Like the Schrodinger equation, the heat equation is linear and so the superposition principle applies even though you are describing statistical behavior and diffusions (albeit without the crucial interference):

https://math.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Differential_Equations/Differential_Equations_for_Engineers_(Lebl)/4%3A_Fourier_series_and_PDEs/4.06%3A_PDEs_separation_of_variables_and_the_heat_equation

It has also been known since the 1930s that the Born Rule and uncertainty principle both can be derived in classical stochastic diffusions:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjh/s13129-021-00032-7
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjh/s13129-023-00052-5

Commutation relations too have been found independently in classical stochastic processes:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304414910000256
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/10/1502
https://arxiv.org/abs/1208.0258

There's no reason to think we need anything more than particles, in definite locations at any time, behaving randomly to explain quantum mechanics. No need for observer, no need for woo. This interpretation is just not very well known despite having no fundamental challenges to it apart from being unintuitive. But it makes up for lack of intuition by having rigorous mathematical formulations.

In fairness, I don't think I could explain to you what "to do" means if you didn't already have the intuition! I don't need that explanation to use the phrase. But I would agree that obligation can be trivialized/redundant and deflated significantly similarly to other social constructs when we analyze it in terms of just social interactions - people telling eachother what to do, having emotional reactions, etc. etc. It is naturalistically flimsy.

Apologies, I was thinking more about the literal meaning of the phrase. The phrase "to do something" in your reply or "to do" I would say are more or less along the same lines.

Can you give an account of "do this" which is much more coherent than obligation and its synonyms though? Maybe you can and I haven't thought about it enough but then I am curiousto test my intuition about this.

Yes, fair enough; and I guess most people (I think... in normal societal circumstances anyway... not sure about some extreme kinds of moral trolley-esque thought experiment) would say it was not justified if the topic was human life, regardless of these risks, so not without precedent.

Then individuals should be free to act in whatever way they choose within those globally-understood bounds. — apokrisis

Interesting. Makes morality sound like a problem of maximizing entropy under constraints.

I feel like the problem with challenging "obligations" based on meaning is that conceivably there are various other concepts we might use all the time that are difficult to attribute non-circular meaning but are nonetheless quite intuitive. Things like modal concepts or even sensations of experience. Even concepts like time, quantity, 'being'. Its hard to non-circularly define them but they are nonetheless extremely intuitive and we all agree about them. One might not be able to describe the sensation blue but then it is immediately apparent what a blue thing is. Why can't someone also be able to immediately apprehend a concept like 'obligation'? You then get into these my word versus yours type scenarios which are hard to resolve without changing someone'a intuitions. Maybe one should be an anti-realist about everything?! But then again maybe this just delays the my word versus yours. At the same time, I do think there is something more flimsy and malleable about moral claims compared to scientific ones. I don't find it intuitive to make sense of morality naturalistically, and I am very biased toward naturalistic explanation since they seem like the foundation upon which our inter-subjective interactions are based.

I think he could be right but then again, I think we allow people the right to do what they want within limits. Is everyone realistically moral all the time and do we need to pretend that? Can we tolerate that?

Only I didn't ask that question — Vera Mont

Aha, apologies!

and I don't think the OP was asking how the farmer justifies his living, but how the consumer justifies his food choices. That's just a guess, of course. — Vera Mont

Well my perception is the phrase "how can we still justify livestock farming?" could conceivably include all of these kinds of moral predicaments and similar.

There is always a choice. — Vera Mont

So you think that sustaining their living is not a justification because the risks from making changes are not risky enough?

Maybe he doesn't need to justify it. Not everyone has the same sensibilities. — Vera Mont

Well yes but I am not sure those kinds of answers are the ones you had in mind when you brought up the question. That seems implied when you gave the question: "How can we still justify... "

agribusiness wouldn't have choices, both is what he cultivates and how he goes about it. — Vera Mont

I guess it depends on economics. I'm sure if more ethical choices were economically more lucrative, farmers would jump on it. I can't speak for whether such possible changes present significant economic risk to farmers that threaten their livelihoods. Possibly for some in some places.

Maybe its hard to justify livestock farming but maybe a livestock farmer can still justify livestock farming in order to make a living with little other alternative.

I feel like Bayesianism is the most general and all the others can be looked at reasonably well through a Bayesian lense. For instance, it seems there are many situations where it is natural to cash out Bayesian probabilities regarding the occurrence of events in terms of frequencies; and obviously this can be easily justified by the law of large numbers. Doesn't seem hard to me to connect it to propensities either, which I might also cash out in terms of talk about frequencies, at least counterfactually speaking.

By “moral decay” I mean that we are in a period of time where morality is being by-at-large supplanted with hyper-individualism — Bob Ross

I'm not sure I agree that I see a strong connection between individualism, moral anti-realism and people's ethics in modern society. At least not in the way you are saying.

I mean your "criticism" of the modern world is just so insanely reductive view that I could never agree with it. I find these views have a real lack of intellectual humility.

Yes, moral anti-realism is the total reason why an extremely complex, changing world is in a dumpster fire compared to the halcyon days of old (that never really existed) even though the world is ironically probably in a place of greater moral awareness than for the great majority of its history.

People want more than they need. — Outlander

I don't think that is relevant and what people need can always be cashed out in terms of them liking or wanting to be in particular state.

In that sense, what people want or like might obviously be a much broader category, in principle, than what allows people to flourish. But that doesn't mean that what allows people to flourish isn't what they want or like. And really, the only reason why what people might want or like might be broader than what allows people to flourish is that different wants and likes can conflict, whether that is within the same person or between different people.

But the elevation of pleasure as the sole principle by which the Good — Count Timothy von Icarus

But I should rather like to say that human flourishing — Count Timothy von Icarus

The whole idea of human flourishing is meaningless is it doesn't fulfill things people want or like. You cannot be "flourishing" and simultaneously not enjoying things in some sense or getting something you want out of it.

Clearly, the only way that a utopia can fail is that it has consequences which are things people do not actually want or like. The idea of "good" things is utterly meaningless unless people are receptive to those things because it benefits them, i.e. it gives them something they want or like in some sense.

but I certainly wouldn't say that Huxley is offering up a utopian vision of human flourishing due to this fact. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well I think human flourishing essentially comes down to what people like and want. I mean, if Aldous Huxley isn't offering a utopian vision of human flourishing, why is that? Because it doesn't offer everything that people necessarily want or it only is focusing on some subsection of what people might want or like while avoiding others.

I would say the answer to the above is no, which in turn seems to answer the question of "why should I do what is good?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well this just sounds like appealing to what people want or like which I don't find an objective reason. It's hard to logically imply an ought from an is (which is nothing to do with skepticism) and then again, some people who want odd things, or things that may be harmful to others.

People can and do disagree about the germ theory of disease, evolutionary theory, or the shape of the Earth. Not only that, but such beliefs are socially and historically conditioned. If you grew up in a great many social settings, you likely assumed the Earth stayed still and the Sun moved around it. Does the existence of disagreement about these facts, or that agreement is socially and historically contingent, make the Earth's rotation around the Sun subjective or only objective in a trivial way? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think the difference between morality and the scientific case is that presumably there is some kind of hidden cause out in the world separate from us which we are trying to make sense of and which bears out empirical data that we can use to evaluate our scientific models. But in the moral case the only data we have is our own opinions based on how people want the world to work. So there isn't really a sense in which there is some separate hidden object which we are right or wrong about. We are the analogous hidden object whose properties are contingent on what opinions we happen to have. Its then not clear to me that someone disagreeing objectively means one person is right and the other wrong.

I get this view but it seems kind of trivial to me because clearly what is "objectively good" depends on each specific context and what people happen to want and like. Yeah, you could think about that as objective in some sense but it seems kind of trivial.

That's not the deepest problem though. It doesn't necessarily follow from saying that there are objective things that people like, that an obligation to moral behavior is implied (or that what we call moral or pro-social behavior is good, in other words). Clearly, objective morality has already been presumed. Where does that come from? People just seem to agree that we should have moral rules to guide behavior, and that agreement has probably emerged for various reasons related to our biology and the emergence of functioning societies.

You could say that a lot of people agree on this point, but then the same problem regresses again. It isn't implied objectively from the fact that many people agree about morality that we should engage in moral behavior as an objective fact. And I don't need to appeal to objective good to explain why people agree, only biology, social science, physics (in principle). Maybe you could still call it objective good, but it is pretty flimsy given that not everyone might agree and that people can and have engaged in different moral behaviors in different places and times. If objective good is pinned down on whatever people just happen to do, then that suggests it can change, which seems quite a flimsy standard for objectivity. You can label something as "objective" good but if it has a propensity to change with context then it seems trivial.

But like I said, I don't even think most anti-realists believe the position themselves, even if they think they do, since they generally end up pointing to some standards as the benchmark of the good. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you can believe something is good without simultaneously believing that good is an objective property, hence the difference between ethics and the other meta-ethics!

But we have plenty. Universally there are moral sentiments such as "Don't murder, don't steal," that transcend culture. Most people understand that laws are societal enforcements, but that laws themselves can be moral or immoral. It is used in vernacular and in culture. — Philosophim

My issue with this is that there is absolutely no requirement to postulate objective goodness to explain these things, and to my mind the ontology of "objective goodness" doesnt even make sense.

This leads to an infinite regress that, in reality, must terminate in arbitrariness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is exactly the sort of thing that leads someone to be an anti-realist so I don't see that as a criticism. An anti-realist is led to the position precisely because they don't see any foundation for objective moral value.

abolishing the target of practical reason ends up destroying all of reason. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think there is a good Moorean argument for this... simply that anti-realists don't have any problem with reasoning or having their own ethics. Anti-realists just aren't that different to realists wrt ethics.



You arr talking as if there are certain things that just ought to exists and I don't think this is how it works. You may postulate something exists, look for it and then find that you have no evidence that it exists. Completely reasonable to not believe it exists.

and the nature of the animal. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, so you have lots of animals engaging with the same world. This doesn't really count for animals though because they aren't using words.

The sheep distinguishing a "wolf" is not part of this conceptual thing because it doesn't have a word for it, it is just making distinctions in the world. It can make any number of distinctions in line with its capabilities that are completely degenerate and redundant, so there is in no sense a fixed set of bounded distinctions a sheep can make. You can get it to pay attention to some features or to others. It will react to the presence of a wolf. It will also react if it learns that certain features of a wolf imply different things. It doesn't need to put things into labelled boxes to do this.

why different peoples make largely the same sorts of distinctions despite having developed their languages and cultures largely in isolation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Because they are the same animal that behaves in the similar ways and interacts with the environment in similar ways.

But can you think of one culture that doesn't distinguish types of animal or doesn't use terms for colors but rather blends color and shape, color and size, etc.? — Count Timothy von Icarus

You miss my point. My point is that we are always capable of making these distinctions.

And in fact, itis actually relatively well documentes that there are some cultures that use very different colour categories (e.g. tribes that distinguish only about 3 color categories). Even relatively similar cultures can have different categories. But even if cultures have different categories, it is extremely likely we all have the same color distinction capabilities. So in fact, our ability to tell apart colors greatly transcends the kind of words we use. And it is this ability to make distinctions beyond categories shows that inherent boundaries don't exist. I am using actualities because it doesn't matter what cultures tend to use or not. No one uses bleen or grue. But they are coherent concepts. YOU perfectly understand what these concepts mean or any combination. You can use them if you want. I have decided to use them right now and I will be able to score high in a test of distinctions. My ability to use non-standard concepts is an actuality. They are perfectly coherent. The fact I can use them shows my abilities to engage in the world transcends fixed boundaries.

Everything is "could, "can," "is possible," or "if." But can you think of one culture that doesn't distinguish types of animal or doesn't use terms for colors but rather blends color and shape, color and size, etc.? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Its not hard to find words that are non-standard or don't have a direct one-to-one translation in another language. Some may be random, some may be conditioned by the way people live or interact that they have words for particular things that have unusual significance for them but no where else.

https://ourworldenglish.com/28-untranslatable-words-from-around-the-world/

Even though there is no one-to-one correspondence in many of these words, do I have any problems understanding them? Not really, at least superficially. Would be able to convey some unique words in english to a person not familiar? Probably. Why? Because concepts are redundant and degenerate. Our ability to engage with the world is not confined to fixed boundaries. There is always inherent overlap.

Again, my point is not that people use different schemes. The point is that peoples engagement with the world transcends fixed boundaries. People can make up new words, new concepts any way they want and other people can understand because we don't perceive the world in fixed discrete objects. What we perceive is much more high-dimensional than that.

The appeal to pragmatism isn't meant to say that people have different uses and so end up with different words.

What I mean by that is that our engagement with the world and our ability to perceive the world is not in words or fixed categories. We don't need them. Animals don't need them. Words come about through the need to communicate which is a pragmatic act. It doesn't matter if we end up using many words the same (which would be because we share similar lives and similar things are relevant to us).

The point is that the words are not the the thing, they are a tool that we fit to the world for our own use. But our actual engagement with the world perceptually and physically far outstrips that.

Once you remove words from the equation then the idea of fixed boundaries loses good definition (not that it had any in the first place since our use of words is totally fuzzy and degenerate). Once you remove words then ultimately what you have is the idea that we react to the world in a certain way and there is a continuum of similarity and differentiation. And even that imo is an idealization because I don't think the way we (I) hold attention to things is particularly tangible either. Its not apparent to me that I attend the world in discrete quanta. Personally there is something obscured about how I attend to the world in a way which allows me to act in a way indicative of someone paying attention. Obviously there is always some kins of example of something like "focus hard and see the shape of this like" which seems like it should be straightforward ( I am not sure, but will give benefit of doubt) but this is only an extremely simplistic example which is not representative of the fact that we are attending to things all the time at different breadths and intensities and different levels of vagueness.

Yes, exactly, but humans aren't many potential species, we are just one. What is "pragmatic," "useful," or "good" is always conditioned by the way the world is. This is what I mean by prioritizing potential over actuality.

Of course, if the world was so different as to rewrite all our conceptions of objects, there would be different objects. But the world would seem to have to be very different indeed. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What is pragmatic depends on how a particular animal lives its life. We are perfectly capable of inventing a multitude of completely coherent concepts or words that refer to different things, different boundaries. We just choose to use vocabulary in a certain way as depends on how we live our lives and what we want to communicate. If i just made up a concept and fit it to the world... then what is the criteria for it not to be a proper concept or object if it fits? Or if lots and lots of people start using the concept coherently? I don't think the idea that we can "rewrite our conception of objects" is falsifiable in a similar sense to how some criticize the idea of different conceptual schemes. We engage with the world and we can draw boundaries anyway we want and apply labels in anyway we want with complete flexibility, maybe partly why all "objects" are fuzzy, also perhaps reflecting the fact that nothing we encounter in our daily lives is not in some sense decomposable in very complicated ways.

I think its about plurality. Endless plurality. We can point at any aspect of a scene we want. Maybe there's no fact of the matter. But surely the words we come out with, there is inherent plurality in the schemes we use. Huge degeneracy or even redundancy in the ways we can use words to engage with things in perception. And we can do it on the fly.

Trick is to do it without saying the word. Any word immediately invokes a convention.
There's no 'importance to survival' since the question is being asked in absence of anything which can meaningfully assign 'importance', salience, or which can meaningfully 'survive'. — noAxioms

Yes but the way your brain works at any moment isn't independent of your personal or evolutionary history.

No one uses grue and bleen and I don't imagine you could ever get them to, not least because: — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you could if you gave them a reason where they needed to use those concepts, where those concepts suddenly became useful and had statistical significance. People don't because there is no pragmatism in those concepts but they are completely intelligible otherwise we wouldn't be talking about them. And it follows that if we had to use the concepts in everyday conversation or had to look out for grue and bleen things... then we would.

A. It isn't obvious when objects were created by looking at them, smelling them, etc.
B. When an object is "created" is itself a dicey philosophical question. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No average person realistically knows any of these things for objects.

But you might imagine something like splitting the visible spectrum in half and having words for size AND color for some colors and then shape AND color for others, such that "square + purple" and "yellow + small" are their own discrete words. And yet absolutely no society does this. They use colors and sizes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, because we have no reason to use these yet these concepts still exist or you wouldn't be able to talk about them. At the same time they depend on how your biology happens to be. If you had a different type of color vision then what decomposition of colors seems "natural" may not be the same as a regular person. At the same time, if you had a sense that was inherently able to detect "size + color" then you would have a completely different conception of what seemed "natural".

But in actuality they aren't. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But they do exist. The fact that it is not useful to use a certain kind of concept doesn't preclude it.

And again, I think you confuse concepts and words with out ability to engage with the world. A cat doesn't need words to distinguish and interact with the world. You can train a cat to react to and behave in accordance to arbitrary "colour + size" combinations and neuroscientific experiments have precisely done this. We are fully capable of engaging with the world in a multitude of ways that far strips words and concepts we use. Words are just for communication, not things in themselves. Worda don't do any work. Complicated brains with huge numbers of degrees of freedom do the work with regard to incredibly complicated statistics that show up in our sensory organs with patterns at various scales. Obviously these statistics have root in some kind of physical connection via physical apparatus. Obviously how we interact with the world is arbitrary. But no visual scene is a fixed decomposition into discrete objects. We have access to a huge amount of information in the visual field that allows us to flexibly engage with it in ways much greater than a fixed decomposition of objects. We are engaging with statistical regularities at different scales and have some ability to attend to some over others.

Sometimes objects seem simpler than they really are because you can just implement a particular kind of control where you can ostensively point at things and say a word, completely ignoring the rest of the total complexity in which one makes distinctions at various scales, precluding well-defined boundaries. We choose to point at things based on the pragmatics and perspective of the kind of scale we exist on and evolved in the universe, based on the sensitivities to things we can pick out due to neural hardware, due to the affordances in which we can act in the environment. But could we point at other less obvious "objects"? Yes. If they become important to survival could they become bonafide "objects"? Yes. Ultimately, pointing and naming something is just the idealized, superficial surface of your ability to distinguish and manipulate things.

The thing is that sight and touch are coarse-grained depending on one's perspective and in any case, touch is about fundamental physical interactions or forces, not the actual touch of a thing. They tell you about affordances of an object in some context, not "contact" with an object.

What distinguishes "object" from "non-object"? Statistical salience.

To borrow a line from J.S. Mill, I think one would have had to make some significant advances in philosophy to believe that children experience statistics and not things (or have had some very strange childhood experience.) The things of experience are given. Questions about what underpins them is another matter. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Or perhaps simply these "things" are statistics, to completely deflate the idea of an object. This would simply be a matter of what brains do - infer and de-correlate latent regularities in statistical and learn transition statistics for the sake of control. An "idea" is just what is latent in ineffably complex transition and control statistics.

It's in there. Otherwise, when kids point at things and ask "what is this?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

But is this a child detecting objects or a child that is detecting statistics (which maybe has been honed over development too)? You then ask that doesn't detecting statistics depend on what kind of statistics you are sensitive too and where you find yourself in the world? A pumpkin looks very obviously like a single object to us but these statistical regularities that make up a pumpkin are decomposable because we know a pumpkin is made up of lots of different things inside which generally we are not aware of - many scales above and below. The child certainly isn't aware of atoms, forces etc. Is the child detecting an object? Or statistics.

You can train people to detect all sorts of statistics and things in the right context which they normally wouldn't consider significant in any other. I think another point is that I think our perception and language is sophisticated and flexible that it can detect any kind of objects it wants given the need. No one normally uses the concepts bleen or grue... but if we wanted to we obviously can. The indeterminacy is there all the time and we can use it but choose to restrict ourselves.

Here is one thing I am inclined to recently. Concepts aren't really a thing. Knowledge is not in words. We can have knowledge without words and use it very well. And once you take away the words its pretty vague the idea of drawing boundaries and labels around things because when we manipulate the world and predict things it transcends any fixed, coarse labels. My ability to use objects with my hands and maybe invent new ones, new uses has nothing to do with fixed boundaries I must respect. There is an extreme fluidity in how I enact my knowledge.

Words are just about communication. It is just something we use to help convey information. Words don't define the things in themselves and words don't even have rigid meanings beyond our ability to manipulate them.

There are no concepts just our interactions with the world through a neural space with incredible ability to distinguish through its many degrees of freedom. We can detect regularities. But that in itself is utilizing the same kind of space of degrees of freedom. There are an enormous numberways we can act, react, distinguish in ways which differ and overlap in regard to the things that show up in the cortical space.

Question is, it is anything more than a concept? Nobody is suggesting that as a concept, it is incoherent. Well, mostly nobody. — noAxioms

But then surely the concept of an object as an objective thing would be incoherent?

Strange. We seem to in principle put labels around things any way we want, nevertheless there seems to be directly apparent underlying distinctions that we experience regardless of those labels (Arguably - at least that is my strong inclination - but I think there can be intractable debate about this that I am not sure about: e.g. overflow of consciousness and phenomenal/access distinction which I think is probably somewhat illusory).

Those underlying distinctions also obviously depend on the way our brains happen to interact with the world - e.g. animals with different sense capabilities, the resolution we interact with world where solid objects are obviously constructed from something more fundamental - what seems like a "natural" object depends on the perspective. Even so, underneath we assume there are kinds of regularities in the world which, though we perceive and perhaps abstract through our limited perspectives, seem to capture objective distinctions out in the world beyond labels... distinctions we could never access mind-independently... what does a distinction even mean? How do you cash out the term "objective"? There is almost a paradox that clearly in principle there is some objective world, events, "things" not the same as other "things", changes in one place different from another place. But any labelling brings the arbitrarineas back.

Is object just not a coherent concept? One must just accept the limit that the mind constructs things in an arbitrary way about something which is "objective". Inherent contextual paradox. We can refer to an objective world but not without subjective machinery... but then how is that objective. Cannot be reconciled ever. No matter how you construe it, a reference, a label is an arbitrary label. This like an inherent glitch of epistemic perspectives. Maybe you can justify a label if it could not have been otherwise though. But we don't know enough. And even then you cannot say that other labels are invalid. The difference then is parsimony.

Fundamental object? But are there any in the universe? Is the universe a constant arrangement of little fundamental objects? Virtual particles emerge from the "aether". Elementary particles decay. Matter can be turned to energy and vice versa. Particles can change properties but I don't know how that works... once there was three weak bosons and hypercharge.. symmetry breaking, now there are two W, one Z boson and a photon. I also find it interesting that the discretization of fields into individual particle quanta seems in these models almost a side effect. It comes from boundary conditions which are the same reason anything else is quantized in quamtum mechanics. Only, a lot of things happen not to be quantized because they happen to not have those conditions. But do we really know what a field is? Seems quite abstract. Particles are then just due to energy levels of the field. What is energy even? Not even really a thing is it. Very abstract way of describing constraints on behavior. Literally everything in physics is about behavior, spatio-temporal transformations. Forces are about behavior involving symmetries. Particles representations of poincare symmetry groups. When you get down to it energy is the indicative of symmetry too... just perhaps the most fundamental one. There are no objects in physics in some sense... abstract functional behaviors... what even is mass but a resistence to force in some sense?

Do we need intrinsic fundamental objects in physics. What role would intrinsicness play? Would be almost epiphenomenal, homogenously indistinct... either that or inaccessible. Then when you try to imagine what the inaccessible would be like, you must still use labels, which ofcourse I have been using all along. Paradox I say. Because how can the world have no intrinsic nature... but again, "intrinsic nature" is an abstract concept we invent. Maybe just no possoble coherent access and so the paradox remains.

Maybe then you can identify distinct particles but they ephemeral and perhaps not fully well-defined scientifically (e.g. spatially). But again, label issue still there and deeper inaccessibility being beyond scientific model of observable behavior. Paradox. Can you define object in some other way? In terms of causal interactions and modal counterfactuals? Then again, causality is a construct and modality suffers same anti-realist arguments as any other scientific concept imo.