One of us is a paid professional writer. Is that what makes you so butt-hurt?

I mean, I know this sounds ridiculously dickish... — Akanthinos

So why did you say it? If you are so smart that you could boil it down into fewer words, great. But I think what you meant was that you are unaccustomed to any demand being made on your attention span.

(Which would be about the size of Twitter. Again we see how culture is shaping neurodevelopment right there in a way everyone is now quite familiar with.)

Lets say you, as an homosexual man, have an heterosexual sister. Her genetic material is not yours, but it is about as similar as it can possibly get. If all you can do is make sure that her child is well taken care off, and she does successfully, even if you didn't, you didn't quite lose the reproduction race. — Akanthinos

Rather than looking for the hidden genetic advantage - which is always going to be a long-shot given the realities of neurodevelopment - it makes more sense to view the development of sexual identity or gender as a complex process. Genetics gets things started in a general fashion, pointing the foetus is roughly the right direction. But culture and experience play a larger role in finishing the job off than perhaps we suspect.

So we can say that it is logical that at a genetic level, the intention is to produce a binary outcome. There are males and females for a good evolutionary reason. That has all the advantages, so far as biological evolution goes.

But the construction of that differentiation - at the level of the brain's sense of gender as well as the body's development of definite sexual traits - is a complex business that can wander off line fairly easily. The sex organs can lack a typical degree of differentiation. So can the brain and the endocrine system. In the womb, there could be exposure to the "other" developmental signals at a critical time. Or even while growing up - the effect of environmental hormone-mimics.

So norms might be an average that genetics shoots for. Then it is normal that genetics only shoots for norms and so there are many ways that development might wander off towards the rival pole.

Now in animals, this kind of natural variation probably encounters little selective pushback. Animals with "homosexual tendencies" likely still end up copulating with the opposite sex and having babies in the usual way. There is not a great reproductive penalty that would cause genes and neurodevelopment to become more tightly regulated. And also, genes don't really give that level of control over behaviour anyway.

Then coming to humans, now we are talking about cultural creatures. Behaviour is especially plastic in humans due to large brains - expanded precisely because of the demands of being socially-scripted animals. Even adolescence - as a phase of post-puberty continuing brain development - is a very modern human thing. It seems to have been absent even in our hominid ancestors a million years ago.

Humans become sexually capable about four years before they become sexually active and reproducing. In the "wild", the female pelvis doesn't reach full size until about 19. That is also when birth becomes the norm. Pubertal boys likewise have to wait before they actually grow into men. They are put on hold between 13 and 18 in developmental terms, unlike any other species.

So there are big differences with humans that are biologically evolved - to support social lifestyle needs. And which also make our sexual development more complex and hence prone to the biologically "unintended" happening.

Now think of the wide variety of cultural norms that can get established - further social ideas that frame gender roles and define sexual identity - because there is this basic neurodevelopmental plasticity. There is a new kind of information that can shape the individual - the cultural imprint that follow the genetic attempt to establish a binary reproductive division of sexuality.

This doesn't make homosexuality now learnt behaviour in a strong sense. But it does mean that the human individual is growing up as a response to both an inherited biology, and an inherited culture.

In animals, my argument is that even if an individual wanders off the straight and narrow, it will likely wind up reproducing anyway. There is no cultural input to create any different idea, or introduce any further possible confusion.

But humans may be far more responsive to social cues from the youngest age. And now we get into the interesting territory of how that plays out.

For example, there has been pretty crude shift in child-rearing to gender specific environments. Every new baby comes colour coded in its clothing, nursery decoration, its toys. You are either meant to be pink or blue. So a strong dichotomy is being imposed on your identity from the moment you first opened your eyes. And that forces some kind of choice - do you now accept or reject that culturally binary identity?

Instead of leaving things to be a little ambiguous and personal, society pushes the question in your face and it has to be answered one way or the other.

And likewise, coming from the other side, there is that other aspect of modern culture where society is loud and proud that it makes no judgements about your sexual identity. That too is a judgement that is constantly present in a growing child's life - even in being a "non-judgement". Some kind of definite response seems demanded. And the logical response to that becomes an identification as gender fluid or pan-sexual.

So it ain't about right and wrong, of course. But biology did have its intentions. And to look for a hidden selective advantage in homosexuality or gender confusion is a stretch.

And then humans are by design more neurodevelopmentally plastic, more designed to be developmentally completed by cultural programming, anyway. Natural selection has been at work at the level of social norms for a long time with Homo sap.

And now we get into the ways that culture forces the issues. It logically seeks binaries or dialectical divisions. And so every individual becomes forced to interpret his or her own feelings in terms of gender norms. Human culture has evolved to a point now where being non-binary is itself a binary issue of great social importance to how you understand yourself as an individual.

Didn't homosexuality use to be simpler just a few generations back? You were queer and so spoke and walked a certain way. The choice was just straight or gay. Although where homosexuals could construct communities, then they started to impose their own further binaries to create a variety of sub-types. You could have butch vs fem, and so on. As much variety as you please - so long as there was the wider homosexual community to supply and support these contrasting modes of expression.

So the mechanics of it are complex. And also, still socially evolving. The human capacity for gender fluidity - under the right social conditions - is probably far greater than anyone would believe. But also there is the issue that if you are born with one set of sex organs and cultural factors leave you confused about how to interpret that, is that a happy state of affairs for all concerned. Is there a price to that kind of social liberalism - just as we can ask about liberalism generally when it robs individuals of the identity-stabilising context they in fact often seek.

So there are philosophical questions to make both the liberal and conservative uncomfortable. Does either understand the nature of gender sufficiently to be able to arrive at sound social policy?

(And yes, I realise that political identity is another of those binaries that society likes to impose upon us as confused and unformed individuals. :) )

Look, what's the point of confining metaphysics to science? — Janus

But I don't. I confine it to pragmatic inquiry - that combination of theory and measurement that we would use to organise our experience in intelligible fashion.

Instead of arguing against what I say you want to reduce it to some 'old cultural war playing out'. — Janus

You are the one saying it is art against science, not me. I am just pointing to the familiarity of that good old cultural war.

That is why you need me to be saying that metaphysics is confined to science and excludes art. It would fit into your world as you understand it. It frustrates you that I say something wider than that.

You actually don't have any good argument for why people should not be interested in ideas that cannot be definitively cashed out; the very idea of "cashing out" reveals your instrumentalist bias. — Janus

Is an artist who doesn't make works an artist? Does an idea exist if it is not articulated in some particular semiotic form or relation?

Again, there is no proper idea without its impression, no actual theory without its acts of measurement.

I just think you are blind to what semiosis is actually about. You imagine that selves - being "unworldly" - should not need to measure themselves against a world. But selves are the result of the making of umwelts - models of worlds with selves in them. So selfhood is always "worldly".

But then that world can be the social world that makes humans as social creatures. Poetry, art and religion are all about that. You can call it doing philosophy or metaphysics if it pleases you.

And certainly organised social structures, like churches, found it actually useful to force people into binary logical positions concerning questions of faith, and hence social identity. The kind of logicism you are promoting has become a core pragmatic tool of cultural control over individual psychology. You want to give folk no choice but to "be free to feel their own truth". :yikes:

However I am interested in metaphysics as an actually objective inquiry into the nature of being. And that requires a full understanding of the logicism which is the semiotic tool to be used. The danger of ideas that seem "logical", and yet lack the other thing of testability, is like top of the list as a red flag.

To you, that puts pragmatism in the camp of the enemy. Science! But as I have pointed out, all ideas must be rooted in impressions to have reality. Ideas can't exist by themselves ... Platonically. They must exist hylomorphically - cashed out materially in some particular impression so as to have substantial actuality.

If you disagree then it is on you to show how measurement is possible in metaphysics; or how metaphysical ideas could be assessed in terms of their practical outcomes. How does metaphysics differ from natural science, taken as a more or less unified whole, in your view? — Janus

I’ve already made the arguments in this thread. Science is simply metaphysical speculation cashed out. Naturalism is what worked best in terms of reducing our practical uncertainties about existence.

That also then leaves the creative possibilities. It leaves plenty of room for art, poetry, etc, as forms of cultural expression tied to pragmatic social purpose.

Your assertion is that metaphysics is larger than science because it is the one that contains the further creative possibilities. But that is just the usual anti-Scientism that @Wayfarer peddles.

I have been at pains to show how my Peircean metaphysics is holistic naturalism. It can include your cultural anthropomorphism along with a more generally cosmic view. Peircean metaphysics says creative possibility is already the ground zero of existence.

And from there, it is no surprise to find science emerging as a hierarchy of increasingly specified complexity. We have a succession of constraints, a cascade of semiotic symmetry breakings, represented in the familiar explanatory pyramid of physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology and psychology.

Nothing gets left out. It is just recognised that at the psychological end of the spectrum, the scope for creative spontaneity becomes hugely developed in terms of its complexity. In particular, it makes that key transformation to becoming organismic. Selves emerge to localise the semiosis. You get life and mind arising as instances of a modelling relation.

So all your responses are turned towards advancing the Romantic cultural project of denying the very notion of rational or intelligible constraints on action and being. You want feeling to remain transcendent - beyond the grasp of the scientific imagination. But then you want feeling to be immanent or foundational also. So metaphysics - as the ultimately liberated exploration of being - has to be seen as focused on feelings first, facts later.

You are defending a very traditional response to the socio-cultural threat posed by the Enlightenment. This old cultural war still wants to play out.

And beyond that tired dichotomy is the naturalism, the systems view, which is the holism of metaphysical pragmatism. Unity is achievable by a conceptual frame willing to be large enough to encompass nature's apparent contradictions.

I expect you to disagree and continue with your assertions, but it is probably a waste of time; — Janus

It is certainly a waste of time when you both put forward the importance of faith as an act of measurement, a form of evidence for a belief, and then refuse to discuss the consequences of having said that.

As a matter of faith I assume that eventually some new thing will be found and understood that will render the strangeness and weirdness of QM merely amazing and beautiful, but understood. — tim wood

Yeah. And so how will that happen except by not in fact just accepting locality rules as you seem to believe?

You don't appreciate that you are constructing a rationale based on a contradiction. You will believe in reductionist materialism even if our best physical theories are based on axiomatic holism.

The fact that the holism has to be presumed to allow the reductionism to be demonstrated doesn't bother you at all. Even though, with QM, the ability to ignore the holism finally got broke.

QM is only half a theory of reality. It gives you the time evolution of possibilities. It can no longer give you the counterfactual definiteness of a collapse to actuality.

The actual world is no longer calculable! And that is because it is the world that contains "the observer".

It's all in your god-damned mind (says the default Copenhagen interpretation)! The material world that QM models is now nothing more actual than a shadowy infinite dimensional space of probabilities!

Nothing spells the death of naive direct realism, the death of materialism, like the facts of QM.

But as I have pointed out, the same has always been true of mathematical physics. At the level of axiom, it has always had to incorporate a telos - that of the least action principle - as the way to collapse the possible into the actual.

From a modelling point of view, this ain't mysterious. You need to fix a backdrop to be able to model a play of dynamics. And that is what least action does. It hardwires a telos into the physical, material, backdrop. This thing called the Universe, this thing called spacetime, is also a thing called the universal application of a global entropy optimising principle. It flattens the Cosmos in terms of energetic effort as well. Events take the paths that require the least information.

That is why we live in a Universe of apparent classical certainty. At our scale of being, all the uncertainty and indeterminism has been filtered or themalised away by the global holistic action of the PLA.

That seems so obviously true, we can afford to axiomatise it. Our models can focus on what still might change or surprise us in unexpected fashion - because we have this backdrop global coherence that acts as a universal reference frame.

And that backdrop is neo-Aristotelian. It contains also the forms as the global symmetries which can be locally broken. It contains the global telos that acts as a universal constraint on energetic change or entropic uncertainty everywhere.

I agree. Physics doesn't play up this fact. Yet it is still true.

Yes. though I'm not sure it needs any defense so much as acknowledgement of what it is, for what it is, as what it is. — tim wood

But that would rule out pretty much everything science has discovered. If the needle of a compass spins, how does that magic happen - explained in terms of everyday perception and not employing weird scientific stories about imperceptible fields.

I have now watched Leonard Susskind discuss and describe the holographic theory on Youtube. — tim wood

Well one of the key things to realise in such discussions is that folk are usually talking about one physical theory of lower dimension capturing what matters about another physical theory of higher dimension. So it is a dualistic relation between descriptions of reality.

It is like a hologram in the sense that a two dimensional image can capture all the same information that exists in a three dimensional image. At this level of analogy, we are not talking about actual worlds.

The most celebrated result is the AdS/CFT correspondence. This says one representation of reality - a string theory story of gravity acting in a negatively curved spacetime - equates to another representation of reality as a conformal quantum field theory that lacks gravity.

So it is a formal equivalence of models with different ingredients. One can be viewed as a limiting extreme on what the other contains in freely expanded form. This is a really useful technical result as you might only be able to make successful calculations about reality in one or other base. And then the two incomplete descriptions can be glued together via this relation to give you the more complete model you seek - like the holy grail of a theory of quantum gravity.

Of course, holography arose out of a more directly physical story - counting the entropy content of black holes and other relativistic event horizons. It says that - due to a Planckian granularity of entropy or bits of information - what is inside an event horizon can't be more than what would be "written" on its surface.

This gives event horizons a material reality. They will emit radiation due to the Unruh effect. You can measure their physical existence. It is a generalisation of the blackhole radiation story - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_effect

So beyond the pop sci headlines - we live in a hologram like some weird supernatural projection effect! - what we are talking about is the material physics of event horizons. Then a next level equivalence of the theories employing that mechanism. One theory can be seen as the collapsed extreme of another theory, both containing the same finite set of local observables or entropic degrees of freedom.

More of a problem is wackdoodles of greater or lesser wackdoodleness who grab this idea and run with it into science fiction and science fantasy. I do not think you are such, but in your choosing to adhere to theory over reality it's hard to tell. — tim wood

Or maybe what is wackdoodle - from a scientific point of view - is believing that we can know reality in a fashion unmediated by a model. So what I adhere to is that metaphysical truth - it is all models, all the way down.

And that is why I argue for modelling based on the holism of neo-Aristotelian hylomorphism. As I say, physics already thinks structurally now. It sees reality as arising from the mathematical inevitabilities of fundamental symmetry - downward acting formal cause. And from the telic necessity of some optimisation principle. The world can only exist stably because instability can be suppressed or cancelled away.

Anything is possible. But for every possibility to be actual would be pure chaos. The PLA shows that nature in fact is the organised result of a holistic sum over all possibilities. We live in a regular, lawful, classical kind of Cosmos because everything contracts and tightens according to a tensegrity or ricci flow type optimisation algorithm.

Now that might be weirdly non-local, and so outside current physics - as a stated theory of observables. But it is also completely within current physics as just one of its axiomatic truths - one of the three essential principles expected to characterise all possible physical laws (along with the cosmological principle and the principle of locality).

...and I ask you what you do when it rains, that's a serious question. At the least it puts the question to you, "Is it raining?" — tim wood

So you can expect some definite fact of the matter ... because you have a theory about what qualifies?

Water droplets are falling out of the sky. One would put on a raincoat to go outside. It matters to us if we get wet.

If we examine it, we would find that your theory of rain encodes all four Aristotelian causes. And that holism - which encodes also a pragmatic purpose - would be why it would seem such a reasonable and straightforward question. It does matter if it is raining.

But now I look outside and see that it is mizzling. Does this fit my theory of the world being divided so sharply between the wet and the dry? Maybe I can go out without a raincoat as I'm not really going to get wet - not to any degree that seems to matter.

Alternatively, it is a really muggy day. The humidity reads saturated. But again, a raincoat kind of day? And yet can I say it is actually dry out there?

So the point is that material facts are always ultimately psychological facts. It is just that they are also the recalcitrant facts of experience. We can't just wish them away.

But then also, to the degree they make no difference in terms of our pragmatic wishes, we would have no reason to even notice them as "facts".

It is this kind of epistemic subtlety that is missing from your approach to the issues here. You are arguing from the position of naive realism. Time to stop and think about the fact that it is all models of reality as far as our experience of anything is concerned.

if you have to dig up that antique, — SophistiCat

It’s the OP. Send your complaint to the publisher.

We are more used to thinking in terms of unfolding forward in time, but there is no time asymmetry in such systems. — SophistiCat

The maths might go backwards in time with no trouble, but we are talking about the physical event.

If you agree that it can go backwards in time like its mathematical description, then how does this support your local notion of cause and effect?

And it has least to do with Aristotelian final cause, which is bound up with anthropomorphic, psychological categories of goals and intentions. — SophistiCat

Isn’t neo-Aristotelianism the de-anthropomorphic version? The PLA is about path or effort minimisation.

There are deeper and more interesting ways to make sense of such alternate explanatory frameworks. — SophistiCat

And what were they? You never said.

Rational coherence is simply a matter of avoiding inconsistencies or contradictions in your system. How would we go about testing "empirical correspondence to a theory of everything"? — Janus

No. It creates a rationally predictive framework that encodes predictions as deductive necessities. So it is capable of being now actually a theory which can be right or wrong in terms of the empirical facts.

As I say, pragmatism even accepts that such rational frameworks are always purpose dependent. It isn't taken for granted that they deliver the truth of the thing in itself, only an umwelt that has meaning to someone.

And pragmatism also accepts that every rule has exceptions. It takes a constraints-based approach in which chance and spontaneity are also metaphysically basic.

So pragmatism deals with the usual complaints against Scientism. It deals with the epistemic issues before moving on to the ontological.

You can say there are good reasons to believe it, but those reasons will always be the ones you prefer to use as criteria, rather than some alternative set of reasons. The absolute superiority of any set of reasons cannot be demonstrated. — Janus

If you don't care about theories that make predictions, then you simply are left with an odd notion of a theory.

You could argue that you don't care about modelling reality. But then I've got to wonder what you would mean by metaphysics. How is it still a communal philosophical inquiry into being and knowing, and not something else, like a subfield of poetry or theology?

So, I would agree that assertions about the existence of God, or Eternity, or the Good, and so on are not rationally decidable; but they do have an affective, a metaphorical, an aesthetic and a poetic sense, and in terms of those senses such assertions are not meaningless nonsense. — Janus

They are not metaphysics either, to the degree that metaphysics is an inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality.

And the fact is, which I doubt you will dare to deny, that people's faith in such figures may make enormous differences to both individual lives and societies, so they may also have pragmatic value or dis-value, depending on how the effects they produce are judged. — Janus

Rather than deny it, I've offered that as evidence. It is the pragmatic social utility of theistic or romantic constructs that accounts for their evolution and persistence in human linguistic culture.

Anthropological science explains why people come to think that way.

Let's stick to what I actually claim. I assert that a Peircean pragmatic/semiotic approach to metaphysics is the best. Best in terms of both its rational coherence and empirical correspondence to a theory of everything. Best as its theory of epistemology is also its theory of ontology. Best because it unifies mind and world in a modelling relation.

I am always happy to defend this contention.

If you want to make this about philosophy vs science, you are changing the subject as far as I'm concerned. The Peircean perspective is already larger as it spans everything conventionally regarded as particular to either domain.

Does science produce consensus? Ought philosophy not? Already we are off on an excursion into LEM-strength categorical distinctions that wind up imposing impressive, but essentially illusory, barriers on discourse.

A totalising Peircean metaphysics incorporates consensus and dissent from the get-go. It already says that there must be both the continuity of agreement (synechism) and the discontinuity of spontaneity (tychism) to have a crisply developed state of being.

So once again, you are reaching for the smaller view - where something must fundamentally divide the philosopher from the scientist. And you can't even hear me when I am laying out how they simply represent the naturally emergent dualities which would develop to produce a living structure of being.

Of course there is also art, poetry, awe, romanticism and all the rest. But you want to make it fundamental. And actually it might only represent the particular and the contingent. To the degree it is ontically structural or necessary, that would be captured by a naturalistic metaphysics and its ability to define humans as the product of novel grades of semiosis. Social creatures due to language. Technological creatures due to logic.

So yeah. Let's hear your counters on the specifics of my position. Test those. But be clear about what it is I have actually claimed.

I don't see any convincing arguments that metaphysics can be done by science or as a science — Janus

And all I see is your assertion on that count. Yet the thread is about neo-Aristotelianism. And the criticism of reductionist science relates to its neo-atomism. So I don't need to say much else.

And in philosophy it doesn't matter what ideas you entertain beyond what creative and interesting ways of thinking about the world they open up. — Janus

You are expressing your personal preference. That's fine. It is your philosophy of philosophy.

I've argued the essential incoherence of your position as you say it can rely on acts of personal faith as evidence. I await a counter on that.

"Getting it right' in some determinative sense doesn't matter except in the sciences. — Janus

More nonsense. Getting it right in the sense of some absolute truthiness is what in fact obsesses the logicists and rationalists. And theologians tend to fall into that trap for the reasons I outlined.

Science speaks to the pragmatics of a modelling relation with the world. That is an utterly different epistemic mentality.

And even there it is about "what works". — Janus

It is completely about whatever works for you, for your purposes. And hence it opens the door to the kind of free creative speculative bent you seem to think so important.

But the difference - the one that I was drawing out - is accepting the constraint of a community of rational inquiry. You are more inclined to see philosophy as some kind of pluralistic exercise in individual exploration and revelation - the Romantic model of epistemology.

I have argued that the communal approach clearly trumps the personal one - primarily as there is no such real thing as an ontically personal point of view. We are all the products of social construction so far as any rational philosophising goes.

So far, you haven't countered that argument, simply re-asserted your position and ignored the underlying incoherence.

That's the point I think you fail to see, because you are so starry-eyed about science. — Janus

You are wasting your time with the ad homs. The failure here is your failure to counter arguments.

To bring this back down to Earth, what do you mean by "particle"? Does the property of concrete atomistic particleness not develop in time due to the cooling and expansion of a Big Bang cosmos?

So you are presuming the timeless existence of little itty bits of matter floating free in an empty spatial void. And there is zero physical evidence of that being the true story of our Universe. It is how we might usefully conceive of the Universe right now. But it was not true at its start. Nor will it be at its Heat Death.

The bit of your multiverse or ergodic return speculation that can still work is the idea that the universe in its current cold and expanded state - the one where particles in a void is a reasonable classical physics summary - is infinite in its spatial extent. And so there is room enough, if we kept crossing the universe, that we would "have" to encounter an unlimited number of replica Earths, with replica you's and me's living the exact same lives.

There would be an infinite number of near replicas - all the ways those Earths, those us, could be fractionally or, more often, substantially different. And then an infinite number of absolutely exact replicas.

But a logical argument that always returns the answer "yes" on any question ought to be suspect.

"Would multiplying by infinity result in an infinite number of exactly 'me's' on top of an infinity of 'nearly-me's'?" "Yes. Anything times infinity equals infinity."

At what point would one start to wonder if this kind of simple extrapolation - one that turns any possibility into an actuality - is a little metaphysically sus?

But the evidence is the accounts and testimonies of philosophers and sages, over millenia. — Wayfarer

Most of whom thought the world was flat and slavery ethical.

That's what a secular account would say, as by definition, it can't accomodate the soteriological dimension, as there's nothing in its conceptual framework to accomodate it. — Wayfarer

By definition or due to lack of any evidence for why it would need to be taken seriously.

Sure, if you believe in reincarnation or the dangers of Hell, then maybe there is something to be rescued from.

But why would we believe in such fairy tales - except for socially constructed reasons?

It is this soul that accounts for the ability human beings have to reason and engage in higher order cognitive function (i.e. knowledge of universals).

Again, why would we believe that given what we now know about evolution and development?

If, in order to make your physics "easier," you want to suppose you live in a hologram or some such thing, you're free to do so — tim wood

That is just pop sci hyperbole. Don’t believe the headlines, read the papers. Holography is far more subtle than that.

And you have it the wrong way round if you believe that metaphysics is just pragmatic modelling - which is my own position here.

We don't believe the intuitive picture that a successful theory appears to support. We believe the theory. And the intuitive picture is only that. A helpful stepping stone as a mental image to get our heads around the theory.

So you are defending the "material world" ... as the everyday perception you have of living in a world of medium size dry goods. But perception itself is just a constructed impression of the world, a model that works. The first thing physics starts to do is strip away that cosy certainty that we already experience the world just as it is.

So why defend materialism with blind faith? Newton had already broken that model of reality with his mechanics.

As I said, Descartes and others couldn't make the mental break to drop the atomistic idea that the void is jammed full with jostling particles. Forces were created by particles swirling about like an aetherial fluid. Stars would be caught up and swirled about in the heavens by a cosmic flow of corpuscles.

And Newton came along and said nah, don't need that. Gravity can reach across space to pull on objects. Bodies can spin or move forever without needing the constant nudge of impetus.

Mathematical physics got started by accepting the immateriality of physical cause. It was disturbing at the time. Then we got so used to it that we don't even think twice about it. It's QM that is the weird one these days.

Did you know that Shannon calculated the limit entropy of an ordinary English text to be just a little more than one bit per letter? — tim wood

Or 2.6 bits. But that is an average.

My posts might be a little long for you. But the real problem might be that each sentence approaches a black hole density in information content. :)

Look, there aren't many people who are more hard-nosed realists than me. And that is why I insist on pointing out the shallow graves in the physicalist forest.

The principle of least action is a good example of how "mystical" the most material-appearing mathematical descriptions of nature already are. Our most fundamental law of physical existence - the second law of thermodynamics - is openly teleological. Quantum interpretations show that non-locality is real and yet still intellectually unacceptable to most folk.

It goes on. Science is a human enterprise. Things start to feel dangerous as we let go our perceptual impressions and just believe what the damn theories say in an abstract structural sense. But that is where modern metaphysics has got to.

...or show clearly how ideas are material things (even as you say they are immaterial). — tim wood

On that, I've said often enough that my metaphysics is semiotic. The realm of ideas, or of formal/final cause, is now subsumed into the physics of information theory.

So physicalism itself has already made the necessary move towards realism on the "immaterial" causes of being. It takes information to be real. The material realm is now understood in terms of entropy or degrees of freedom - the flipside of information as a measure of epistemic uncertainty.

So you can't get clearer than current physics. It is now both dualistic and holistic - that intimate interconnectedness of local degrees of freedom and globally meaningful constraints that you seek.

Talk of materiality is as old hat as talk of immateriality.

I’ll just add the obvious fact that for someone to be elected POTUS they of course must get hundreds of millions in donations. — 0 thru 9

Good point. But weren't they a group of conservative billionaires making the mistake of thinking they were buying themselves a controllable stooge?

Trump would ride his populism to get in. Then deliver the kind of tax breaks, market deregulation, small government, policies they expected once he was surrounded by solid grown-up Republican advisors.

Those like Thiel and Mercer have been expressing buyers remorse - despite getting a lot of that legislation implemented.

Don't forget the Mercer family installed Bannon too. So the "bunker down" alt-right agenda was what some of the billionaires wanted. However that became too alarmingly red-neck and conspiratorial even for them.

Conservative megadonor Rebekah Mercer, owner of a partial stake in the alt-right outlet Breitbart News, wrote Wednesday that the publication’s former chief, Steve Bannon, “took Breitbart in the wrong direction.”...

“Some have recklessly described me as supporting toxic ideologies such as racism and anti-Semitism. More recently I have been accused of being ‘anti-science,’” wrote Mercer, whose family donations have previously backed controversial conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. ...

She declared her support for “a kind and generous United States, where the hungry are fed, the sick are cared for, and the homeless are sheltered” and one “that welcomes immigrants and refugees to apply for entry and ultimately citizenship.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/15/rebekah-mercer-op-ed-411276

So the rich elite didn't back Trump to be a wrecking ball of the globalist economic paradigm. Mostly the reverse. And why would they even expect that of him, given he more than anyone was an incompetent who got lucky from the financial system, the elite social structure, as it is?

My argument is thus that Trump is a rational phenomenon that reflects "the wisdom of the crowd".

There are dark forces in play in that many ordinary folk have it in the back of their minds that rough and turbulent times are coming. So let's provoke the crisis that is going to bring it on ... because we know we have the power when it comes to the show-down.

It is a cool calculation at that level. And there is no downside to that view because you might get what you want because everyone else just caves in to your demands. China, Russia, Europe and the rest might have to keep the globalist charade going as their best available option. No one will call in their debts. Other countries will have to punish their own populations financially and ecologically.

The worst thing that could happen is the US is tipped into such domestic turmoil that there has to be a big social clamp-down. All the names on the watch list need to be rounded up in black SUVs and taken to the FEMA internment camps for the duration. :)

What percent of the US population coolly and rationally thinks that might not be such a bad thing? Bring it on.

So Trump's billionaire backers certainly hoped they were buying something - the usual kinds of things, but delivered by someone who would cut through all the intellectual bureaucratic Washington bullshit that stops them just getting everything they want it, the moment they ask for it.

However, even if Trump voters are comparatively unworldly and illiberal by the standards of the prevailing intellectual elite, they are quite capable of assessing their reality in this gut rational fashion - "What's in it for me and my kind; what do I care about the consequences for others; if we have the power, why not use it; if the current game is tipped on its head, how am I not going to be a winner?"

And Trump is captive to that mood because he doesn't have the character to rise above narcissistic populism. He is a helpless mirror of the masses as he only truly cares about hearing them cheer at that week's stadium rally.

The billionaires miscalculated in thinking they could buy a stooge. Trump hasn't got the focus to be that organised and stick to some strategic agenda. He is just a mouthpiece for a rumbling discontent and anxiety expecting things to turn nasty, but also feeling fairly cocky about the heat it is packing.

A heart is a piece of meat. — tim wood

But it isn't actually just that, is it? That would be the reductionist view. One that talks about the material rather than the purpose.

For me it is permissible, informally, to take ideas - immaterial things - as real, because they clearly are. For me it is not permissible to include them in reality, or at least the same reality that contains material things, and there are lots of tests that differentiate the two. — tim wood

I think for you it is an ideological necessity to maintain an arbitrary distinction that you don't in fact really believe in.

You have to use teleological language to describe the world. But you don't want to admit to having done so. It seems bad form for some reason.

All I say is that creating that mental block has to be your own choice. It prevents you from going on to a more sophisticated metaphysics. But do you really need a more sophisticated metaphysics to live whatever life you lead? Would it be relevant to you? Seems not.

So our differences are resolved if you acknowledge my distinction, or show clearly how ideas are material things (even as you say they are immaterial). — tim wood

Weird. If you can't give yourself permission to think about these issues with a better set of tools, then that is your problem. I don't need to jump into your hole just because you refuse to use my ladder.

I don't think you could make a plausible case for choosing between them as to their metaphysical verisimilitude based purely on the various numbers of adherents they have attracted. — Janus

But my argument is not that they are doing metaphysics. They are doing society. The metaphysics serves only as a system of differentiation and justification.

Religions are social projects. And to the degree they differentiate between communities, they are real life tests of what works in an anthropological ecosphere. As ways of life, they are a bunch of species in competition. Winners and losers cash out in the raw numbers.

But the metaphysics comes into it as a mechanism for constructing sharp differentiation. It gives the whole theological story of social organisation its next step twist. By creating an abstract rational justification for some particular system of belief, there is now a theory in play. And "faith" becomes the test - the evidence or act of measurement.

The theory is either true or false. Your church is either right or it is wrong. And so things are organised such that there are faith-based facts which make the metaphysics of your creed the only true story.

The glue that binds the religious communities and ensures their continuance is the personal faith of their members, whether that faith is mere lip service or fervent passion, whether it is enforced or merely encouraged, any institution will only last as long as the faith its members have in it, which is measured by the time and money they are willing to devote to it. — Janus

However you characterise it, faith is not about opinion, taste, preference, or whatever. It is framed in logicist fashion as "the true facts". And a community becomes bound to a shared metaphysical theory by being able to point to these the existence of these facts.

Now again, I agree that this very sharp sense of religion - the one that comes into conflict with other brands of metaphysics and evidencing - is extreme.

Chinese temples, just like Roman temples, are pretty open-minded in terms of being able to mix and match all strains of belief. You can have Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian idols all sitting happily alongside each other on the same plinth, along with whatever local deities are part of folklore.

The Anglican church would be another example of where theological doctrine has become optional. It doesn't matter even if the vicar believes in God so long as he/she does believe in pastoral care and social work. (Of course, you then have the schisms that result - African anglicans wondering what the hell is going on with their former colonial masters.)

But here you have been stressing the privileged role that "acts of faith" have in the bolstering of metaphysical systems. And I agree. They are precisely that same logicist thing of setting out a theory and then justifying it with acts of measurement.

And then, we have every right to ask just how robust is that communal method of inquiry? Can it in fact deliver metaphysics of any objective quality. The more honest view is that it is simply a mechanism to shore up some self-interested social structure - a church and its ecclesiastical hierarchy.

So, it is not the faith itself that is "innocent" or guilty, but the evil, the guilt, consists in the authoritarian forces of strict tradition, persecution of "heresy" and coercion through fear. — Janus

No. Faith does not get off so lightly. Modern Romanticism stepped in to fill the "spiritual" vacuum left by the Enlightenment's destruction of Christian authority. And while that might seem a liberation of faith - a free choice about what to believe - it still leaves the issue of how do you support a metaphysics with the kind of acts of measurement which are "faith based".

Sure. It completely works as a way to build workable communities. Romanticism does that. It is everywhere as part of the social fabric of the modern world - the metaphysical justification for ways of life. So there is a reason it exists. It works in that fashion.

But again, if we are talking "real metaphysics", then we need real measurements. If we want to transcend the merely social - as a community of inquiry - then science is the model of how to go.

Isn't there a rational self-interest in voting in a demagogic bully at this stage in the US story? And so even if Trump turns out to be ineffective because of his weak character, at least he is destroying the previous state of order. It is a start, in his supporter's eyes.

So what is playing out here. Isn't it americans wanting the US to assert its power rather than its intellect at this point in history? Less negotiating, more telling.

The US has led an era of economic globalisation that made it rich. It was a rational self-interested move. But it also hollowed out its own middle and working class by exposing them to open global competition. And it also allowed the future rivals to US hegemony to emerge, particularly China.

So it has become clear that intellectualism results in losses as well as wins. And the US still has all this actual brute power it can simply capitalise on. In the voter's eye, it just needed a leader willing to exert that power. The US might have written the rules of the globalised era, but it could now rip those up and who could resist?

Waving good-by to globalisation seems sane as energy and resource constraints are coming on. The world economic system is on the brink of collapse anyway. The US could retreat within its own borders to create a new localism in terms of energy and economics, bunker down for climate change.

So a lot of actually rational thinking could be in the backs of voter's minds. Bunkering down would hit China and other rivals harder. And globalisation has in fact created its own stateless intellectual elite, not beholden to any particular national base. Who would care if they got cut adrift?

Trump may reflect that accurate assessment of changing times. His bull in a china shop mentality may be what is needed to shatter the globalism paradigm - exit that market ahead of the game.

The problem with Trump is that he is a crude bully. A fake strong man. A cartoon version of power. It seems crazy that voters would put him in charge and be sticking with him still.

But maybe there is also a clear-eyed view that the US needs him as a wrecking ball to usher in the change in the world order that many people think they want because they fear the sudden collapse of the globalised economic system, the start of the naked resource wars.

Trump derangement syndrome would be the aghast horror of the prevailing globalised elite who have benefited from the way the world is, and who are out of touch with what it might quickly become.

It would be no surprise at all if the next GFC hits and Trump has prepared the ground for whatever is this century's incarnation of a fascist authoritarian state. His administration already has the makings of a junta with all its generals.

The intelligence services and other aspects of fascist control would be a problem. They still seem pretty much wedded to the paradigm of the globalised elite. And it would take cleverness and time to take over that. But the playbook on that is well understood. Manufacture an existential crisis - like a war on terror, immigrants, or whatever. Create the conditions where the population demands repressive powers be used. After all, the US has built up that internal security apparatus too.

The good thing about Trump is it doesn't seem possible he could organise anything as coherent as that next step. But at the moment, he serves rationally to undermine intellectual globalism, turn the world towards brute power politics and a bunkering down.

The interesting question is now what kind of figure and regime will follow him. Does anyone expect business as usual will resume in terms of the US again returning to the intellectualising, globalising, mindset it has had for the last 30 years or so?

Theologies compete and evolve. In the Christian world, Pentecostalism and evangelicalism are winning the race for bums on seats.

So if you are talking about human metaphysical systems, it’s going to be about something that seems functionally useful in terms of some communal purpose.

I earlier argued a key semiotic distinction - the shift in belief and reason from ordinary language to logical syntax. So I am not being down on religion as such.

Religion is about ways of being, ways of social organisation, which are historically tested and thus historically proven. That wisdom becomes encoded in a community’s linguistic habits. It is not really about faith - until one social system comes into competition with another.

And then it became about faith precisely because prosetlysing religions such as Christianity became a social thing. Seeking converts, arguments and evidence came into play. Beliefs had to be accepted as true, to allow rival views be deemed clearly false.

So faith is hardly innocent. It was the machinery of logicism descending to take control of human populations. It was an insistence that there is a right and a wrong side to be on.

Hence the inevitable fissioning of the denominations once the faith trick got hold of a broad enough flow of Human Resources. The church was based on a forced division of the true and the false. It became fractured into a rainbow of subtypes as that was the trick it was based on.

So what real value does faith have here? It is the instrument of organised religions, which in the end are most interested in fighting their own structural battles. Faith is how corporate theocracy measures the degree of conviction in its adherents.

Maybe Scientology shows that the crazier the metaphysics, the sharper the test of personal adherence. Demanding faith in the face of the ridiculous is the way to cut off a community from the mainstream and so secure its flow of economic resources for the church hierarchy.

But there is not just one single community of inquirers. — Janus

Nor even a single method. And yet that would be the argument here. Some methods have proven better than others.

Even within science, you have a broadly dominant community in the metaphysical atomists. Then a good representation of Aristotelians, especially in the sciences of life and complexity. Elsewhere, a sprinkling of Platonists. And this thread was about who gets it rightest ... in terms of some grand purpose.

So pointing to the fact that there is the usual requisite variety is simply to say natural selection has adequate material to be working on. Variety is what we expect. Then winners and losers too.

That's why I say that any answers to such questions, being ultimately incapable of definitive demonstration to everyon'e satsifaction, come down to personal faith — Janus

Well why that rather than down to the well investigated conclusions of a community of open-minded inquirers? Why would you privilege personal faith over collective research?

Have you ever invented a single article of faith that wasn't itself already present as an articulated possibility in the social circumstances that shaped your intellectual development. If you had been raised by wolves or alone on an island, would you have anything that even resembled a belief that might be either affirmed or denied?

the very idea that existence is not replete and fairly rippling with meaning seems obviously absurd. — Janus

We agree on what matters then. Down with nihilism. Living already has value.

Yep no afterlife. But also perhaps an ensouled universe? Neo-aristotelianism would be a justification for seeing existence as a state of ecological being. The Cosmos is not dead but itself alive - in some minimal pansemiotic, not at all mystic, fashion.

Just knowing enough earth science means you can look around a landscape and see it as a grand material flow organised by its silent purposes. The Earth lives. So do the stars as they pulsate on the brink of gravitational collapse while being in the process of exploding.

So I don’t believe in an after life. But the Cosmos does not seem to lack life and mind when you look around through an Aristotelian scientific lens.

And that would be the kind of richer philosophical view you yourself feel worthwhile. It feels great to be a naturalist. Existence seems so meaningful just in itself. :grin:

Looks like Firiston has worked on a new collaborative book The Pragmatic Turn — Read Parfit

Hey, I didn't even realise. That is going to be a pretty technical volume though.

There is this New Sci article - https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Is%20this%20a%20unified%20theory%20of%20the%20brain.pdf

Or another introduction - https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Seed%20The%20Prophetic%20Brain.pdf

As well as all his publications - https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/

My first question after reading this is “so what?.” What it feels like is an answer I experience every day. What I am interested in are the mechanics of consciousness; to gain insight into how my feelings work. — Read Parfit

I agree that scientific theories are not conventionally about explaining "what it is like to be this particular thing" but about "how generally could I make that kind of thing". So a neurocognitive theory would be the kind of general blueprint that would allow us to build something that was conscious - in whatever useful sense of the word that would mean. If we could produce true AI, then we would have a theory of what we meant as the essential trick involved in being conscious.

But still, a causal explanation of "why it would feel like something, rather than nothing" is desired by most people. They don't ask science to actually build consciousness, just talk to them about brains and stuff in a way that reassures them they can "get" why it exists as a result of physical processes.

This is a little crazy in one way. It is like when a scientist gives a layperson an image of how fundamental physics works. Oh, there are these little atoms flying about. Or spacetime warps and so objects just roll along that gravitational curvature.

A mental picture gets painted. It seems logical in itself. The layperson "gets its". No further questions asked.

Now it is in fact just as easy to paint a picture like that with consciousness. Brains model the world. To be modelling the world ought to feel like something, right? Why wouldn't it?

But now the typical layperson is not at all satisfied. It is easy to believe in a world composed of little atoms, or waves, or whatever. But there is not the same cultural preparation to understand nature in terms of structures or functions. If you point at a brain, folk are only expecting to find a lump of meat. A bunch of chemicals. Talk of its structure - grounded in a play of symbols - is just not a conventional way to look at anything. It does not give the same easy intuitive pictures of concrete stuff happening.

In terms of hard scientific analysis of the process, I am guessing it will have to stop at something like 'and then the dopamine is released.' — Read Parfit

No. The right scientific answer is going to be focused on the abstract structure - the modelling relation that is in play.

That is what cognitive psychology was pursuing - a functional description of mind. And that is where the symbol-grounding issue arose as a foundational problem for the overly computational road that cogsci was taking. Science took a big wrong turning for a couple of decades because it thought pure syntax - symbolic processing - would light up and be conscious all by itself.

So symbol grounding was cogsci slowly realising it had taken the wrong path. It had to back up, rediscover the neural networking and other embodied relational approaches it had trampled over, and begin again.

The best current approach to my taste is Karl Friston's Bayesian Brain framework. It is neural networking married to thermodynamics - the mental equivalent of the marriage of genetic constraints and metabolic dissipation in life science.

So you have information and physics united in the one theoretical framework. You have symbols, but they are grounded ... by being the thing inbetween, mediating the relation that connects the information and the physics.

I'm sure this all sounds pretty confusing and abstract. But check out Friston. Our best theory of mind will have to be one that speaks to the embodied modelling relation that exists between minds and worlds, or the functional structure of a brain and the affordances that manifests in some material environment.

When if comes to the "conscious feels" question, it won't be about dopamine but about understanding why I see the butter as "yellow". What function does it serve to reduce the complexity of matter and energy that is "the world" to this informational token?

And then understanding how much information processing went into arriving at this perceptual judgement - a sensation of yellow - would go towards the general question of "why it would feel like anything?". Once you really do get down to the level of understanding the complexity of stuff like the modulatory role of dopamine as an informational signal, then you are going to have to respond, "well, why wouldn't all this intricate world modelling not feel like something rather than nothing?".

As to holism, I find this:
"the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts."

If you accept this, then can you explain to me what "cannot exist independently of the whole," and "is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts" mean?

By "in intimate interconnection," I assume that means in terms of the function of the whole, if the whole has a function. The valves are "intimately interconnected" to the crankshaft in terms of the overall functioning of the engine, but they had better not ever touch!

And from the engine. I can remove parts and put them over there. They exist independently over there, yes? — tim wood

You seemed to think there was still something to address here?

Well let's talk about organisms rather than machines. Can an organ exist without a body, and a body without its organs?

Can a heart have an independent existence - one that never involved the context of being part of an organism which needed it for the purpose of pumping blood. Or is there in fact an intimate interconnection, a co-dependent relation, that speaks to the wholeness of the biological causality?

So as I said, it is nuts to talk about proving existence is a machine because you can prove a machine is a machine. A machine is a device built in the very image of reductionist modelling. It works because all the causal holism has been stripped out of the situation.

That is why machines have to be built. They can't grow. They don't get to decide their own use or design. Quite deliberately, there is a lack of any intimate immanent interconnection between their material/efficient causes of being and formal/final causes of being. Because we, as the human builders of a machine, want to supply that part of the causal equation. It is we who have the purposes and the blueprints.

And so the realm of machinery is a special reduced kind of world we create by constraining the usual holism of nature. An internal combustion engine is a controlled explosion directed at regular intervals through a system of pistons, cylinders, cranks and gears. We make sure all the parts are machined from sturdy metal, that the petrol/air mix is just right, that the timing of the explosion is precise.

In short, we do everything possible to reduce it to a mere assemblage of independent parts. And that is why the human mind - with its ideas about purposes and designs - becomes its own culturally independent thing.

As a species, as an organism, we have been transferring a large part of our being into our technology. It started just with cooking, spears and hammers. Now its iPhones and space shuttles. And in splitting off the material/efficient causes of being into a realm of machinery, that has increasingly freed us to be purely intellectual beings - organisms that are now largely devoted to supplying the other half of the causal equation, the purposes and the plans.

So there is a nice little irony there for @Wayfarer's OP. The mathematical turn in Greek thought was all about fabricating the conditions of organismic transcendence.

We could become the gods of technological creation as maths was the basis of a new epistemic cut in nature. We could split our organismic nature in half, turn to technology as the amplifier of our material/efficient causes of being, and then in matching fashion, become amplified in terms of our scope to have grand purposes and grand designs. We transcended our biology and even sociology to the degree we made it possible to dwell in a technologically-based paradise of ideas.

So we rewrote the rules of organic holism. Or at least took it to the next semiotic level by discovering the power of mathematical/logical language - a generalised syntax or grammar now completely washed clean of any intrinsic semantics.

Again note. Language itself was made mechanical - logical, computational, a composition of atomistic parts with no holistic entanglements. So no wonder that the reductionist mindset - the one that tries to view every situation as another machine - has become so ingrained it can no longer even be noticed as a mindset.

We no longer think in the social language of words - the everyday speech that still reflects the structure of intimate interconnections and interdependencies with our other tribe mates. With a standard modern education, we are trained to be as mechanical as possible in our critical thinking skills. When asked any big questions, it seems the only right way to go. Does this compute ... in the machine-like fashion that is the standard issue model of physical reality now?

So again the ironies. To the degree we have founded ourself in mechanism, we have liberated ourselves to be gods or free spirits of the world in which we live. We have achieved Cartesian dualism as an act of self-made causal division. And that then has become a standard source of philosophical angst.

Are we just enlightened machines, or souls existentially trapped inside fleshbots? Which of the two things are we really - a construction of material/efficient cause, or an expression of transcendent formal/final cause? In fact, we are just living a thoroughly divided life that has been amplifying both aspects of our organismic being exponentially. We are being stretched in opposite directions having stumbled into the means to do so - that Greek turn, the development of pure syntax, the development of a mathematical/logical point of view which can Platonically split our world.

Now that again is why we really, really need neo-Aristotelianism today. We have to accept that all four causes compose any functional system. That has to be our philosophical frame of analysis if we really want to understand "everything".

Most folk are stuck with the conflicted image of Platonic dualism. The world is an unthinking machine. We are rational souls. So metaphysics basically can't make sense of how things are. Caught in this paradox, people fall to bickering about whether everything is in fact all mechanical, or all spiritual. Every thread on this forum goes down that gurgler. It is just the way modern culture leaves people.

And that is why it would be wonderful if more people understood holism properly. It is certainly true that to be a modern human is to be divided between the material possibilities of a mechanised existence, and the intellectual possibilities of a free imagined existence. We have made our lives as Cartesian as possible. But that is really weird when you think about it. Holism would be the way to turn that around and see the further possibilities for a psychic integration of that divided self.

Well, let's not exaggerate. Most people have zero interest in philosophy and do live rather unanalysed lives. They are social organisms, responding to their immediate cultural contexts, and probably all the happier for it. The contradictions are not felt because they just don't believe that other people are merely machines, nor in fact transcendent beings. They are simply other people and the ordinary embodied games of language apply. No need to introduce any mathematical abstractions into this equation and thus set up some further metaphysical drama.

But once you are exercised by the division that is forming our modern intellectual condition, then you ought to be pleased that there is a way to heal it - neo-Aristotelianism, or any other of the many brand-names for a holistic, four causes, understanding of metaphysics.

It settles the old differences while opening up new intellectual horizons. Human anthropology is about the most trivial and easily disposed of issue. It is how holism applies to physics and cosmology that would be cutting edge. Or to life and mind in some properly structural sense. Now we are talking about the new adventures that science has embarked upon.

It is difficult to fathom your logic. Are you saying that reductionist locality can account for the quantum facts? My point was that no matter how absurd you might deem a non local holism, dem are the facts.

You are deflecting. The issue was already the quantum one of Feynman’s path integral. I am the one arguing that it’s models all the way down. I am the one asking you how quantum mechanics can be understood other than holistically, while pointing out that even classical physics is holistic once you ask how the principle of least action could metaphysically be the case.

I am denying the empiricist dogma of 'no innate ideas'. — Wayfarer

That is now another shift in subject. And empirically, psychology supports that particular "dogma" to a large extent. How could genes even code for innate ideas?

On the other hand, genes can code for the general constraints under which the brain develops its processing architecture. So there is a structure that is going to grow in a way that might eventually cash out in well-structured ideas.

Plato had some nonsense about the truths of mathematics being dormant understandings that a rational soul could be prodded into remembering. But was this more than just poetic licence even for Plato? Certainly, it would be the least useful of his metaphysical positions today.

That is why I frequently refer to the IEP article on the necessity of explaining mathematics in empirical terms - the 'indispensability argument for mathematics'. Don't you think that is ridiculous, that it has come to that? That is said to be because, and I quote, 'our best empirical theories seem to debar any knowledge of mathematical objects.' And why do 'our best theories' seem to debar that knowledge? Because 'the rationalist’s [what I'm calling Platonist] claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.' And why? Because mathematics is real, but it's not physical; its very nature is incorporeal, and the faculty which grasps it can't be understood through the one-dimensional lens of today's empiricism. That's what empiricism must deny, a priori, because according to it, everything real is physical. Ergo, having to justify mathematics in terms that empiricists will respect. I'm sure the irony is missed on most of them, as that, too, is not physical. — Wayfarer

But surely, having again been caught out by a succession of posters in this very thread, you ought to be more cautious about your enthusiasm to make all the fact fit your desired conclusion?

Right from the off with this post about neo-Aristotelianism, you made the mis-step of conflating the supernatural transcendence of Platonism with the naturalistic immanence of Aristotle. You were taking something directly contradictory as evidence for what you want to believe.

So again, you are wanting to argue that mathematical structure is incorporeal. And my comment was that maths itself divides into the real and the fictional. The kind of maths that physically matters is the kind of maths that empirically works to make actual predictions about nature.

So you can't just gaily claim all maths has this unreasonable effectiveness that no one could explain.

It is only a particular kind of maths - the kind that deals with dynamical structure - which really has this "miraculous" quality. And we can see that it is not in fact a transcendent immaterial miracle but an immanent material one.

Disorder requires order even to be disorder. For entropy to be produced, there must be a dissipative structure. So cosmic structure has to self-develop to create the Cosmos as a steady-state entropic flow - a story of a Big Bang turning into a Heat Death by the end of time.

Nothing could be more corporeal than that structure which is the means by which the substantial actuality of a material being can manifest.

This is how Aristotle fixed Platonism with his immanent hylomorphism. All we have to do then is scrub out the mystical Christian re-write that followed and we are back to the future with neo-Aristotelianism.

Again - no animus against evolution, but against biologism, by the view that our abilities are circumscribed by biological ends. Evolution doesn't address the gap between surviving and living - the space in which human culture emerges - and every attempt to do so, amounts to reductionism. — Wayfarer

Science sees sociology and culture as natural phenomena too. They are part of the same evolutionary story. They are manifestations of the constraints imposed on all forms of existence by the telos of the laws of thermodynamics.

So sure, a systems science perspective - the neo-Aristotelian one - would accept that there is much about human culture and individual taste that is merely accidental. It is not constrained in a strong fashion. And in fact - as we are now talking about a highly developed state of semiosis - it positively fetishes the creative, the spontaneous, the free.

This Romanticism itself is sensible in the context of our hugely accelerated development. We want as many "mutants" and "hopeful monsters" as possible, as that is the requisite variety that evolvability demands. :)

If we want to continue accelerating exponentially into the future we are freely inventing, the name of the game is to increase the scope for contingency, and thus mistakes, and thus the learning which is the pragmatic erasure of those mistakes and the resulting honing of even better habits of action.

So thermodynamical development completely explains life and mind - including the fact that the creative and the spontaneous are a fundamental part of the deal. Developmental structuralism predicts exactly what is observed.

We even have models now. Scalefree networks, constructal theory, and other examples of freely growing natural structures, powered by randomness and yet already predestined to arrive at maximally efficient outcomes when it comes to the job of delivering ever increasing entropic flows.

It 'relates', because it is used to make predictions and calculations. Isn't it revealed when mathematical analysis is used to generate new discoveries about nature? — Wayfarer

Yes. And so now you endorse the necessity of an empirical basis to establish any connection. It just ain't a theory unless it is founded in matching acts of measurement. That is the pragmatic constraint we impose on our free speculation so that our knowledge develops in a purposeful and reasonable fashion.

So you are starting out by granting the very things you normally strongly deny. How long before you forget what you just said here?

The movement of those objects is constrained by the laws of physics, which is what enables us to predict them. That's what I had thought you meant by 'constraints' but please tell me if I'm wrong. — Wayfarer

It is exactly that.

And he really doesn't have an answer; the word 'miracle' appears twelve times in that essay. Likewise Einstein often mused that 'the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprensible'. — Wayfarer

Sure. Newton and Galileo were equally amazed by the universalising power of mathematical physics. Everyone always has been. When you look at "God" in the face - come to understand the inescapable necessity of the structural principles of existence - one always ought to feel awe. It's a dazzling realisation.

So, great scientists like these two, don't themselves actually have a theory about why. — Wayfarer

Well actually, Einstein in particular was famous for his "unreasonable" belief that you just have to go with the structural necessity of symmetries. So he knew what to be looking for in terms of physical reality - even when he wasn't the greatest mathematician himself.

Wigner did foundational work in seeing how symmetry maths mapped onto the emerging bulk of quantum mechanics - revealing the essential mathematical-strength structures involved.

So I think you should read these kinds of comments as a wake-up call to their fellow scientists and the interested lay public. Reality is all about intelligible structure, not meaningless matter.

Maths was merely the science of pattern, a way of modelling dynamical structure. Once you took a structural view of the Cosmos, it was inevitable that it would have to map to the kind of maths which had been developed to talk about structure in this kind of constrained, symmetry-breaking, dynamical and relational fashion.

Where that goes against the grain, is that it is against empiricist dogma that nature ought not to be so ordered; mathematics must be somehow explicable in terms of grey matter, for it to be considered real. — Wayfarer

But remember that you accept the constraint that empiricism should have over our free metaphysical speculation.

Let's not revert to the Platonism of saying human minds discover transcendent truths. All we are doing is arriving at useful models of dynamically self-organising or immanent structures. And then empirical evidence shows that we can apply those models to good predictive descriptions of the Universe as a whole. There is nothing larger that needs to be said ... for as long as evidence confirms what we think.

So the empiricist dogma is still in full force. But structuralism is the approach which says nature has to be deeply ordered to exist. It is structuralist theories that are being produced and so the ones being tested.

If we spend billions searching for a Higgs boson, it is because it has been a mathematical-grade structural necessity for about 40 years.

What I think it means, is that mathematics is inherently a part of the structure of intelligence. — Wayfarer

But which comes first? If the world is inherently structured, then brains are under an evolutionary constraint to be able to master the principles of that structure. And eventually a technical language comes along - mathematics - to take that to a further explicit level of cultural discourse.

Mathematicians get to stop talking about the shape of the world like regular folk. They just sit in a huddle talking about the shape of shapes. And they are happy to be called the most intelligent people on Earth for doing so. Although quite a lot, they get called other names. :)

Where the real conflict lies, is not between that view and physics - many physicists have strongly Platonist tendencies, whether they know it or not - but with Darwinism. — Wayfarer

Bring out your bogeyman. Give the effigy another good kick.

Your animus against evolution and development is misplaced. It is Aristotelian causality at work. It is constraint treated as something physically real, structurally foundational.

As Wigner says, there is something miraculous about the human ability to reason. It enables us to imagine something that has never existed before, and then manifest it. — Wayfarer

Again, the ability to speculate freely is half the story. Yes, it is useful to conjure up fictions, as they might turn out to be truths. But then that is where empirical test comes in - the other necessity that you want to deny.

So there is no maths that anyone invented that matters a fig - except to the degree that science has now put it to good use. End of story.

Without empirical success, all that wild invention would be utterly unmiraculous in most people's view. Who could have any reason to care. At least fabled beasts have some kind of social reality. Maths that never cashed out in an experiment would be the definition of an austistic activity, like rhythmically beating your head against the wall.

So reconsider the arc of your own argument. Maths is only miraculous because it can be used to say something testable about the deep structure of physical reality.

That is the only thing that saves it from being Pythagorean lunacy in the world's eyes.

But such a mind would need to take account of everything that does make a difference and be able to discern the difference between differences that make no difference and those that make a difference in order to eliminate the former and arrive at 'the cosmically general viewpoint". — Janus

You would be talking the mind that has to climb out of ignorance, so not now really God-like and all-knowing?

I would of course be happy with that as we are now talking the proper Peircean cosmic view. Mindfulness becomes that very mechanism which is the development of habits of conception, routines of constraint.

If you want to go that further step, that's great. In the beginning there is just vagueness - neither a point or view nor its absence. And then what self-organises is the foundational temporal distinction between the general and the particular.

You can have differences that make a difference as there is also the embodied purpose in play that determines the differences that don't. General necessity emerges from the fog of the indeterminate, along with the accidental particulars it is determining to be such.

So Schop's Cartesian confusion is thus completely dissolved. Mindfulness - as semiosis - is already everywhere in existence from the start. But it only develops a fully crisp expression by the end. By which time history will be over and no longer matter at all. All the accidents won't make a difference.

This is exactly the kind of ontology modelled by self-organising physics - for instance, Feigenbaum's universality, the point where the definite transition to chaos is achieved. Every possible path winds up at the same Heat Death limit. The details no longer matter. And they never really did.

The third person point of view, the scientific version of the God's eye view, really has to see the whole of creation in a single unifying sweep. And what it would see is this extreme simplicity, and not some complicated world of medium-sized dry goods that seems to us the epitome of material existence.

The Universe began as a featureless radiation bath. All you need to know to describe it in every detail were a few basic parameters - the cosmic equivalent of a temperature and pressure. There just wasn't anything more to say.

Then after an excursion through an era of somewhat more complex and localised turbulence - our small window of observation - it will get back to that original bland state. It will have merely transitioned from one state of ultimate vague simplicity to a matchingly definite state of equivalent material simplicity.

Some deep mathematical possibility, an ontic state of structural possibility, will be fully expressed. But the Universe will be now just again a featureless radiation bath - albeit of maximum possible coldness and extent.

So again, the objective scientific view is the one that sees the essential formal structure and ignores the accidental material particulars which happen along the way.

There is a good metaphysical reason for why scientific modelling winds up with the kind of character it has - one based on the unavoidable mathematical symmetries. It is exactly how the true third person point of view would look.

The God's eye view makes more sense too as that emphasises the view is all about seeing the general purpose, the general necessity, that is cosmically in play, everywhere at all times.

So the view from nowhere is already rather too focused on the notion that a world is simply a set of material objects. And then the problem for a mind is to see these particular located things as they "actually are" - in a material/efficient sense of existence.

And my point is that science naturally moves towards the abstraction of generality in seeking out the objectively dispassionate view of existence. For good reason, the local particulars just don't matter much. They are nature's accidents. What theory has to pursue is the global necessities. What has to be "seen" from a point of view is the formal/final causes of being.

And thus, it ain't quite so dispassionate after all. It is all about the search for some cosmic-level purpose or reason in fact. It is about the necessary constraints that regulate all acts of material individuation.

So the problem is very often framed in reductionist or logically atomistic terms. What vantage point, what God-like mind, is capable of making every possible measurement of reality? How do we know every accidental detail that composes existence all at once, in its entirety, the complete data set with nothing left out.

And yet that way of framing the issue is utterly wrong. The cosmically general viewpoint that can "see it all" is the one that is everywhere but nowhere in that it is only contemplating the absolute bare essentials of existence.

It all boils down to the reason or purpose that there is such a thing as existence. After that, the rest is just the unfolding of a creation, an accumulation of some further history of accidents.

A God would shrug His shoulders, and say Who cares? I got the fundamentals right. The rest followed of its own accord. I've no need to sweat the details. That wasn't how it was meant to work.

Two things are clear from this: 1) whatever holism is good for, it is of no use when applied to anything as mundane as things in the world, and 2) apokrisis has apparently started a correspondence course in sarcasm but hasn't got to the part yet where they teach him that sarcasm is usually without substance, especially the eye-rolling variety. — tim wood

I can't make you out. You seemed smart enough to have a serious conversation. Then you so quickly degenerate into time-wasting bickering.

To deny holism in the context of quantum theory is simply Quixotic.

Sure, it is a good scientific strategy to try to interpret QM or QFT with the least amount of holism possible. We don't want to go overboard with the woo when we can still hope to assimilate aspects of quantum metaphysics to good old reductionist locality. But in the end, you do have to give up that classical picture of a completely mechanical reality. All quantum interpretations now agree on this. The experiments are in.

So I don't know if you are playing a game or seriously believe your anti-holism. Unfortunately stuff like this suggests you have a poor grasp of what QM is actually modelling when it talks about particles and waves....

Do a little research on diffraction gratings. This movement of light as a wave, capable of self-interference, like water in the ocean, I accept as a fact demonstrated by experiment. — tim wood

A wave is a classical collective phenomenon. It can be understood metaphysically as some set of discrete objects - water molecules - with elastic connections that then oscillates with a resonant frequency. The wave forms arise as a common mode that solves its boundary conditions - the various parameters imposed on a body of water like the shape of its container, any steady driving action like a wind or other external impulse.

So wave mechanics is clearly holistic. The "parts" arise to fill the available parameter space. The wave peaks are forced to fit the container in harmonic fashion. A clearer example of top down causation is hard to imagine. A continuous liquid is broken into a set of now discrete vibrations.

Of course, the metaphysical reductionist will point out that the continuous liquid is itself a collection of discrete molecules. But that is both true and missing the point.

The discrete molecules are not discrete at all. They have charges that come into play when they are collected together. They are thus constrained to act in continuous fashion - elastically connected - by that continuous force between them. The sum is already greater than the parts once it becomes necessary for us to recognise the fact that a system contains its interactions as well as its locations.

So anyway, even classical mechanics speaks directly to holism and top-down causation. Harmonics is an actual constraint forming the features in question. When we count the wave peaks or wave troughs, we are counting the locally emergent phenomena ... and treating the underlying liquid as a continuous boundary condition, parameterised by global properties like viscosity. That just is the metaphysics of the situation.

And then once we start talking about quantum waves, we are now parameterising probability spaces - the probabilities of making particular observations. Any underlying materiality has dropped right out of the picture. Talk of a wave is now pure mathematical analogy. It is talk about an organisation imposed on possible measurements.

In the loosest fashion we might talk about some wavefunction as a solution constructed by a collection of all the possible paths connecting two points. And sometimes the additions and subtractions give you a probability that looks like a trajectory carved by a material particle, and other times, a probability that looks like the kind of interference patterns you see from interacting waves.

Yet what we actually see in reality is neither moving particles, nor interfering waves, but simply some registered event - the click of a particle detector. How that empirical fact occurred remains fundamentally mysterious. QM certainly does not model the collapse of the wavefunction. The maths can only generate a probability picture that either looks more particle trajectory like, or more wave interference like.

I say all this to emphasise how far QM moves away from materialist ontological commitments.

Even Newtonian mechanics demanded all kinds of spooky "action at a distance" and "inertial motion" woo. That was the big deal - having the bravery to drop the highly materialistic ontology of "Aristotelian" impetus theories and accept a materialism ruled by global symmetries and forces like gravity which could act without any mediating medium. So even Newtonian mechanics was the big break from literal atomism. (For amusement, check out how Descartes failed to make that mental break and kept trying to make a corpuscular theory of heavenly motions work.)

And now, with QM, the rupture with simple materialism is complete. It is a calculus of the probabilities of observables, not a picture of material events.

Of course we still want to picture what that means in metaphysically intuitive fashion. But now - in the modern era - that has to mean focusing on the mathematical form or structure of nature.

And that is the Aristotelian four causes thing. We are back to wanting to take formal and final cause seriously if we want to understand the Cosmos in some properly deep way.

Whereas, the 'domain of numbers' (for only one example) doesn't exist, in that sense, yet is still real, according to Platonists (including Godel and Frege.) So - real but not existent. And that is the dividing line between Platonism and everyone else, as everyone else says that 'what exists' and 'what is real' are the same. — Wayfarer

I think you have a problem here in that you have to show how the imagined domain relates to physical reality.

It is just like our other imaginary worlds that are so easily constructed by linguistic combination. We can imagine an infinite variety of fictional beasts - unicorns, dragons, orcs, elves, gryphons. They all exist in a domain opened up by syntactical construction. We can freely assemble animals out of bits and pieces like wings, hooves, fire breathing, horns, miniaturisation, the ability to walk through walls, etc, etc. Once you establish a syntax based on unconstrained construction, you can generate an infinite variety of the unreal in modal fashion.

So the question is, how do you divide your mathematical Platonia into a part that is physically realistic (like the maths of the standard model, or the maths of quantum probability amplitudes - both extremely arcane until it was found they had this exact fit with reality) and the part which is simply an unconstrained generation of fictions?

The talk about the unreasonable effectiveness of maths is usually much too loose. And in that confusion, it becomes unclear whether maths is generally just a human construct or an actual science of patterns.

So you can't make a good case for Platonism until you can reliably tell the difference between the fictional creations of maths, and the maths that might actually be the deep structure of nature, of existence itself.

And here is where the constraints of Aristotelian immanence might come in. If we insist that worlds have to be self-organising, then that puts a bound on free construction. Already such a world is far more limited in the patterns it could generate. We can rule out the mathematical unicorns and elves on stronger grounds because the question would become, could every beast we could possibly construct, successfully co-exist.

We are now thinking holistically. We have closed our fictional world and applied a principle of natural selection to it. Would dragons have enough unicorns to keep them fed? Would fairies just wave their wands and eliminate all nasty orcs from their world?

So this is an analogy. But it shows the further Aristotelian constraint that would start to make sense of mathematical Platonism. Once you invoke hylomorphic immanence, then you close the system in holistic fashion. You add the rule that all must be able to co-exist as the one world. And that changes everything really. It creates a boundary separating the actually possible from the fictionally possible - the kind of possibility that is merely a meaningless combination of parts, not a world of possibility united by its common purpose of being able to actually exist in a holistically meaningful fashion.

So holism really counts. It creates the closure that defines the meaningful. It encodes the finality or purpose of a world - even when that purpose is understood as just the most basic thing of being able to exist.

That is why I always point to the centrality of symmetry and symmetry breaking when talking about metaphysics. That is the area above all in maths that is focused on the holism that closes a world while also speaking to the local individuation which allows the other thing of atomistic construction. Symmetry maths takes you to the heart of immanent self-organisation.

But anyway, the critical issue is that not all maths is equal. Some of it is a runaway syntax of the kind that allows us to make infinite bestiaries out of a finite collection of parts. And a core of it gets at the holism needed to unite a world under the common immanent purpose of successfully co-existing as a functioning whole. The usual developmental and evolutionary constraint that is the hallmark of any systems metaphysics or structuralist thinking.

it allows for the slipperiness of your argument. — schopenhauer1

An argument is a model. Your problem lies in grasping the arguments.

Per Feynman in (I think) SIx Easy Pieces, or maybe QED, the light takes all the paths. — tim wood

Worth quoting Feynman probably....

In the case of light we also discussed the question: How does the particle find the right path? From the differential point of view, it is easy to understand. Every moment it gets an acceleration and knows only what to do at that instant. But all your instincts on cause and effect go haywire when you say that the particle decides to take the path that is going to give the minimum action. Does it ‘smell’ the neighboring paths to find out whether or not they have more action? In the case of light, when we put blocks in the way so that the photons could not test all the paths, we found that they couldn’t figure out which way to go, and we had the phenomenon of diffraction.

Is the same thing true in mechanics? Is it true that the particle doesn’t just ‘take the right path’ but that it looks at all the other possible trajectories? And if by having things in the way, we don’t let it look, that we will get an analog of diffraction? The miracle of it all is, of course, that it does just that. That’s what the laws of quantum mechanics say. So our principle of least action is incompletely stated. It isn’t that a particle takes the path of least action but that it smells all the paths in the neighborhood and chooses the one that has the least action by a method analogous to the one by which light chose the shortest time.

You remember that the way light chose the shortest time was this: If it went on a path that took a different amount of time, it would arrive at a different phase. And the total amplitude at some point is the sum of contributions of amplitude for all the different ways the light can arrive. All the paths that give wildly different phases don’t add up to anything. But if you can find a whole sequence of paths which have phases almost all the same, then the little contributions will add up and you get a reasonable total amplitude to arrive. The important path becomes the one for which there are many nearby paths which give the same phase.

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html

So all your instincts on cause and effect go haywire apparently when you say that the particle decides to take the path that is going to give the minimum action. Yes indeedy. And yet this teleological view is the one that made his name. :)

You don't rebut nonsense. You laugh at it.

Scientific and other analytic explanations tend to be reductionist, in the sense that they fit phenomena or concepts into some theoretical framework. — SophistiCat

Sure, reductionism can have this other meaning. But the discussion was about four causes holism vs atomistic materialism. So why change the subject?

And I would say it gives you more of a problem admitting the principle of least action does reduce to a holistic position which takes finality seriously as part of the fundamental workings of the Cosmos.

If there is a lesson to derive from the four causes it is this pluralism of explanations — SophistiCat

Again, I thought you were arguing against four causes modelling. And now you are championing it under the permissive banner of pluralism.

there are these alternate frameworks that are sometimes exactly equivalent — SophistiCat

So now you have even less to carp about apparently. You think there is a formal duality between reductionism and holism. And I rather agree.

There are deeper and more interesting ways to make sense of such alternate explanatory frameworks. — SophistiCat

Terrific. You will be telling us how that pans out for QM any time now.