Thanks for confirming that you can’t answer a direct question to save your life.

It's like saying that we can't know real truth, because as soon as anything happens it's in the past, and we can't be absolutety certain about what we've sensed, and our memories, so let's just define truth in terms of pragmatic consequences. — Metaphysician Undercover

What waffle. The proof that we understood the past is the degree to which we can use it to predict our future.

Same old tune, Banno.

If you want to say something, I outlined a position just a couple of posts back. Have a go at that.

So... We think about our own thought and belief. That requires language. Thinking about thought and belief first requires that we form and/or hold thought and belief. Thus, we form and hold thought and belief prior to language. — creativesoul

So to think doesn’t require language, but to think about thinking does require language?

Doesn’t really work, does it. If thinking is thinking, it either does or doesn’t require language. So the usual equivocation at work here.

None of modern cosmology makes any sense other than to keep some priests busy. — Rich

It's like the little boy exclaiming the emperor wears no clothes. Except this little boy is standing so far at the back of a tall crowd he sees nothing really. He just enjoys the sound of what he says.

It has been my understanding that this particular version of the multiverse is unverifiable, thus meaningless. — T Clark

Any argument based on inflation is speculative metaphysics. But it might be worth stepping back to think about how science can even operate at the limit of the observable.

You will never be able to experiment in some direct controlled and repeatable way - the gold standard - when it comes to investigating the origins of the Cosmos. That's obvious. Your apparatus to make measurements that could replicate the energies involved would turn into plasma, or collapse into blackholes, themselves.

So the only course is to identify the most fundamental constraints on any possible theory - like the fact the universe looks almost perfectly flat and thermalised from the beginning. And then you can search for a mathematical mechanism that would predict such an outcome.

Maybe that mathematics will just pop out of pure mathematical considerations themselves - like the permutation symmetries that have been so successful at predicting the fundamental particles.

Or else the maths will come from other physics internal to Universe - the kind of physics of mechanisms we can confirm via laboratory experiments, such as the kind of mechanisms that explain condense matter structures, or whatever.

So all we can hope to do is work our way towards the most fundamental known constraints on a final theory. And then make some judgement about which mathematical model best makes predictions that manage to fall within the bounds of that set of constraints.

So of course any final theory is "unverifiable" if we are insisting on some scientific method so strict that we know it could never be applied. But we can still be scientifically systematic in a way that respects the rules of some epistemically well-grounded game.

And exactly what the rules ought to be is a matter of loud argument in science. As it should be.

Inflation theory is an example of where the ease of producing mathematical models has fuelled an academic industry. Unconstrained imagination has been allowed to run riot to build CVs. Whereas really the fecundity of inflation as a research topic ought perhaps be sounding the alarm bells.

Hence we are now seeing the same kind of pushback that string theory got four or five years ago - http://backreaction.blogspot.co.nz/2017/10/is-inflationary-universe-scientific.html

And multiverse thinking is this issue on steroids.

As I say, what is happening is we are trying to paint the final theory into a corner. We are using what we know about the universe at an observable scale to narrow down a space of possibilities. Then in that corner, we explore all the mathematical structures that can fit into its tight space.

Yet it is a generic fact that every time we seem to trap a very particular kind of mathematics in the corner, it turns out to have unbounded fecundity. The same equations can still spit out an unlimited variety of alternative universes even if they seem to have only a few free variables to play with.

This is what happened with string theory. As the maths was perfected, it sprang a leak. It could generate a "practically infinite landscape" of alternative physical realities.

My view is that this shows the maths itself has a problem. We aren't good at modelling self-constraining systems. That is something that has only got going as a field of research this past 40 years. So we can't build models in which the constraints themselves emerge to rein in the very infinities that the maths will otherwise, in unconstrained fashion, generate.

After string theory, many expected loop quantum gravity to do just that. It has tried to apply a condensed matter mindset to the problem. But that also splintered into a great variety of possible mechanisms and as yet no breakthrough is being celebrated. Strings are even back in fashion.

So my answer is that inflation theory has the problem that it can sort of still be tested. For instance, better resolution of the CMB might detect the gravity waves that some inflation theories predict. Yet it is fundamentally a free parameter model. The "inflaton scalar field" is extreme hand-waving with no direct evidence. So if one version of inflation is falsified - we find no gravity ripples - the knobs of the basic model can be twiddled to predict that outcome too.

Inflation is not unverifiable and therefore meaningless. It just reflects the fact that we can paint the mathematical possibilities into a corner - which would be meaningful science - and yet maths tends to still have unbounded fecundity even when trapped in apparently the tightest physical spot.

So more attention has to be directed at this epistemic issue. Science ought to be favouring mathematical models that can predict their own emergent constraints, not just stay within some set of observable constraints while spewing out a vast variety of alternatives from within that confined space.

It seems that it is the human ability to think symbolically that allows for "holding beliefs"; where holding a belief is conceived of as being in an unchanging state of assent towards an absolutely fixed content. — Janus

I think that's a really important point. Language shifts belief into a timeless register. It makes a truth claim transcendent of the usual continuous active engagement of the world. And then the truth-making is also turned into a search for "the facts", the "states of affairs".

Which is where Banno and Sam go astray in trying to treat the truth-makers as some uninterpreted ground of experience. It could also be where Creative goes wrong, but after many years, I still have no clue what thesis he is trying to promote. He can't seem to answer a single straight question about it.

So anyway, that is what is important - what I keep referring to as Pattee's epistemic cut (which was also von Neumann's deal with self-reproducing automata and Peirce's triadic metaphysics). The animal mind is embedded in the flow of the moment. It is responding directly to the here and now in terms of some adaptive system of conception and exploration. There is just no mechanism to transcend that flow. So an animal doesn't "hold beliefs" in that it could objectify a thought and wonder whether it is actually true or not. It just expresses a belief in interpreting the world a certain way. And the "truth" is then discovered in terms of the pragmatic consequences. The animal prospers or suffers.

But language gives humans a mechanism to objectify their own "states of belief" and compare them to "states of the world". And as I stress - or as Peirce and other modelling relations guys like Robert Rosen stress - The states of the world are understood as acts of measurement. They too have to be translated into the transcendent register. We don't check the world directly to see if a belief is true. We check our conception of what the world would look like if such a belief were the explanation of some particular set of measurements.

We are looking not for the thing-in-itself, but the signs we conceive as speaking the truth of the thing-in-itself. The umwelt. And that is conceived of in the same timeless and placeless fashion - despite being a conception about some "physical state that exists at a time and place".

Take Banno's confusion over mountain heights or Sam's attempts to tie mental states to brain states.

Banno is imagining that if he got out a ruler - a measurement in terms of some transcendent co-ordinate system - he could tell you how high a mountain "really was". Well he can tell you the results of a measurement act in terms of some world transcending viewpoint. But already he is imagining a measurement act in an ideal Platonia where mountains aren't eroding or still growing, or where he never makes an error as he lays his ruler end over end several thousand times, while trying to keep count.

Likewise Sam is imagining that the brain has "states". At some instant in time, you can take that instantaneous snapshot view which gives you a timeless representation of how the brain was, in a way that will forever after be recorded as such. But the causality of neural activity is spread over multiple timescales. There's habits that take decades to form. There's attentional action that spans seconds. There's working memory action that spans minutes. There's neural level processes anywhere between 5 and 100 milliseconds. You have the biological pace of activity inside the cells that is just a frantic blur.

So any neurobiologist knows that no timeless snapshot could capture the temporally-complex structure of what the brain is doing. The best we can hope for is to figure out what collection of measurements might best match the predictive needs of some theory. We can't just measure "the reality". We already have to have formed a mental picture of what signs or observables can meaningfully stand for our concept of "a brain state".

So the measurables - the truthmakers - are not grounded in "the world", or even "our direct experience of the world". The truthmakers are grounded in our conception of how the world should look in terms of some set of signs, some set of measurements, that usefully converts a running temporal reality into the kind of timeless representation of reality that our theories of the world can deal with.

Yet in post after post, you just get folk claiming that minds perceive the state of the world in untroublesome fashion. The beliefs might be conceptual things, but the perceptions are veridical things. But what are qualia except our efforts to imagine a timeless and placeless version of the experience we would otherwise just live? And in objectifying qualia, we might get to say something useful, yet we also leave behind so much that we haven't manage to say anything about.

So truth is a pragmatic choice about how much of reality we can afford to ignore. We gain something by objectifying and creating a set of signs - a set of "timeless facts" that serve as truthmakers. But it is an art, a skill. And good epistemology is about bringing out the tricky nature of what we claim to do.

If people are conceived of as being able to hold beliefs in this kind of static sense, it would seem that they routinely do it without 'thinking about thinking', though, and that is why I said it has nothing to do, necessarily, with metacognition. — Janus

Creative has some special private understanding of metacognition. He certainly hasn't managed to explain it to me, or relate it to the literature.

I think it is a bad term in fact. It is normally used by psychologists who don't take a linguistic or discursive view of the human mental difference. The construct of metacognition presumes that the human ability to recollect, or be self-aware, or to have voluntary control over attention and imagination, are all aspects of some higher genetically-evolve cognitive faculty. So the thesis is not that the structure of language gets internalised to structure individual minds, but that the minds evolved that structure, therefore that's why they knew how to speak. In evolutionary history, the thoughts were there before the means of the expression.

So metacognition is how a cognitivist would think about things. And a social-constructionist would see metacognition as merely the kinds of things you can learn to do once you live in a community where speech is a shared thought-structuring skill.

But as you say, most people "hold beliefs" in the sense that they don't think you are crazy when you ask them to give explanations for why they just did whatever they just did. They accept the rules of that particular language game and will play along. They will come up with a reason that seems reasonable, according to whatever cultural context is in play.

Psychologists can then argue over what this "metacognitive" discourse tells us about the structure of human cognition.

No. It's not. That's the point. i is a number but it's not a quantity. — fishfry

Perhaps this is pedantic, but even in terms of rotations in the complex plane i does have a couple of associated quantities with its notion of multiplication. It represents an anti-clockwise rotation of 90 degrees and a magnitude of 1 in terms of the size of complex numbers — fdrake

Fdrake is right. If we want to ask what i quantifies, it quantifies the number of dimensions that a number is constrained by. So i is a widget to rotate a real number into an orthogonal direction that turns the number line into a number plane.

The number line stands for the most constrained notion of continuity. Complex numbers relaxes that strong constraint and allow numbers to wander in two dimensions. And the numbers still behave like numbers - objects that meet the functional criteria of associative division algebras.

We can continue to relax the number of dimensions in play. We could consider a three dimensional number. But now it doesn’t behave arithmetically. It is not a suitable object of algebraic structure - a fact of undoubted physical significance when it comes to why space winds up being three dimensional.

Then with quarternions, we have four dimensions and a bounce back to a large amount of algebraic structure. Five, six and seven dimension again see that structure disappear. Then the octonions provide a last echo.

So i is a good example of structualism at work. We can define some basic relational properties that numbers are meant to have. The associative division algebras do that. And then we can see how the “hard structure” emerges as constraints are added.

As we constrain the dimensionality that defines the continuous space in which discrete mathematical objects are meant to move, we can see the role those constraints play in actually defining the mathematical properties those objects are understood to have.

The limits maketh the objects and not the other way round.

I noted that there is no general definition of number in mathematics. A well-known and true observation. For whatever reason, this simple and harmless statement triggered several people. I still don't understand why. — fishfry

Either people were triggered or they thought there are some good approaches worth discussing in philosophy of maths.

Shapiro and Resnik hold that all mathematical theories, even non-algebraic ones, describe structures. This position is known as structuralism (Shapiro 1997; Resnik 1997). Structures consists of places that stand in structural relations to each other. Thus, derivatively, mathematical theories describe places or positions in structures. But they do not describe objects. The number three, for instance, will on this view not be an object but a place in the structure of the natural numbers.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/#WhaNumCouNot

If you can't be bothered to do that, then this is not a discussion. — Pseudonym

You’re right. I’m not bothered.

It is sufficient justification for me to maintain my belief that no-one has yet provided a testable, pragmatically true, proof that neurobiology does not proceed deterministically, it is not incumbent on me to prove that it does in order to justify my belief. — Pseudonym

Eh? You can believe what you want without proof because you are free to ignore opposing positions when they offer proof?

Seems radical.

Show me a single biology textbook which states that life depends on randomness. — Pseudonym

Peter Hoffman has written a really good book - Life’s Ratchet: How molecular machines extract order from chaos.

I summed up the guts of it in this post...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/105999

If all you're going to do is suggest that anyone who continues to disagree with you after the presentation of one article must be closed-minded and have no interest in hearing challenging positions, then you might as well go door-to-door proselytising. — Pseudonym

I just thought you might appreciate some help with concepts you seemed to be struggling with. Would you think it better if I were to follow your approach of just making up my own shit rather than offering arguments based on actual philosophical and scientific positions?

This site (as I understand it) is for actual debate. — Pseudonym

Sure we could debate Pattee when you are up to speed on the biosemiotic position I’m citing.

If we can't even pick a random number without our pre-existing mental state influencing it towards one decision out of the supposedly 'free' choice, then I don't see much hope of demonstrating that our important choices in life are anything other than determined in advance by the dispositions we already have. — Pseudonym

A disposition is an untroublesome form of “Determinism”. But I guess a “problem of personal inclinations” doesn’t have quite the same dramatic ring to it.

Using the English language.

equivocal - ɪˈkwɪvək(ə)l - adjective

- open to more than one interpretation; ambiguous.
"the equivocal nature of her remarks"

- (of a person) using ambiguous or evasive language.
"he has always been equivocal about the meaning of his lyrics"

I'm not saying animals don't believe, I'm saying that they don't form or hold beliefs. — Janus

Yep. They don’t act on a belief. Their actions simply show they believe. Where we - linguistically, hence metacognitively - can also speak of the belief upon which we might, or might not, act.

Our observations clearly show us that animals attribute causality. That requires thought and belief. To think that fire caused tremendous discomfort is to believe that touching fire causes pain. It is to draw mental correlations between one's own actions and what followed. It does not require, nor can it, propositional content(unless you want to argue that propositions aren't dependent upon language). — creativesoul

Thought is even more equivocal than belief here.

Sure, animals can think in some non-linguistically structured fashion. They can be smart and adaptive in their planning and responding.

But to call this thought, with no further attempt at distinction, is to perpetuate a confusion.

I would agree that ordinary language doesn’t give us a lot to work with here though. Folk psychology terms do not handle the difference that language makes to cognition very well.

Compatibilists, unlike libertarians, believe even the internal constraints are deterministic. It is true that some libertarians believe that whatever someone actually does freely, he or she ought to have been able to refrain from doing it (or to do something else) in the exact same circumstances regardless of the antecedent causal constraints on the action being internal or external to the process of deliberation and decision. This is the strongest possible version of the so called 'principle of alternative possibilities' (PAP). But that is a rather minority positions among defenders of the possibility of free will. — Pierre-Normand

This is an excellent summary. What I want to add is that even if the internal deliberation was as rational and optimal as possible - completely determined by those ideal constraints - reality is still unpredictable. We can only guess that a choice is likely the best. And our own actions impact on the world in a way that produces some of that unpredictability. Stepping into a muddy river, I might step on a crocodile.

So an ideal rationalist has to second guess their own actions in terms of intended consequences. That uncertainty is a product of any decision and part of the internal milieu. It can’t be computed from some prior state of perfect knowledge, as we might argue about a best guess. It is an irreducible residue of indecision when doing our best to make a decision determined by “all the available prior information”. As a guess about a guess, it is information that only follows the action that causes it to be the case.

In short, there is an irreducible uncertainty at the heart of any model theoretic approach to reality - an observer effect that dogs all rational models. We are entangled with our environments when we make a decision. The decision that results in an interaction is the same as the act of measurement that disturbs the state of the very system it hopes to measure.

If only I had known, I wouldn’t have stepped on the crocodile. But it was only in stepping that I could have known.

The line between internal constraints and external constraints is a fuzzy boundary and not a sharp one. In the final analysis, strict determinism fails as the actor and their environment can’t be absolutely divided.

Mostly decisions can be relatively determined by internal information. A decision had only that one possible optimal outcome and so we had no real choice. However often the reality is the information is ambiguous. We can only discover the rationale after acting.

Hence Buridan’s ass. You just have to make a plunge when no choice is clear.

If you were in fact a deterministic computation, you would blue screen. Your decision making would gridlock. So a good thing we aren’t designed that way. A good thing noise still exists in the system to tilt decisions in less constrained fashion.

In summary, folk want one or other extreme to be true - absolute determinism or absolute freedom. But as you outline, a sensible position depends on zeroing in on the tricky border where both sides seem to be saying something believable. And zoom right in and the very distinction itself evaporates.

Any theory thus has to recognise the further fact that observers and their world’s can’t in the end be completely unentangled in either direction.

I see you started a similar thread just before this one. But I will quote a bit of that here...

Beyond the limit of existence we said its opposite must lie. This opposite again has a limit, for it is only what it is and therefore exists. As you might be able to see, nothingness is that from which existence comes but that never gets to be per se for when it is it becomes something that exists and therefore never exists and IS nothing. Now this nothingness before the origin must not necessarily be 0 of everything. As I said, it could be everything except the ability to change. I dunno it is as if change were what we call god. Change that arises because the limitation of things forces their existence. It is as if we exist because we have to exist. Makes sense? — Daniel

So I would say you are asking the right questions. Now what suitable answers have some philosophers offered?

One approach is that of metaphysicians like Anaximander in Ancient Greece or CS Peirce in modern times.

Where things begin is in a vagueness or a pure unbroken potential. This is neither a state of change nor stability. Being the unlimited or the indefinite, it has no division in either of these possible directions. It is only the possibility for such a division to manifest.

We are talking of metaphysical qualities that are dichotomous. Each is the limit of the other. So the limit on changing is to be stable. The limit on stability is to be still changing. Thus you need both to “exist” to have either as something that definitely applies in the world. The existence of each secures the existence of the other. We can point to the lack of change when things are stable. And we can point to lack of stability when things change.

But back when things were primally vague, there could be no fact of the matter either way. There was no change to measure stability by, and no stability to measure change by. All you have is mute indeterminacy in regards to either possible question.

So apply that to existence in general. Non-existence must exist to stand as a definite limit on existence. And vice versa. Existence must limit non-existence.

Fine. But note how non-existence is not yet defined in its own way. Are we talking about absolute nothingness. Is it the nothingness that stands outside the somethingness in some spatial sense, or temporal sense, or even a spatiotemporal sense?

We can see that the notion of “existence” does have some inherent problems. Is it properly opposed to nothingness, to flux, to development, to decay, or what? Again, that is why we would want to start by deconstructing the term, discover what we actually think we mean by it. What actually is the limit that makes existence exist. Across that limit must lie its other. But we need to give that other some more concrete definition than saying “it is whatever existence is not”. It must be given a positive character to secure existence as a well defined metaphysical concept.

So anyway, the story would go that everything begins just in an undifferentiated vagueness. Then your key metaphysical polarities are what could emerge in a mutually definitional fashion from that. You get a dichotomy like flux and stasis which describes existence in terms it’s two logical extremes.

So now your reality is bounded by standing within a pair of limits.

You want to draw a circle on a page. That marks off an inside from an outside. And then you want the inside to be existence, the outside to be non existence. Yet that doesn’t really work. You have only marked off a region of a plane in arbitrary fashion. The outside of the circle also actually exists in this tale.

A better conception is a page with a mark, an ink dot. Now there are two opposed extremes. A figure and a ground. An event and a context. The reality goes in two complementary directions. Either it contracts towards the black speck of ink, or it expands outwards to the general blankness of the page. You can’t get more black and inky in one direction, or more unmarked and blank in the other. However neither without the other can properly claim to have its chief characteristic.

A dot of ink without the page it blemishes can be a mark. And a page can’t be definitely unblemished as a definite thing unless there is at least some mark to blemish it and so betray its general presence.

So metaphysically, existence is what we find between two complementary limits on being. The essential relationship is hierarchical rather than spherical. Reality is to be found between upper and lower bounds on possibility. The relation is not between an inside and an outside, but a triadic one where reality is the spectrum of intermediate possibilities that two countering limits definitely create.

So first there is just a potential. Then there is the possibility of some mutually definitional division. And thirdly there is the final outcome of a spectrum of possibilities that those two limits on being can manage to define.

So what if I say that "for existence to exist it must have not existed before? — Daniel

This is a very standard line of thought of course. We believe in deterministic cause and effect. We believe in Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason.

And yet we also we realise that while this can explain existence in terms of particular individuated entities - a world full of objects - there is a problem when it comes to applying the same simple cause and effect logic to "existence as a whole".

You are talking about the central problem of metaphysics. And we know that simple cause and effect stories can't work.

And that is why you would have to start to step back and see what reality is actually composed of. In talking about "existence", you are already presuming individuation and stability ... in the face of an equal amount of development and decay. So "non-existence" looks like that other bit - the change, the possibility, the flux.

The question has to become about why anything might develop and persist in the face of so much action in the other direction. This thing that you presume - existence - then drops out of the picture. There isn't any such thing as "simple existence". That is simply a label you were slapping on the most stable and enduring part of everything that is always changing.

But likewise, "coming into existence", is a problematic idea because it is also true that things do have the tendency to stabilise and find concrete forms that endure. Everything might be changing, but pattern or regularity also can't seem to help emerging.

So to get anywhere on this obvious poser - how could existence first exist? - you have to be prepared to unpick the notion of existence itself.

To me, it makes more sense to understand existence as where the "coming into being" has finally arrived at some stable rest point. So it is not about where existence starts. It is about where coming into being stops.

Our attention can focus on why flux or chaos settles into something stable and persisting. And we have a lot of mathematical-strength models that can speak to that kind of metaphysics.

Is it safe to assume that for something to exist it has to come into existence first? — Daniel

It seems a good assumption just looking around at the evidence. When things exist, we mean that they persist. They hang about in an individuated and stable fashion. But we also can see that things change. Individuation is the result of development. Stability is what can survive lability or corruption.

So what we see is a reality that is stretched between two tendencies. Things persist. And things also develop and perish.

So if that is what we see everywhere we look, then that is what would be safe to assume. Reality is a process in which things can both change and stay the same. Our metaphysics then has to be directed to the "how" of that duality.

Every day to go and expect your car to start you are relying on determinism. And if he fails to start then you rely on determinism to find a solution, such as you forgot to put petrol in it; or you need to change a spark plug. — charleton

So when a radioactive atom decays, are you saying that was determined by a cause? Something suddenly made its decay more probable, nay inescapable, in that moment rather than - as inductively confirmed in the study of these things - that the decay probability does not vary with time? The chance was constant, therefore the determinism was - measurably - zero?

So at some point you have to be able to say in what way you think the neurobiology of brains is informationally deterministic. What does such a claim mean?
— apokrisis

As above really, it means that the next physical state of all the neurons in the brain is determined by the prior physical state of those neurons plus all the universe interacting with them. The change from one state to the next being determined by the laws of physics, which themselves are determined by the initial state of the universe. — Pseudonym

There didn’t seem any point continuing when you just keep making the same bald claim and say nothing about how that could be the case in terms of the actual neurobiology.

If you believe every thought and choice you could have, every next word you could say, was hardwired into the quantum foam at the beginning of time, then you are asking me to take seriously something that is just too silly.

If you were familiar with biology, then you would find that life actually depends on randomness. It needs material instability so that it can have something to regulate with its information. It is made of molecules that will fall apart and put themselves back together so long as they get the right signals.

So just in that you have the fact that life thrives on the edge of chaos. Where things are the most poised and unpredictable, is where information can then point that constructive energy in a predicted or constrained direction.

That is why I urged you to read Pattee. And your response tells me all I need to know about your interest in any actual challenge to your assumed position.

Sorry. You are not getting it. Biology tells us that bodies aren’t deterministic devices. Life likes to control matter. So it has to separate itself from matter to have that control.

You will find the argument laid out here ... https://www.informatics.indiana.edu/rocha/publications/pattee/pattee.html

How does that explain the problem? The "bang" of the big bang? — TimeLine

I was answering the question of how an inflationary universe could be considered large yet not infinite.

So again you are speaking in non sequiturs. Who was talking about the problem of the bang of the Big Bang? Where are you getting this latest misrepresentation from and what could it even mean?

As I said, it is you that has no clue what he is talking about. — TimeLine

If you believe that statement is wrong, provide a refutation with citations.

The claim of determinism is solely that somehow the state of the universe in the next moment is determined by its state in the previous moment. — Pseudonym

Remember we are discussing freewill. Are you claiming there was a widely discussed problem before Newton’s mechanistic laws of motion?

And while you could take a looser view on determinism - I certainly do - the normal view relies on laws to ensure one state has no choice but to lead to the next.

Nomological determinism is the most common form of causal determinism. It is the notion that the past and the present dictate the future entirely and necessarily by rigid natural laws, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

Then what you actually claimed is that there is informational determinism when it comes to the brain. After all, as I pointed out, no one uses Newton’s laws of motions to say that physics determines any putative finite state transitions.

So again, what ensures that neurons behave deterministically if you are claiming it is information and not physics?

As I said, the design feature of computers is that nothing about the physics of transistors should dictate the way a gate decides to open or shut. Only the program instructions are meant to determine the state transitions. So we certainly know how to build a deterministic finite state automata.

However if it is our free choice about what programme code to write, what rules to create, then the freewill issue can’t be solved by pointing to that kind of machine determinism. We still lurk behind the scene.

So at some point you have to be able to say in what way you think the neurobiology of brains is informationally deterministic. What does such a claim mean?

None of this invalidates determinism in any way. It just means we do not yet have all the information necessary to predict 'stochastic' events — charleton

Hmm. To say that events are predictably unpredictable, as a wavefunction does, is merely to say they are constrained rather than determined. You can be certain of your uncertainty. And if that uncertainty is irreducible, then absolute determinism is a dead duck.

But relative determinism, or a degree of constraint, is still a useful thing to have. Just because absolute determinism fails, not all is lost.

But you were going to tell me how my next word could be predicted in principle by a prior neural state. Apparently the information is in my brain and in the entire universe. That seems a little hand-wavy, no?

Remember the question I actually asked.

And how would you know what the previous state was and the next state was of either. Would your "determinism" allow you to predict that using Newton's laws of motion? If not, what laws are you proposing that would connect one measured state to another measured state? — apokrisis

If your version of determinism is informational rather than material, then what law of nature determines the transition from one neural state to the next?

So just saying there is information involved is not an answer. I’m asking what kind of natural law are you imagining ruling the neurobiology. Where is the evidence that the brain is literally a finite state automata that could even sustain that kind of completely constrained or deterministic state mapping?

I don’t follow. Are you being sarcastic?

So fill in the blank. The next word I’m going to write is the word ...

Indeed, and you went on a torrent of abuse because I sought an explanation, and an explanation you still have not given. — TimeLine

I’ve given you an explanation several times now. So you will have to explain what your problem with it is. Otherwise you are simply trolling.

The problem is not that, Apokrisis, the problem is that you are intentionally and incorrectly misunderstanding my comments and then responding to an article I have given you by implying I meant something that I did not mean. — TimeLine

Well explain how that cite meant anything.

How can I have intentionally misunderstand your comment “Here, read.” Clearly I understood. I read.

But what the hell do you think baryon asymmetry has to do with inflation? I’ve asked you to explain. Clearly having stuffed up again, you won’t. You will just huff about with wounded pride and pretend you have been done some dreadful wrong.

'm not. I am interested in what you have to say, but your behaviour and your responses have only made me lose my respect for you completely and I am confident that the reasoning behind that behaviour is because you are uncomfortable with my presence. — TimeLine

Uncomfortable with your presence? You have a vivid fantasy life apparently.

It is as simple as the fact that first you baffled me with your non sequiturs, and then you annoyed me with your strangulated prose, and finally I am tiring of your self-pitying tone.

I’ve asked you for a number of explanations. They have not been forthcoming. I’m not holding my breath.

Here, read. — TimeLine

When you are so deep in a hole, stop digging. You've just cited a paper that is hypothesising about a non-inflationary scalar field that might explain some other issue - the dominance of matter over anti-matter after recombination.

So this scalar field would be a condensate that produces right-handed sneutrinos. It would be carried along for the ride like all other particle fields during inflation - inflation being produced by a different imagined scalar field that Guth dubbed the inflaton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflaton

The logic is the same as I outlined of course. And it is weird that you seem to want to continue to want to challenge that logic in some obscure fashion.

The logic is that observation shows that we have a problem and that then sets up the search for a mechanism that can fix it.

So the isotropic state of the CMB was a puzzling observation. Guth proposed a scalar field with a special property - some kind of repulsive spacetime expanding phase before it decays - as the possible solution.

Likewise, the paper you cited starts with the matter asymmetry problem. It is observed there is matter in the universe and so something is needed to explain how that asymmetry arose. Again, a scalar field - this time a more standard particle one - is being proposed as the get out jail card.

The paper makes this distinction in its first paragraph. It would have been impossible for you to miss it.

In particular, assuming inflation [1] as a solution to the horizon, flatness, and other cosmological problems and as a seed for density fluctuations for later structure formation, we are obliged to adopt scenarios where the baryon asymmetry is generated after the reheating.

So because the inflaton can't explain the matter~antimatter asymmetry, something else after inflation would have to be the mechanism. Some particular particle condensate with a right-handedness that broke during recombination.

If you still think that your citation is any kind of argument against something I said - in particular, that observation of a problem is the reason we impute some scalar field as a mechanism - then you will have to explain yourself further.

Now, I could turn around and say something like just because you go over the heads of others, doesn't mean you know what you are talking about or screaming like a little baby boy doesn't actually suddenly make you right but I am going to ask you once and once only, speak and question properly. If you do not understand something, it is you that has the problem and because you know a bit of physics, your attitude is nevertheless ungenerous. — TimeLine

And here you go with your usual hyperbolic attack as soon as you encounter the slightest pushback on your posts. But I'm sorry. You are giving me no reason to think you understand the issues in question.

The paper you just cited to "prove your case", again proves mine. And you can use your moderator position to hound me all you like. I'm not going to pretend you are correct about things when you aren't.

Why do you repeat what I say and then scream that you don't understand? — TimeLine

Remember that you decided to focus on my use of the term "humongously large". You were asking relative to what? I answered several times. Obviously the comparison was between the size of the visible universe at the end of inflation compared to the inflated whole.

So do you accept that as correct now? If so, why are you trying to pretend I was agreeing with something you said?

Determinism is a fact of the universe it does not have an opinion. It's true whether you believe it or not. — charleton

Does science talk about discovering true facts or arriving at the most broadly based unfalsified beliefs?

You are adopting an absolutist position on determinism as a known metaphysical fact. And it is no longer even a reasonable metaphysical belief, given quantum indeterminacy and the measurement issue in general.

It is all well and good that observable fluctuations and perturbations in scalar fields in the CMB radiation can explain the isotropy and homogeneity along with the massive size, as well as the expansion of the universe as accelerating, — TimeLine

What is it with your bad writing? Every sentence lacks logical argumentative structure. It's all a garble of buzzwords and not a proper response.

How do the fluctuations and perturbations in scalar fields in the CMB radiation "explain" the isotropy and homogeneity, and the massive size?

It is the fluctuations of the CMB we observe. Any scalar field responsible for inflation is then imputed via theory.

And it is the isotropy of the CMB we observe, thus making homogeneity a reasonable belief. And likewise, the massive size (much bigger than just the visible universe) a reasonable belief.

Likewise, how do the fluctuations themselves "explain" dark energy? The original observations that spoke to a cosmological constant were of surprising supernovae redshifts. It took another theoretical mechanism - the Sachs-Wolfe effect - to then "see" a background acceleration in the CMB data.

So you are name-checking familiar bits of the cosmological puzzle. But that's it. There isn't the logical connections that would show you understood how these bits of the puzzle slot together.

You stated that the initial region that "banged" was already massive. Going back 13 to 14 billion years, this makes no sense. If the universe was large and infinitely dense, you are merely comparing the size or shape to the observable universe. — TimeLine

It is you who continue to fail to make a coherent response.

First, I stated that the initial region in the original inflationary story was very small. There was a pre-inflationary phase that lasted from the first Big Bang event - the symmetry-breaking that split gravity from a vanilla GUT force. Then this GUT force broke down into the strong and electroweak force an instant later, starting the inflationary period - according to the standard mainstream telling of this form of inflation.

So the usual tale is that the inflaton field was some kind of initial quantum fluctuation - about a teaspoon of matter. And then inflation was an exponential doubling in size of this field, without any dilution of energy density. It is quite easy to fit 50 to 60 e-doublings between the likely times for the GUT symmetry breaking and the next symmetry breaking - the Higgs/EW one - where inflation must have come to its end. Hence we can compare our visible universe region to the total inflationary expanse by counting up the number of supposed e-doublings. That gives us a 55 orders of magnitude difference. Plenty to do what inflation is meant to do in terms of the obseverable degree of isotropy and homogeneity in the CMB.

And all this is just what any popular science book on inflationary cosmology will tell you.

That you say: "This is odd. It also explains nothing," shows you have a flakey grasp of the cosmological arguments being made.

Going back 13 to 14 billion years, this makes no sense. If the universe was large and infinitely dense, you are merely comparing the size or shape to the observable universe. — TimeLine

It is your sentences that make no sense.

What size do you think the observable universe was relative to the inflated universe back then just after inflation ended and recombination got visibility itself started?

If you could write proper sentences, then it would be clear what you think should be compared to what. You wouldn't rely on ambiguity to make it sound as if you had some valid criticism of my account.

Well that is just your first paragraph. And it continues the pattern of being so garbled that it is a huge waste of time untangling your out-pourings for you.

As I have already said, I appreciate Guth' suggestion that the early conditions were about the size of 10^-28cm - the size of a marble - and with energy at 10^16 GeV the scalar field in this false vacuum state dominates the total mass-energy density enabling the volume to expand at a constant; the negative pressure enables it to grow exponentially and no energy is actually needed, or at least the energy of empty space (dark energy) and something we still have no clue as to what it is. In a fraction of a moment, the universe expanded at the speed of light, actually probably faster than light because there are no limitations to how far the universe can expand according to GR. Then the repulsive gravity begins to decay at 10^-33 seconds after the big bang and we get what we have now in the observable universe. — TimeLine

Are you implying I argued something fundamentally at odds with this? Again, you are sticking in a lump of text that does not contest what I said, and doesn't explain what you think you might be criticising when you accuse me of "This is odd. It also explains nothing."

I get that inflation is the physics of matter and scalar fields and that the particles that make universe from initial conditions to the big bang is in the Higgs fields, but these separate suggestions are intentionally fused to help ascertain a number of other factors that have - like the flatness problem - but also have not yet been raised in this discussion; as mentioned earlier, the second law of thermodynamics and the arrow of time, the low-entropy early conditions, cosmological parameters and these problems in inflation also need to be considered, hence the fusion and I believe that I have already made it clear that I appreciate Guth. — TimeLine

Wow. What a dog-turd of a sentence.

OK. So there is a flatness problem - from observation we see the universe is as flat as possible. And there doesn't seem enough gravitating mass to brake an exploding big bang with such exact precision.

Another part of the flatness problem is that the density of any gravitating mass looks evenly thermalised. The universe in one direction looks the same as the universe in the other. And if we believe in the Big Bang, that raises a further issue of how our neighbouring regions could be thermally the same having never shared the same lightcone. We need a mechanism that explains that.

So two big problems. And inflation would help explain both.

You smoosh everything together, killing the logical story science wants to tell. You ought to be making it clear that you appreciate the parts of the puzzle when you write your replies. Otherwise there is no possibility of you making some actual counter-argument or criticism of the science as I explained it.

Your throwing in the arrow of time, entropy, cosmological parameters, etc, is just adding to the confusion you have already created.

More buzzwords that are irrelevant to any thread of argument you might be trying to sustain in your mystifying attack on me. If you think I should have added something further on these issues to explain the cosmology, then pin-point the difference they make. Otherwise it just seems you are trying to sound impressive by name-checking every damn buzzword you can think of. A childish rhetorical tactic.

From my understanding, it does; when you consider the effect of the cosmological constant as it explains the rate of expansion with time, particles that make up the universe following inflation are merely the quantum explanation of a Non-Zero Higgs field that forms elementary particle masses; it has positive and negative contributions at a constant at every space time point, which would mean that omega would equal to omega(m) + omega (lambda) as it explains the rate of expansion with time. I get what you mean, but there is no distinction. — TimeLine

No, you really don't get what even your own citation is saying if you believe that a distinction between omega(m) and omega (lambda) is not in fact a distinction mentioned for good reason.

And given that the simplistic focus of your attacks on me became about this issue of a "humongously larger" inflationary universe, how is this even relevant to that?

You are now conflating the issue of the late dark energy dominated era of the Cosmos with the brief inflationary event hypothesised to better explain its first moments.

Now I find it very reasonable that if there were inflation (a big if), then it is very appealing that dark energy may turn out to be a remnant effect of some kind. So future science may establish a connection.

But here, in your replies, you don't even seem to realise how your mind skips from one thing to the next without paying proper care to the distinctions involved.

You shit out another dog-turd of a sentence that is so scrambled that it can have no possible bearing on whatever it was that I was saying. It makes no definite argumentative point. And that has been the pattern of your every response so far.

Sorry to be blunt. But that's what you get for being blunt, isn't it?

I'm not making any claims, — Pseudonym

Well you are in insisting that brain function is deterministic, even if that just means a deterministic computation, and even if that in turn just means the computations are deterministic guesswork about an undetermined reality.

So you are very determined to make determinism true here, and reject my constraints-based, semiotic, approach where - as a metaphysical generality - all events can be only relatively deterministic and are unable to be absolutely deterministic.

All you've presented so far is a vague "because fundamental particles cannot be measured, we must have free-will", which is fine if you're looking to simply justify an already held belief in indeterminacy, but not really a sufficient argument to ground its necessity. — Pseudonym

Haven't you got that back to front? If my position cashes out at a general metaphysical level against determinism, then in fact it is a necessity that some local bit of complex machinery - like a brain - operates with a constraints-based causality and not a mechanically determined one.

So yes, quantum level indeterminacy is exhibit A. And then chaos theory and non-linear dynamics would be exhibit B.

For me to take a strong position here, it is important that modern physics is now evidence against the Newtonian classical deterministic paradigm.

If the answer to your question helps you to explain your argument somehow, then for me information is the state of a collection of neurons, no different to the way information is the state of a collection of transistors in a computer. That state, together with inputs from the external system, determines the state in the next moment. Of course, given that this is a transition from one state to another, it could also be described as a process, but I see that as a semantic issue, not a metaphysical one. — Pseudonym

So how would you go about measuring the state that is a collection of neurons?

Or in a collection of transistors in a computer.

And how would you know what the previous state was and the next state was of either. Would your "determinism" allow you to predict that using Newton's laws of motion? If not, what laws are you proposing that would connect one measured state to another measured state?

If you can't answer these questions, you haven't got an argument.

How is the brain's model of the future not determined entirely by the information it has at the current time and the neurological connections which represent its current responses to all the multitude of stimuli presented in the model? — Pseudonym

Explain to me how you think information exists in brains. What is brain information in your book - the kind that you are claiming to be mechanically deterministic?

The rather clichéd "Our language/culture is more complex" is pretty weak without defining the level at which this happens and why. — Pseudonym

Cliched? Human language is articulate and syntactic. It is rule based symbolism so capable of unlimited combination. You are talking apples and oranges in claiming other species have “language”.

You have to presume, for this to work, that moral behaviour is in some way opposed to natural instinctive behaviour. I don't see any evidence for this. — Pseudonym

It should be enough to mention #MeToo.

Why would we presume that the brain's ability to model the future isn't entirely determined by the information is has gained up to the present and the current state of it's neural connections which together determine the picture it will generate of the future world? — Pseudonym

Yeah. We might make a guess that is determined by our best information. And then the guess turns out to be wrong.

So I’m not arguing against the ability to constrain uncertainty. I’m attacking the presumption of absolute determinism - mechanistic understanding of physical and informational processes.

The point of having a brain is to make the best choices, given an uncertain world. You seem determined to recover some kind of actual determinacy in what the brain does. But I am arguing from a systems science or hierarchy theory perspective where the causality of reality in general is understood in terms of constraints on degrees of freedom.

It’s not just neurobiology. Even physics is not deterministic.

The question then arises, 'what is the nature of number?' Conjecturally, one might say, number is a series of equal values (quantity). Hence, Pythagoras' and other ancient mathematicians' inclination to render number as equal, whole values. If this is an accurate description of number, then it follows, the concept of number is tied to the idea of a 'unity' value (unit measure). — cruffyd

Yeah. The historical view is a good way to get at it. There was a reason why the Greeks were so horrified by the notion of an irrational number. That very reaction betrays the underlying belief about what a definition might be.

And so we have "oneness" as the central object of arithmetic. And we have "a dimensionless point" as the central object of geometry.

The Greeks were discovering what the maximally invariant mathematical objects looked like - the ones that had irreducible identity despite all possible operations that might attempt to change that in one of the mathematical families.

Having established the highest symmetry identity operations, then maths could progress by identifying and relaxing the various constraints that ensured the existence of these ideal objects - the 1 and the point.

Geometry could go non-euclidean and topological. Numbers could loosen to include negatives and irrationals.

Bourbaki's talk about the three mother structures makes me wonder where order structure fits in to the Ancient Greek story. I guess Aristotle's work on the logic of hierarchies - the [genus [species]] relation - does describe what is the most primitive notion of set theory.

Temporal construction is such that inequality defines its nature. Equality, on the other hand, can only be outside of temporality. One might say: 'equality can only exist eternally.' — cruffyd

I get what you mean but in that direction can lie hard Platonism. However the altermative I prefer is another long story.

Have I once demanded that you "provide me with a proper theory of what constitutes this you"? — JustSomeGuy

And why not? That would be perfectly reasonable.

Freewill is a debate that comes up every week here. Just last week I gave this general account that is worth recycling.

Get back to basics. The sense of self is a perceptual contrast the brain has to construct so as to be able to perceive ... "the world". Even our immune and digestive systems have to encode some sense of what is self so as to know what is "other" - either other organisms that shouldn't be there, or the food the gut wants to break down. And so too, the brain has to form a sense of what is self to know that the world is other.

A second basic of the evolved brain is that it is needs to rely on forward modelling the world. You probably think the brain is some kind of computer, taking in sensory data, doing some processing, then throwing up a conscious display. Awareness is an output. But brains are slow devices. It takes a fifth of a second to emit a well learnt habitual response to the world, and half a second to reach an attentional level of understanding and decision making. We couldn't even safely climb the stairs if we had to wait that long to process the state of the world.

So instead, the brain relies on anticipation or prediction. It imagines how the world is likely to be in the next moment or so. So it is "conscious" of the world ahead of time. It has an "illusion" of the next split second just about to happen. That creates a feeling of zero lag - to the degree the predictions turn out right.

And this forward modelling is necessary just to allow for a continual perceptual construction of our "self". We have to be able to tell that it is our turning head that causes the world to spin, and not the other way round. So when we are just about to shift our eyes or move our hand, a copy of that motor instruction is broadcast in a way that it can be subtracted from the sensory inputs that then follow. The self is created in that moment because it is the part we are subtracting from the flow of impressions. The world is then whatever stayed stable despite our actions.

It is not hard to look at the cognitive architecture of brains and see the necessary evolutionary logic of its processing structure. And a running sense of self is just the flipside of constructing a running sense of the world.

Then on top of that, brains have to deal with an actual processing lag. And the best way to deal with that is to forward-model the shit out of the world.

Then on top of that, it is efficient to have a division of labour. The brain wants to do as much as it can out of learnt habit, and that then leaves slower responding attention to mop up whatever turns out to be novel, surprising or significant during some moment.

That leads to consciousness having a logical temporal structure. You have some kind of conscious or attention-level set of expectations and plans at least several seconds out from a moment. About half a second out, attention is done and learnt, well-briefed, habit has to take over. It does detailed subconscious predicting and reacting. If someone steps into the road while you are driving, you hit the brakes automatically in about a fifth of a second. After that, attention level processing comes back into it. You can consciously note that thank god you are so quick on the brakes, and what was that crazy guy thinking, and why now is he looking angry at me, etc.

So [conscious prediction [subconscious prediction [the moment] subconscious reaction] conscious reaction].

This is all proven by psychological experiment. The whole issue of reaction times and processing times is what got experimental psychology started in the late 1800s.

Where does human freewill come into it? Well what I've outlined is the evolution of the cognitive neurobiology. The basic logic is the same for all anmals with large brains. They all need to construct a running sense of self so as to have a running sense of what then constitutes "the world". They all have a division of labour where they can act out of fast learnt habit or slower voluntary attention.

But humans are different in that we have evolved language and are essentially social creatures mentally organised by cultural evolution. Yes, memes.

So now our perceptual sense of self takes on a social dimension. We learn to think of "ourselves" in terms of a wider social world that we are representing. We learn to "other" our biological selves - this running perceptual self with all its grubby biological intentionality - and see it from an imagined social point of view. We learn to be disembodied from our own bodies and take an introspective or third person stance on the fact we can make choices that our societies might have something strong to say about.

So freewill is a social meme. It is the cultural idea that being a human self involves being able to perceive a difference between the "unthinking" selfish or biologocally instinctual level of action and a "thinking", socially informed, level of self-less action.

An animal is a self in a simple direct fashion - a self only so far as needed to then perceive "a world". A human, through language, learns to perceive a world that has themselves in it as moral agent making individual choices. That then requires the individual to take "conscious responsibility" for their actions. Every action must be judged in terms of the contrast between "what I want to do" and "what I ought to do".

So the idea of freewill is an ideal we strive to live up to. And yet the temporal structure of actual brain processes gives us plenty of dilemmas. We do have to rely on "subconscious" habit just for the sake of speed and efficiency. The gold standard of self-control is attention-level processing. But that is slow and effortful. However - as human culture has evolved - it has set the bar ever higher on that score. As a society, we give people less and less latitude for sloppy self-control, while also making their daily lives fantastically more complex.

A hunter/gather level of decision making is pretty cruisey by comparison. You go with the flow of the group. Your personal identity is largely a tribal identity. You get away with what you can get away with.

But then came institutionalised religion, stratified society, the complex demands of being a "self-actualising" being. A literal cult of freewill developed. The paradoxical cultural demand - in the modern Western tradition - is that we be "self-made".

So sure, there must be some evolutionary logic to this. There must be a reason why the freewill meme is culturally productive. But the point also is that it is a psychologically unrealistic construct. It runs roughshod over the actual cognitive logic of the brain.

We just shouldn't beat ourselves up for not being literally in charge of our actions at all times. We are designed to be in some kind of flow of action where we let well-drilled habit do its thing. And of course our minds will wander when we are being expected to consciously attend to the execution of stuff we can handle just as well out of habit. The idea that we can switch our concentration off and on "at will" just cuts against the grain of how the brain naturally wants to be. Attention is there for when things get surprising, dangerous, difficult, not for taking charge of the execution of the routine.

So "freewill" sits at the centre of so much cultural hogwash. There is good cultural reasons for it as a meme. It is really to modern society's advantage to have us think about our "selves" in this disembodied fashion. It allows society to claim control over our most inadvertent or reflexive actions.

But it is also a demonstrably unhealthy way to frame human psychology. If we just recognise that we have slower voluntary level planning and faster drilled habitual responses, then this unconscious vs conscious dilemma would not create so much existential angst.

We are not a conscious ego in possible conflict with an unconscious id (and also under the yoke of a social super-ego). Our "self" is the skilled totality of everything the brain does to created a well-adapted flow of responses to the continually varying demands of living in the world - a world that is both a physical one and a social one for us as naturally social creatures.

The actual freewill dilemma arose because Newtonian determinism appeared to make it paradoxical. If we are just meat machines, then how could we be selves that make our own rational or emotional choices?

But physics has gone past such determinism. And the very fact that the brain has to forward model to keep up with the world means that it is not being neurally determined anyway. Its knowledge of how the world was an instant or two ago is certainly a constraint on the expectations it forms. But the very fact it has to start every moment with its best guess of the future, and act on that, already means we couldn't be completely deterministic devices even if we tried.

Universal computation is logically deterministic. A programme - some structure of set rules and definite data - has to mechanically proceed from an input state, its initial conditions, to an output state.

But the brain is not that kind of computer. So it is neither physically deterministic (as no physics is that in the LaPlacean sense), nor is it computationally deterministic.

Thus "freewill" just isn't a real ontological problem. There is no metaphysical conflict. (Unless you are a dualist who believes "mind" to be a separate substance or spirit-stuff. And of course there are many who take that essentially religious view still. But for psychological science, there just isn't an ontological-strength problem.)

Your complete misunderstanding and lack of comprehension of category theory and mathematical structuralism was evident to several other posters the last time we discussed this. — fishfry

Here we go. You and your circle of imaginary friends.

I'm done responding to your posts on this site. — fishfry

Funny. I was waiting for you to start.

I did not write the quote you attributed to me. What is your attitude problem? — fishfry

I get a bad attitude pretty fast when someone like you plays cute with a quote. If you leave off the important part of what my sentence said, that is flat out misrepresentation. Expect a swift kick in the arse.

Nobody has provided a counterexample and you now seem to agree. — fishfry

Keep trying the same trick. You are looking worse and worse.

If you choose category theory as your foundation, there's still no general definition of number. — fishfry

Your inability to discuss the foundations of maths is noted.

"You" is in reference to your person. Your self, comprised of your body and everything in it. This isn't something I should have to explain. — JustSomeGuy

Unbunch your panties a little. If you are going to talk about this "you" who decides to push the button, you have to have a proper theory of what constitutes this you. Your hand-waving approach is not good enough for philosophy or science.

Again, this is all just restating what I already said. — JustSomeGuy

Yeah. But minus the hand-waving. So with the missing rigour.

DNA, as I already stated, is the origin of these "programs". Your DNA determines the "code" for your brain and how it processes things. And what wrote this code into your DNA? Nature. Evolution. — JustSomeGuy

Yeah, nah. If you are talking about this mysterious self that runs the show (according to folk psychology), then the full story has to bring in the several levels of semiosis or code.

So yes. There is the DNA and its evolutionary history. But then there is the neural code and the brain's developmental history. And with humans, our linguistic code and its cultural evolutionary history.

Don’t be a dick and misquote me.

I said you seem to think that a definition would be in terms of the mathematical objects involved, and not the structure of relations needed to produce them via a holistic system of constraints.

A reply that makes some contact with the relevant philosophy of maths would be appreciated if of course no longer expected.