Hawking and Unnecessary Breathing of Fire into Equations
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
? Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
The quote above is a popular one, and it seems to speak to the old basic question of why there is something instead of nothing. This problem seems inherent in any sort of objective realism (where existence is a property), which is almost all views. The lack of a satisfactory answer to this challenge is why I had to abandon such realism.
The last question in the quote seems to contain some errors and implied assumptions.
First of all, the universe is treated like an object, which seems a complete category error. Objects are finite physical arrangements of matter (systems). They exist in (are contained by) time. They are all created (caused) by the rearrangement of pre-existing matter/energy into a different form. Their boundaries are apparently human designations, a product of our language.
The universe (defined perhaps as the entire quantum structure defined by a full descriptive unified set of equations) doesn't seem to fit this description at all, except for how it is used in language, which perhaps explains the strong bias. The universe is more like the set of real numbers, but with the addition of rules, temporal and otherwise. The structure contains time, and is not contained by it like objects are.
The numbers act as objects (not temporal, so not 'caused' in this case). Objects are members, and so one can say an integer is not prime if there exists an integer factor other than 1 or itself. There's the word 'exists' there, but it doesn't imply any sort of objective platonic existence, only that said factor is a member of the set of integers (a subset of a larger universe of real numbers). That universe (the set of real numbers in this case) has no need of existence in order for 12 to not be prime. It is not itself an object, hence nobody says that 13 is prime only if there exist integers (well, almost nobody).
Secondly, Hawking begs a very strong bias that the universe (category error aside) has in fact gone to the bother of existing. He should first have asked "Does the universe go to all the bother of existing?".
If one takes an empirical definition of existence (appropriate for a temporal interactive structure such as our universe), the problem goes away. Object X (a created system) exists to system Y iff it has affected Y in any way, which requires it to at least be in Y's past light cone. Problem solved! The universe isn't in our past light cone, but certain structures/systems are. Other parts are not, so those don't exist. It is a category error to speak of the existence of the universe itself. I suppose then that 'observed universe' can be defined roughly as the portion of the structure that is in our past light cone, and the rest doesn't exist to us any more than does a unicorn.
Comments?
Assuming a 'property' definition of existence, but without begging the necessity of that property for empirical observation, what distinction would be observed by something having that property vs the same thing that didn't have the property? Is that a fair question, since any attempt to demonstrate it would be flagged as begging?
- - - -
Disclaimers: I presume humans/consciousness to play no special role except when explicitly called out. I presume no supernatural involvement. I speak of ontology and not epistemology, so for instance I consider any physical interaction to be a measurement of some system X, and 'knowledge' of X has nothing to do with this.
Comments (67)
As opposed to "subjective realism"? :chin:
Btw, I suspect you know that Hawking proposes model-dependent realism to get around astute objections like yours, noAxioms.
Quoting noAxioms
From the point of view of Aristotelean hylomorphism, Peicean semiotics, ontic structural realism, etc, the Cosmos is not an object, but a process. It doesnt exist but persists. It isnt created but it develops. And it is substantial in its being due to being the intersection between structural constraints and material possibility.
So in this view, you start from a material vagueness or everythingness - a quantum foam of possibility - and this then reacts with itself to become a more limited and stable arrangement of somethingness. Existence evolves in a least action or path integral fashion where everything cancels down to whatever definite form can stabilise the situation and make for an orderly Universe unfolding in dissipative fashion in an emergent spacetime.
This says the essence of the Universe is best captured in mathematical models of its structural principles. It is all about symmetry and symmetry breaking as this is how a stable order can emerge from pure instability. Maths does a good job speaking about the system of constraints that are the necessary aspect of a reality that self selects for its long run persistent order.
But then there must also be the material potential as that which breathes fire into the equation. There must be quantum action or hot fluctuation to give the constraints the initial state of disorder to tame, in some sense.
This too could be mathematically modelled we would hope. Or at least logically and metaphysically modelled. But it is the slipperier side of the story.
I disagree. Hawking was simply stating a situation matter-of-factly. If you want to put it in philosophical terms -- Hawking is saying that science does not answer the normative question of: "...why there should be a universe ..."
In my opinion, Hawking was giving a correct or reasonable assessment of a scientific model or theory.
This is how I understand what he is saying as well.
Rules and equations do not give rise to the universe. The model describes the universe. It takes it as given. That it is is neither modeled nor explained.
Quoting 180 ProofPer the disclaimer at the bottom, no, it isn't at all about subjectivity which seems to only apply (by definition?) to conscious systems.
So existence as an objective property (realism) as opposed to the empirical definition: Existence by interaction, a relation of sorts.
It doesn't seem to address the problem at all. Model-dependent reality seems pretty much totally intuitive, a view that seemed obvious (to especially neurologists) long before Hawking gave it that particular name. It seems to describe an interface between our conscious perception of the world and the noumena that's 'out there', whatever its nature. This model tends to be quite pragmatic and works excellently until analyzed rationally. I'm after a model of what's 'out there' that stands up to rational analysis, and MDR seems more a model of the interface between the two.
The article speaks of idealism vs. realism, but it seems this is only an epistemological statement, not an ontological one, which is what I'm trying to address.
Quoting apokrisisThis sounds like a description of something contained by time. I see it more as a mathematical structure, whole, not developing. It is a bit like Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis (MUH), but without the ontology attached to it, the necessity of the fire breathing that Tegmark also finds necessary to include realism along with the hypothesis that wasn't in need of it.
I find this somewhat hard to understand, but it seems sensible enough. From it, one can derive that any observer can only 'unfold' in a portion of this foam that is stable enough for the emergence of observation.
I'd have said that existence is defined by (not evolved into) the ordered state. Ontology sort of works backwards, with future measurements defining the existence of past states.
Quoting L'éléphantThe question Hawking asked I find to be the wrong questions for the reasons I stated. I agree that science isn't going to provide answers since such answers don't impact empirical observations. What I see as mistakes are not scientific ones.
Quoting Fooloso4Can you demonstrate this? Mathematics seems to not require ontology to work. Most people don't say that the sum of three and five is eight only if the set of numbers has the property of existence, so the set of numbers does seem to give rise to that particular sum.
It's poetic as well.
[quote=Carl Sagan]If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.[/quote]
Maybe God just wants apple pie! :snicker:
Perhaps the telos of the universe isn't inferrable from the current stage it's in; could it be that there is evidence in re that, but we haven't found it yet?
Well, my point about was that Hawking is that he does not to assume "objective realism" but model-dependent realism. I don't know what you mean by "rational analysis" here; care to elaborate?
As far "out there" ontology, I think the best we can do rationally is determine derive what necesarily cannot be "out there", that is, cannot be real (e.g. impossible objects, impossible versions of the world, impossible worlds). I suppose, noAxiom, what's "out there" depends on what you/we mean by real. By all means, if my speculation (link) does not suffice, propose an alternative "model".
The lack of a satisfactory answer to this challenge is why I had to abandon such realism.[/quote]
So is your claim that there is no why, and so that leads you to some kind of idealism rather than the usual realist response, which is to shrug and say anthropically, it is what it is?
You need to join the dots and spell out your alternative. The OP has no clear argument that I can see.
If you balk at the term existing, then why isnt persisting an improvement?
To exist does require some kind of grand reason. It does seem like a big effort to create something and one can always wonder, why bother?
But to persist is simply to keep going because it cant really be helped. Persistence embodies its own reasonableness. It is already to be bothered enough.
Does the Sun exist or persist? Is it always having to give an answer as why it even bothers to continue or is that simply an inevitability given that it embodies a dissipative structure that must play out its unfolding pattern in time?
If you switch from the object-oriented ontology you criticise to a process or structuralist ontology, then you dont have to abandon realism quite so quickly. Structuralism also had the advantage that it sounds half-like idealism to a lot of folk anyway. :razz:
Both the human beings formulate rules and equations and the world they describe exist. The claim that the rules and equations are prior to and give rise to the world is a hypothesis. No set of rules and equations formulated by human beings has given rise to a world. Or do you think that if we keep at it long enough we will?
I have not read The Grand Design. It apparently goes through a history of models and I'm not sure if that history ends with a model that solves the issue brought up in said quote.
I pointed out what I thought were inconsistencies in realist statements such as the one I quoted. This isn't really about Hawking, but he stated it more clearly. The question makes assumptions which I identified, and it seems to not have a satisfactory answer. It seems irrational. But if the two assumptions (one of them a category error) are not made, the problem seems to go away, and the model resulting seems to lack this otherwise perplexing problem.
I see no point in that. I can make a square circle, but I see no enlightenment by pondering such things.
Given my empirical definition of existence, what's real, at least in our temporal structure, is what's measured, which means what's real is different for this than it is for that. That's just a definition, not a model.
My model is a mathematical structure, and no, I don't claim it 'is real' since there's no specification of 'real to X'. This is similar to Tegmark's MUH, but not with Tegmark's property realism, but more like Rovelli's relational realism.
Quoting apokrisisNo, my claim is that there isn't any existence property to apply the query 'why'. Hawking's question is like asking why time flows, when it should first ask if time flows.
That anything (a rock on Pluto say) defines its own list of what exists? I suppose that could be categorized as idealism of a sort, with minds and such playing no role at all.
I propose a mathematical structure, similar to MUH. I don't propose that said structure has the property of existing since it seems to empirically not differ from the same structure not having that property. That's my alternative.
The point of the OP was not to promote that particular model, but rather to argue that having the property of existence, or lacking it, has no empirical distinction. It is thus inappropriate to assume it, especially when it brings up contradictions.
Persisting seems to imply an object contained by time. I don't know how to apply the term to a different category.
Galaxies exist to me, and they do it without a grand reason to do so. I know of no entity which expended a big effort to create them. They're actually pretty hard to prevent given the conditions we measure.
Meaningless question as asked. It exists to me but it doesn't exist to say the (arbitrary) galaxy IOK-1 in the state that we see it. The sun (now) measures IOK-1 (then), but IOK-1 (then) doesn't measure the sun (at all). Most existing objects persist for a while.
The question was never why it bothers to continue (persist), but why it bothers to be in the first place. With any realist position, the reality of whatever one suggests to be real is never satisfactorily explained. Why is this 'thing' real and not something else, everything else (cop-out since the property becomes indistinguishable from anything), or nothing? If the property is has no distinguishing characteristics, it is superfluous, and I'm doing away with it, thus solving the problem.
A dissipative structure (especially a deterministic one) defines all its future states. That it actually plays out these states (structure contained by time) or not has no effect on those states. So me making this post is part of the dissipative structure regardless of the ontology of that structure, and regardless of some fire-breathing actually going to the trouble of playing it out. Hence the fire breathing is unnecessary, so the question must first ask if there is fire breathing, and not why there is fire breathing.
I'll take a look at structuralism. I've actually been looking and have failed to put a name to what I'm trying to convey. Surely somebody else suggests such a thing.
Quoting Fooloso4Per disclaimer in OP, I am talking about neither epistemology nor anthropocentric anything. I'm talking about the nature of the universe itself, proscriptive mathematics, not the descriptive mathematics that humans use in their modelling.
Perhaps I have misunderstood your sentence, which I admittedly truncated and thus took out of context, but I actually couldn't parse the sentence (context) as a whole.
Yes, it is. But it's not a claim that humans are prior to those equations.
Okay, so I will respond as you did to me. Can you demonstrate that this hypothesis is correct?
In any case, this is not what Hawking was talking about. Why reference him when you are addressing something different?
As to the problem of existence as a property, this is a good example of why Hawking held philosophy is such low regard.
Quoting Fooloso4I didn't claim that I could, not. That's why it is a hypothesis. You seemed to claim that it cannot be, which seems to be a positive claim, hence me asking for an argument demonstrating (without begging a different view) the impossibility of the hypothesis.
I did reword the hypothesis a little from what you posted. Your syntax made it sound like I was making a claim that the sentence itself was a statement of hypothesis, which, while true, wasn't my point at all.
He seems to exactly be addressing a problem that I also see. Certainly I don't see him suggesting the hypothesis that you summarized. But if I've misunderstood Hawking's use of language, I'm open to correction. Did he not make a category error in referencing the universe in the same was as one does an object? Did he also not presume some kind of realism in the asking of his question?
And yet this fairly famous quote is purely philosophy. I see philosophy from him on occasion, and quite a bit from other publicly vocal physicists such as Carroll and Tegmark.
I hold philosophy in quite high regard, but find I must know my physics in order to do so. For Hawking, the physics is the primary goal, and the philosophy isn't especially required for that.
I can't imagine such a distinction and that's why I think that existence in the most general sense should be understood as it is in mathematics: as logical consistency. An object exists iff it has a logically consistent definition (identity) in a universe of discourse. And I suggest that all possible (logically consistent) universes of discourse are reducible to the universe of pure sets, which is constituted by empty sets (non-composite objects) at the bottom and their collections and collections of their collections etc. After all, all concrete objects seem to be collections and all general objects (properties) seem to be reducible to less general objects and ultimately to concrete objects. That's why in mathematics all general objects are reducible to pure sets. Mathematics describes the structural/relational aspect of reality, which is reducible to set membership relation. Necessity seems to require that there also be something that stands in those relations, or "fills the structure", so to speak, and this something is the non-structured or qualitative aspect of reality, or qualities that seem to subsume other qualities via the set membership relation.
My claim was with regard to what Hawking said, which had to do with rules and equations formulated by physicists. With regard to your hypothesis, what evidence or arguments do you or others have to regard this as more than speculation?
Quoting noAxioms
Where does he claim anything like the idea that existence is a property? The universe exists and there are properties of the universe, but that does not mean that existence is a property of the universe.
Quoting noAxioms
A great deal of confusion arises when certain assumptions are made on the basis of terminology -
Hawking is a realist
Realists claim that existence is a property
Therefore Hawking claims that existence is a property of the universe
What does he say to indicate that he presumed that existence is a property? The idea that existence is a property makes no sense. Something must exist in order to have properties.
Quoting noAxioms
Do you mean this famous quote:
The following from "The Grand Design" makes clearer what his criticism is about:
This speaks directly to what is at issue.
All sensations are actually measurements:
1 Color: Wavelength/frequency
2. Sound: Ditto
3. Touch/pain: Pressure, Temperature
4. Taste: Chemical composition & concentration
5. Smell: Ditto
Food for thought: We experience numbers as sensations (re ideaesthesia)
No. It is a process manifesting temporality. You are just then projecting your object-oriented ontology on to that.
Time and space are emergent properties in a systems or process philosophy view. The mathematical description of time and space are thus talk of limiting states of being. Everything is a pattern of relations and that then defines limits in terms of the arc from its least developed to its most developed state.
How does your MUH style approach handle the evolution of probabilistic systems which require stuff like least action principles and central limit theorems? Temporality has to be real so a sum over histories can really happen as an evolutionary event.
Stability of the kind that allows talk of objects - mathematical, or otherwise - only emerges once free change has gone to some equilibrium limit where further change ceases to be actual change. Dynamical balance, in other words.
So it is confusing when you seem to back both Rovellis active relationalism and Tegmarks frozen Platonism. It doesn't add up.
Quoting noAxioms
Gobbledegook. The point was that the Sun is a classic example of something that exists as a dissipative structure. It is formed as the dynamical balance of its gravitational collapse and thermal expansion.
The only relevance of IOK-1 is that it is so far off that it doesn't materially count when it comes to this dynamical balance persisting for billions of years until the fusion fuel runs out. The Sun likewise needs every other significant mass to also be sufficiently far away.
It may share a lightcone with IOK-1 as a few stray ultracold photons may be absorbed into the Sun's dynamical equation. This may even be understood in retrocausal fashion as a real relation ruled by an actual least action sum. But the crucial contextual or relational fact is that the Sun is sufficiently remote from everything else to form its own local "objectness" in being a persistent ball of gas fusion.
It can't not be related to everything all the way out to the cosmic event horizon and so share the same space and time. But what matters is that this cosmic context is in general a statistically empty heat sink in a flat gravitational balance so far as the Sun is concerned. No forces act on it in a way that makes a damn difference to it being a self-organising ball of fusion.
Quoting noAxioms
Evolutionary arguments are realist. Their mathematical logic is also undeniable. In any ensemble of possibilities, there will be interactions. A collective statistical state will evolve as a consequence. Global order will arise out of chaos just because every interaction becomes some degree of limitation on every other. Complete freedom always averages itself to some collective persistent state just because anything else would be logically impossible.
So a relational view of ontology just gives you a global selection principle for nothing. If something is real, and another is not, you know that some global macrostate favoured the one outcome and suppressed the other in a blind statistical fashion.
And if you believe in quantum retrocausality, it gets even better. The Wheeler-De Witt universal wavefunction could even pluck its own necessary initial conditions out of its past. The dissipative structure of the future cooling~expanding heat sink Cosmos could act as the constraint selecting for that kind of Big Bang beginning. The ends did justify the means.
Quoting noAxioms
Well if you smuggle in the qualification of "determinism" then sure, you recover an ontology of that kind.
But I thought I was explicit. My view follows Peirce in regarding indeterminism (or logical vagueness) as fundamental. Determinism is what evolves in the systems approach. You have the emergence of global constraints that shape local freedoms. You have a fixity of cosmic law and some persistent grain of local action. You get the Universe as we actually find it a limit-based story of global symmetries and their local invariances.
Quoting noAxioms
I have to say that you seem to be trying to fuse two polar opposite ontologies. One is based on static existence it just moves its objects from the real world to some Platonic realm. The other is based on cosmic darwinism and self-organising emergence. Stability is merely a state of well-regulated change. Existence is a process of achieving a long-run dynamical balance.
You don't seem to grasp either Tegmark's or Rovelli's ideas of fundamental immanence, which like Spinoza's and Epicurus', entail that there is no "out there" reasoning about reality necessarily happens only within, or in relation to, reality (i.e. relations of relations, multiplicity of structures, "the totality of facts, not things" (TLP), etc), such that reasoning is just another relation entangled with relations and encompassed by relations and that "the view from nowhere" or ontological exteriority, is an illusion of "pure reason". This is why I think 'kataphatic ontology' fails (as I pointed out previously in the link ) from attempting to say what cannot be said because saying presupposes 'being at all'. As far as I can tell, noAxiom, your position conflates platonism (essential forms) & positivism (empirical facts) in way that seems "irrational".
Also, I think you're looking for a "model" in the wrong place; at most, philosophy, proposes interpretations, criteria, methods, sometimes paradigms, (via gedankenexperiments) for evaluating and remaking models" but, in my understanding, metaphysics alone cannot deduce a defeasible, explanatory model of nature or reality as such.
Of course the nature of the mathematical quantum structure has been left entirely unspecified. If one models Bohmian mechanics, existence isn't relative at all, and the entire universe is defined. There's no collapse. If the structure follows say MWI, it becomes more empirical/relational like I describe.
Can you give an example of this?
Quoting Fooloso4That it solves the reality problem of explaining the reality of whatever one suggests is real. It solves it by not suggesting it, or even giving meaning to such a property.'
When he suggests that fire needs to be breathed into it, making it real, a property since no relation is specified or implied. Tegmark uses the exact same phrase with the same meaning.
There you go. That's an objective statement (ignoring the category error). This universe exists. Some other universe perhaps doesn't. What's the difference except for this one property of existence? Is there a set of things that exists and another disjoint set of things that don't? How does that meaningfully distinguish one from the other?
Alternative, except for him not being explicit about it? What else does anybody mean when they suggest something is real, without implication of a relation? What does he mean about breathing-fire if not the setting of this property?
A unicorn has the property of having a horn on its head. So I disagree with this assertion. The property does seem to be inherited, so only a real unicorn can have a real horn on its head, but I'm not claiming the unreal unicorn has a real horn on its head. On the side, you're not real to the unicorn, but that's using my definition, not the property one.
No, I mean the quote in the OP. This one is known as well, and I agree with it, which is why I don't bother much with philosophers that did their work over a century ago before relativity and QM. I'm actually trying to contribute to this effort of keeping up.
Not sure what he considers an anti-realist to be here, or if I'm on that side.
Quoting apokrisisWhat's an example of a process that doesn't manifest temporally?
Seems ok.
Perhaps by not being one of the probabilistic ones. I agree that dice-rolling seems to require a form of reality.
I thank you for this. Food for thought, which is what I'm after here. I suspect I'll be going over the replies more slowly after the incoming rate dies off. Much of your terminology requires research on my part.
The frozen Platonism is precisely what makes me reject the view. The mathematical part makes sense, but without the ontology, or only with the relational ontology.
It exists to us as such a thing, yes. Yes, it is a dissipative structure, but it is a counterfactual statement to say it exists to the IOK-1 that we see. This is of course a QM dependent suggestion, but I'm typically going with one of the local ones. Under say Bohmian mechanics again, yes the sun exists as a part of the entire universe (relative only to that), and isn't dependent on a relation with a system within it. But Bohmian mechanics embraces counterfactual definiteness.
As mentioned above, this is part of keeping up with modern developments in science.
The IOK-1 that we see is so far in the past that our sun is nonexistent (not even close to being in its past light cone). If somebody there got into a really fast ship and followed a neutrino from there to this location in space, the probability of finding our sun here is nil. BTW, I chose IOK-1 because its name was short and it was reasonably far off.
It doesn't. Our sun exists nowhere in the past light cone of the IOK-1 state that we see.
You don't seem to understand what I'm trying to convey at all. You describe an objective division, not a relational one.
Agree. It does indeed get fun once you put retrocausality into it. I have no hard evidence that this isn't the case, but I'd have a struggle to fit it into my view, which admittedly works better with deterministic mathematics.
But I thought I was explicit. My view follows Peirce in regarding indeterminism (or logical vagueness) as fundamental. Determinism is what evolves in the systems approach. You have the emergence of global constraints that shape local freedoms. You have a fixity of cosmic law and some persistent grain of local action. You get the Universe as we actually find it a limit-based story of global symmetries and their local invariances.
Not sure how you got that out of it.
Quoting 180 ProofThat was a mouthful. I probably indeed don't grasp it, so at least more food for thought before I comment intelligently.
I thought I was trying to avoid Platonism.
That admittedly sounds like what I'm trying to do. I even have example mathematical structures that are far simpler (finite), but have some similar traits like being temporal, 'wave function' collapse and the relational existence that comes with it.
In the most general definition of existence, which is equivalent to logical consistency in any (logically consistent) universe of discourse, it is not required that an object have causal relations to other objects or that an object even exist in a spacetime at all. Spacetime with causal relations is a specific universe of discourse, a part of a larger reality. And since as I said all universes of discourse are reducible to pure sets, a spacetime is reducible to pure sets too, actually since spacetime is a concrete (rather than a general) object, it is a pure set. Space is defined as a special kind of set in point-set topology and time is defined as a special kind of space in theory of relativity, so the whole spacetime is a space, which is a set. Causal relations between parts of a spacetime are a special kind of relations between sets in a spacetime (events), where certain events are logically entailed in prior events and spatiotemporal regularities we call laws of physics, in the context of the arrow of time, which is the increasing entropy (disorder) of spatial structures along the time dimension.
Quoting noAxioms
By concrete objects I mean objects that are not properties of any objects. For example, the apple that is sitting on my desk right now is not a property of anything, so it is a concrete object. But it has the property of redness, which is a general object that is instantiated in concrete red objects. And redness has the property of color, which is another general object that is even more general than redness because it is instantiated in specific colors such as redness, and ultimately in concrete objects that have those specific colors. But redness, color and other properties (general objects) are not collections, because collections of what would they be? Properties are said to have instances (instantiations, examples) instead of parts; properties are kind of diffused in their instances, thus establishing certain kinds of similarity between the instances. The most general property seems to be existence, whose instances are all existing objects, including existence itself.
Precisely. There couldnt be in a sense except that - like the Heat Death de Sitter state - it might mark the effective end of measurable change or difference and so time that has come to a halt.
Quoting noAxioms
But BM is nonlocal. Any QM interpretation must now incorporate Nonlocality or contextuality of some form.
I would argue that what QM tells us is that counterfactual definiteness is only available in the limit rather than being a basic property of reality. As in decoherence, it emerges with thermal scale. You can get arbitrarily close to the binary yes or no of the classical view of material events, but never achieve actual counterfactuality. As Zeilinger argues, when you get down to commutative variables like position and momentum, you just cant ask both questions of nature in the same act of measurement.
So generally now, the contextuality that is the nonlocal wholeness is accepted, which makes locality an emergent property. There is no actual wavefunction collapse. But with thermal decoherence, you effectively constrain the indeterminism to a point that is functionally determinate. This effective threshold is down around the nanoscale of quasi classical physics.
Quoting noAxioms
Im not following. I thought your argument was about us being in its future light cone, hence retrocausality. IOK-1 emits a photon. It eventually strikes an instrument on Earth. A quantum eraser set-up could have become part of the story at any point along its trajectory. Therefore spooky action at a temporal distance of some kind. The future lightcone has to support these kinds of contextual connections. You get a proper sum over histories story and so the local view of time is only the emergent or effective one. The one history remembers because It represented the least action path.
Quoting noAxioms
Emily Adlam is doing nice work on contextuality and retrocausality - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.12934.pdf
Quoting litewaveOf course. My example with the primes illustrates that, and doesnt use my measures definition. The measurement thing seems to only work for something like our physics: temporal with locality, and hence it only works for local interpretations at that, as Apo points out below.
Some of the set theory stuff is over my head.
But of course thats the exact opposite of what Im trying to convey: the meaninglessness of existence as a property.
Quoting apokrisisYes, so some of my definitions (existence based on measurement) dont work under something like BM.
Is contextuality another word for locality? Because there are interpretations that incorporate neither.
Youre saying that classical physics approaches counterfactuality, just as it approaches locality. But QM doesnt actually say whether one, the other, or neither is a basic property.
It is in the suns past light cone, so the suns measurement of it causes its existence relative to the sun. Thats the retrocausality for ontology, given the measurement definition.
The sun is only sort of in the future light cone of IOK-1. It (the system in the state we see) cant measure our sun, and our sun is only a low-probability outcome, assuming non-deterministic empirical physics.
An example of the distinction, Everetts interpretation is completely deterministic, but not empirically deterministic since there is no way to predict what youll have measured in tomorrows observation.
BM on the other hand is deterministic in both ways, and in that interpretation, the sun exists relative at best to the universe, and the relation to IOK-1s light cones is irrelevant.
From IOK1s point of view, thats a counterfactual statement. Its not meaningful in a local interpretation.
BM has that kind of retrocausality as well. Local interpretations dont, so theres no erasing or spooky action in them.
But QM sets it all up. It says there are two questions that could be asked that would fully dichotomise your coordinate system your basis of measurement. The catch is on the finest scale of resolution you can't ask them both at the same time. The issue of commutative order kicks in.
So QM stands for the division of reality into its complementary extremes the standard move of metaphysical logic since Anaximander and even before. You have position and momentum as your two crucial measurements that define "something actually happening in the spacetime vacuum".
Or in a less clearly defined fashion as time remains outside the current quantum formalism you have the complementarity of time and energy as the coordinate system for measuring quantum action. Another way of looking at "something actually happening in the spacetime vacuum", that then fuzzes out on the fine grain view due to Heisenberg uncertainty.
So QM sets up the bivalent metric that is needed to measure a hierarchically organised cosmos one which is defined in terms of the classical local~global scale distinction.
Note how position speaks to the local invariance that derives from spin one arm of Noether's/Newton's conservation of angular momentum principle. And momentum speaks to the other arm of translational coordinate invariance the matching global view when it comes to measuring some classical difference that ain't in fact a difference, being simply a first derivative inertial freedom, and thus a ground zero as your measurement basis ... in a world that is now explicitly dynamical as rotation and translation are its ground states.
And note how QM sets even this up as the quantum vacuum is never empty, just has some dynamical balance as its ground state. Time remaining outside the formalism is how the world starts already energetically closed ... making QFT a little semi-classical and in need of QG to unite it with the fundamentally open perspective of GR. Another more basic level of cosmic coordinate defining.
Anyway, side-tracked as usual. QM poses its dichotomous question with its commutative order catch. Classical mechanics the notion of a quantum collapse then delivers some counterfactually definite measurement.
This is easy to do, due to thermal decoherence, when you stand right in the middle of the local~global divide in terms of measurement scale. Newtonian mechanics is what you see in a low temperature and inertially constrained reference frame. You can measure position and momentum in a way that seem to give you concrete initial conditions and so a deterministic trajectory for every event ... after the "retrocausal" principle of least action has been built into your Newtonianism as Lagrangian mechanics.
But as you head down to the Planck scale, it all gets too small, hot and fuzzy. Your classical coordinate system falls apart.
Well at least to a degree as you can answer one question at a time, if not two. That would be the advantage of QM not actually including time as another moving part of its story, just parking it on the semi-classical sidelines as an informal time~energy kluge that is also quite useful over all scales where time does seem to have a linear lightcone flow where the general thermal arrow prevails and the fine-scale retrocausal corrections don't cause enough minor temporal eddies to matter.
Quoting noAxioms
Yep. There is an asymmetry in the scale terms I just described. Time is the great big flowing river with its irreversible thermal history. The fact that is has all these tiny retrocausal eddies is something that gets washed away in the general big picture view. It is only once you get down to wanting to measure the most local grain of events as in some set-up like the quantum eraser that you can measure this other face of time.
Each individual act of thermalisation is its own bit of history. It might take billions of years for a distant galaxy to complete the photonic interaction that allows it to cool down at its end and the sun to heat up by the same amount at this end. Almost all of the radiation by an IOK-1 would be absorbed by some far more local particle. Probably interstellar dust not even light years away.
So really long-distance retrocausality would be matchingly rare as well. The time it took for an 1OK-1 photon to reach us would have impact on the overall statistical flow of the cosmic thermal arrow.
And even then, the arriving photon would look red-shifted by its long journey. We would see that QM had balanced its accounts. The metric expansion of space is included in the equation. That is why radiation gives you extra bang for your thermalising buck. The hot photon is a very cold photon by the time it has retrocausally connected two very distance locales in spacetime and so dissipated some quanta of energy in a decoherently definite, quasi-classical, fashion.
Quoting noAxioms
Why offer BM and MWI as your orienting dichotomy of interpretations? Both are really old hat sounding these days.
I say it is better to treat collapse and collapseless ontologies as simply mapping out the limits of the real story the one where there may be no actual true collapse, but then indeed an effective collapse due to thermal decoherence and a relational understanding of QG.
Reality is always contextual and so "collapse" becomes a matter of degree determined by the scale of observation.
On the finest grain, no collapse can be found. You just have the two questions you would have to answer to give you your bearings in a classically-imagined cosmos.
On larger scales ones where the spacetime metric is larger and cooler, where lightcones have the time and space to have their equilbrating effect on questions about location and momentum then a sharp sense of classical reality emerges from the quantum vagueness and uncertainty.
Time appears to flow like a constant c-rate thermal arrow. Space appears to remain as gravitationally flat and thermally even as it ever was at least on the scale of galactic structure where it all should settle down to a conformal or scalefree metric.
I was going to ask, have you checked out Penrose's twistor model which is an attempt to map everything to exactly this kind of conformal metric a lightcone view of spacetime?
Quoting noAxioms
Another little point here. The fact that the photon was absorbed by a detector at one particular point in all the points that it could have hit on the same lightcone is where you find the counterfactuality in the local view.
From IOK-1's point of view, does it give a stuff where its emitted photon lands? It sprayed the wavefunction in every possible direction. There was some probability of it going off in the precisely opposite direction. And even hitting the general vicinity of the experimenter's lab still leaves a lot of scope for narrowing things down.
So the degree of counterfactuality is only maximised collapsed to its limit in the sense that the photon landed "here", and not any other "there", on the holographic boundary that is the surface of your lightcone that defines the particle's "past".
Quoting noAxioms
BM is explicitly nonlocal. The problem is that it isn't relativistic without fudging the Born rule. So it has fatal shortcomings.
This is why I lean towards interpretations that are "kind of nonlocal" in a way that is complementary to the way they are "kind of local". That is, dichotomistic interpretations where each aspect emerges as the limit of its "other". So causal sets and other emergent spacetime models like that.
Adlam speaks of the new "all at once" interpretation where accepting nonlocality in both time and space going further than BM for instance allows you then to recover your local view in terms of the resulting sum over possibilities.
The principle of least action finally becomes an element of reality, not some spooky teleogy that has to be invoked to make the results come out right in the measurable world.
Meaningless because everything has it? I would say it's just a trivial fact. The more general a property is, the more objects have it. So it seems trivial that the most general property is had by all objects.
QM theory says nothing of the sort. BM maybe does. A statement concerning "something actually happening in the spacetime vacuum" is a counterfactual, a principle which QM cannot demonstrate.
1) This assumes nonlocality. There is no retrocausality under a local interpretation.
2) I had to go very big picture with the IOK-1 thing because you asked if the sun existed, and I had to reach pretty far to a system relative to which the sun is not only not measured, but isnt even a very probable future outcome.
Im not. I was illustrating what I meant by the nonstandard term empirical determinism.
The one I describe can be described either way. Dropping to 3rd person, Noax at t1 (Noax1) has a cat in superposition of states in a box. Noax2 observes at a live cat. Did the wave function collapse? Depends if you consider Noax1 to be the same entity (a persistent one) as Noax2. If so, the wave function collapses when Noax opens the box. If not, theres no collapse, only two wave functions relative to different system states (beables if you want to know an appropriate term for them).
Another thing to do then. Thx.
Most of them (say photons emitted more than a millisecond ago) dont land at all, and even that is a counterfactual statement. The ones that dont land dont really exist (have a particular trajectory say) in a local view.
Per my disclaimer, this has nothing to do with experimenters and labs, which are just there for our purposes. Im just saying that your wording makes it sound like collapse (if the universe works by some collapse interpretation) doesnt only occur in labs or when humans are involved. If the wave function is merely epistemological, then I suppose humans are very much involved, but I said up front that this isnt about epistemology.
I wasnt aware of this. Can you expand or provide a link about this issue?
Quoting litewaveMeaningless because theres no distinction between everything having it and nothing having it. As the most general property, it seems entirely superfluous since I dont know how the less general properties would be any different for the lack of this most general property.
And Ive referred to it as just a trivial assumption. Nobody seems to be able to defend it without begging it.
In your terminology, I see existence as a relation of member of some universe of discourse. But at the most general level, such a definition reduces to the meaningless everything is a member of the set of everything from which one cannot in any way deduce if that set has any members or not.
So the property of logical consistency is "superfluous"?
Quoting noAxioms
Sorry, I still don't get your objections to the quote from Hawking. And I mean by this, that you sound overzealous in laying down your reasons. As good as they are, they overextend what Hawking was saying. If I try to stretch the Hawking quote, I would say that Hawking had stripped what he was saying of all that assumptions such as universe being treated as objects. Hawking did not give any opening to warrant this sort of objections to his statement.
So, bottom line, you make a good point, but misplaced.
My only opinion is that I've not likely measured a unicorn, but my 'measure' definition is definitely restricted to certain causal structures such as a local interpretation of our physics.
Quoting L'éléphantThat's actually probably true. I'm reacting to my interpretation of the words. But what else is meant by the "breathes fire", "makes a universe", "should be a universe", and "bother of existing"?
If my interpretation of those words is a bit overzealous, then what did Hawking actually mean by them?
What for instance, other than the ontological property itself, would distinguish two sets of rules and equations, one which exists, has fire breathed into it, and the other doesn't exist, no fire, etc. Suppose they're even the same empirical thing. Let's say one is described by MWI, and the other one by Bohmian mechanics. They're very different sets of equations, but both describe the same Earth with us in it. What would be the empirical difference between L'éléphant in the one universe vs L'éléphant in the other? What test could either L'éléphant perform that identified which one was the existing one?
Per litewave's definition, both are logically consistent, so they both exist equally, which is just a tautology.
The 'object' thing is not the core of my objection, just a side one. It is admittedly only relevant in a structure (such as our universe) that defines a coherent concept of objects, where the objects have some of the properties I listed.
The 2nd objection is the main one, since it applies to all the phrases I listed above
Well, everything exists in the way it is defined, of course. If a unicorn is consistently defined as a fairy tale creature then it exists as a fairy tale creature. But if a unicorn is defined as standing in front of my house right now then I would say it is not a logically consistent definition and therefore such a unicorn doesn't exist. The proof that such a definition of unicorn is inconsistent is simple: there is no unicorn standing in front of my house, so it would be inconsistent if a unicorn were standing where it is not.
Now you're changing the definition of 'exists' to the one I gave. My post said that a unicorn exists, per your definition of 'exists'. You seem to deny it only because you switch to an empirical definition in your logic: only things that you see can exist. A unicorn isn't itself logically inconsistent, it's just (fairly) inconsistent that it's in front of you and you nevertheless cannot sense it. A large mammal would probably be visible if it was right there in your presence.
So once again I'm reading your definition incorrectly. Maybe it's not an empirical thing, but a 'member of this world' thing, which is a very different definition than just being logically consistent. I agree that a unicorn here on our world is not consistent with our particular universe of discourse, but I didn't ask if it existed in our universe of discourse, I asked if it exists (the general property form, not the relation with our concrete world), and it being in our particular universe of discourse is not a requirement for its logical consistency.
If there is a logically consistent definition of unicorn in a particular universe of discourse then the unicorn exists (in that particular universe of discourse and thus also in reality as a whole). I just meant to point out that although it may seem that the definition of a unicorn existing on our planet is consistent, it is in fact not consistent, and so there is no unicorn on our planet. This is a perhaps somewhat surprising point about logical consistency: reality cannot be different than it is because then it would be what it is not and thus would be inconsistent.
Quoting litewaveEvery time you say 'exists', you qualify it with a relation to a UoD.
This isn't the property definition you gave. I asked if the unicorn exists, not if it exists in a particular realm. You seem to not disagree with this. You say the unicorn is consistent with its own particular UoD, so how then is the unicorn not logically consistent?
You also introduce 'reality as a whole' here, which, absent a different definition, I presume to mean 'all things that exist' (no specified relation), which means all that is logically consistent.
If by 'reality' you mean 'consistent with what you personally observe', then we're back to an epistemological version of my relational definition.
I never asked if it exists on our planet, but I did mention a common evolutionary ancestor which at least eliminates unicorns on distant star systems. Under say MWI, Earth with unicorns on it is as likely (probably more likely) than an Earth with humans on it. It's a possible world, and thus it exists (say in the UoD of all the evolved coherent states of the Earth's wavefunction 150M years ago) as much as this world does. There's nothing logically inconsistent about that.
Your demonstration of inconsistency assumes an empirical definition. You don't see them, so you say they don't exist here. Well, the unicorns don't see you, so by the same token, you don't exist to them by that definition.
There's the term 'reality' again. Is this a separate property than that of 'existence'? What possible evidence have you that unicorns (logically consistent ones) are not also a part of reality?
But 'logically consistent' means 'logically consistent with everything'. Everything must be logically consistent; there can be no inconsistency in reality.
Quoting noAxioms
It is, but only as a part of that UoD. It would not be consistent as a part of a different UoD in which no unicorns exist. Like a triangle is consistent as a member of the set of all triangles but inconsistent as a member of the set of all circles.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes.
Quoting noAxioms
I guess that's right although if you don't know all the details you can't be sure about the consistency.
Quoting noAxioms
Well, I took it for granted that it was included in the definition of 'unicorn' that if a unicorn was standing right now in front of my house I would see it. And so since I don't see it I conclude that there is indeed no unicorn standing in front of my house right now. And if there is no unicorn standing in front of my house right now, it would be logically inconsistent if a unicorn was standing in front of my house right now - because it would be standing where it is not standing.
You probably don't mean that, but then I cannot make any sense out of this new changed definition.
Likewise, you're not consistent with a different UoD in which no litewave exists.
I'm trying to drive this to a distinction. Some reason that you have the property of existence and the unicorn does not. So far all I have is that they're in different worlds.
So by your' 'with everything' definition just above, there are no triangles because they're not also circles. They're not logically consistent with everything.
Being sure about consistency is just an epistemological problem.
Right. So it's not in your personal UoD. By your original definition, your ability to see something has nothing to do with its property of existing. My definition did (sort of). I would never have used the word 'see'.
Right, but nobody asserted it was standing in front of your house right now. It's in its own UoD. It's logically consistent with that UoD. Therefore (until you changed the definition above), it exists.
I'm just trying to point out the implications of your definition.
I say it doesn't exist, but again, I'm using a different definition.
No, every object is logically consistent with every other object in every universe of discourse. Do you think that a flat space is inconsistent with a curved space? They are perfectly consistent with each other, each space is a particular object, a particular kind of set and both sets exist in the universe of sets. An inconsistency would arise if you tried to claim that a flat space is curved.
Quoting noAxioms
The UoD in which I exist is a particular set. Another UoD is a different set. Both sets exist in the universe of sets. No inconsistency. But it would be inconsistent to claim that I exist in a UoD in which I don't exist.
Quoting noAxioms
The unicorn is also logically consistent with all other universes of discourse but only as a part of a UoD in which it exists. It would be logically inconsistent if it existed in a UoD in which it doesn't exist, for example in front of my house.
To recap, you started out with the question of why anything would actually exist in a fashion that mathematics could now describe it. And also you seemed to want to clarify something about the role of time in all this.
My reply was that Hawkings question could be flipped by ontic structural realism. The cosmos exists as it does not because nothingness was impossible but because quantum "everythingness" was self-limiting. Nothing could prevent symmetry breaking and the expression of the least action principle as an act of cosmic Darwinism. Gauge invariance had to emerge locally, Lorentz invariance globally.
So that is the structuralist view. But structuralism still suffers from needing a model of the raw action - the initial everythingness - that can breath fire into the equations. There is still a "first cause" issue in some form. But the big step forward is that it is as little of a "material something" as could be imagined. It is just a quantum foam of possibility as yet to be structured by an emergent topological order.
So ontic structural realism, or the condensed matter view of a cosmos shaped by the principles of topological order, is the part of reality that is the most "mathematical" and thus what the maths of fundamental physics seems to be "all about". The maths is the natural way to capture the organising limits of nature its emergent gauge symmetry in particular.
But also we need a theory of the stuff the material cause that complements the formal cause that "breathes fire into the equations" in the sense of giving the symmetries something to limit. And this is where we need some kind of model of the quantum foam, or vague Apeiron, too.
Quoting noAxioms
On the problems with Bohmian mechanics, that Adlam reference is useful as a general overview given you seem to want to incorporate retrocausality or temporal nonlocality into whatever QM interpretation you wind up with.
But in general, BM doesn't relativise because where QFT path integral demands that particles take all possible paths, including the non-classical, BM's pilot waves just take classical trajectories.
Goldstein has tried to use backwards causality to fix this https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0105040.pdf
That mathematical models of the universe is just that -- no actual "reality" was harmed in the making of a model. No fire of life can be felt within a mathematical model. We cannot answer the normative questions such as "why is there a universe?"
MDR (model-dependent realism) is what Hawking is known for. Which makes him a hypocrite by saying philosophy is dead. (This is actually annoying to hear from a well-respected physicist). It tells me he did not understand Philosophy -- it becomes cumbersome to read through passages of philosophical concepts when you have a photographic memory of mathematical equations).
You can test this yourself by just using algebra or calculus, for example. The brain would have a hard time switching with ease between mathematical equation and an exposition of philosophical theory. The brain becomes impatient. You start to doubt whether philosophy is keeping pace with the developments happening in the "universe" -- developments which could be written in a neat bundle of axioms and theorems. ("mechanical" should be the monster we're after here). The slow, meticulous philosophical inquiry and scrutiny of concepts about our claims regarding reality doesn't look like a knight in shining armour. It is the sage, whose secrets are given to those who wait -- and if the wait is forever, so be it.
Little wonder that some of the best writers of philosophy are mathematicians who turned against the mechanical mind of a math purist. They wrote of the power of the lowly, much maligned empirical observations. They went to see the sage. Of course, they're heroes to me because admitting this would be tantamount to a child yelling "the emperor has no clothes!"
So, back to the basics -- because this is as close as we could get to the claim that we've touched "reality" out there.
Quoting apokrisisThe role of time has to do with my selection of an alternate definition of existence based on causality, something not defined the same way for non-temporal structures. Still, my definition only seems to work for local interpretations of our physics. The primary definition of existence is the sort spelled out in the OP with the prime number example. Theres a term for that sort of existence, but it escapes me for the moment.
This is already a relation since it seems only related to a structure following QM rules. Yes, theres an everythingness about it, but how to explain the quantum structure in the first place? That seems to be what Hawking is asking.
This sound like what Im attempting to resolve with this topic. It seems to be an issue with any form of realism.
Id call it an initial state. Relativity theory seems to have no problem with initial and final states, but a unified theory would probably be needed before we can actually assert that.
If that little material something needs fire breathed into it, then it matters not that its minimal. The problem is still there. I eliminate the problem at the start by not suggesting the need for it. But it acts against a strong bias and nobody else seems to be able to accept that.
I dont know what emergent gauge symmetry means, sorry.
I dont actually. Im a locality kind of guy, but Im aware of other interpretations that have these things.
Again, I dont know what that term means.
Pilot waves require a preferred ordering of events? I was unaware of that, but such a preferred ordering has never been disproven either, despite even my attempts to do so.
How do the BM people respond to this criticism? I wasnt even sure if they still clung to the pilot wave model since the physical wave tanks failed if baffles were put in.
Quoting L'éléphantBut Im not talking about a model, which is an epistemological tool. Im talking about mathematics itself, that our universe (and others) is, at the most fundamental level, a mathematical structure. Life can very much be felt within such a thing, and my addition to this premise is the lack of need of the fire to feel that. The mathematics is no different with or without the fire, so it isnt necessary.
Maybe, but in finding the question unanswerable, I suggest instead that it is the wrong question.
MDR (model-dependent realism) is what Hawking is known for. Which makes him a hypocrite by saying philosophy is dead.[/quote]Agree with the hypocrisy accusation. All the quotes Ive seen of him in this topic (and an entire book, despite it no doubt containing science) is philosophy.
Quoting litewaveFine. The unicorn is part of that other UoD, so at the objective level, it exists (per your definition, not mine) as much as do you since both are members of this universe of sets.
Is that acceptable? Youve seemed very resistant to the unicorn having the same ontology as you.
Both sets exist in the universe of sets. No inconsistency. But it would be inconsistent to claim that I exist in a UoD in which I don't exist.
Yes.
Minimising our notion of material cause by maximising our understanding of formal cause is still progress. It is answering the question of cosmic existence in causal terms.
So we can breathe fire into the equations by understanding them to be describing formal causal necessity. We can see why the symmetries of nature are not just some random choice but a mathematical necessity. Existence couldn't be otherwise.
And at the same time, the material cause which is what folk conventionally think of as the bit needing to be supplied as the animating fire is revealed to be the most accidental or incidental kind of cause. It has to be there as a cause in some minimal sense, but ends up being hardly anything at all.
This is the message of spontaneous symmetry breaking. The ball on the top of the dome has to roll off. The situation is so poised that absolutely any and every nudge will tip it. Therefore the actual nudge that tips the situation is as unspecial and "immaterial" as it gets. You couldn't really say it caused anything as such. One fluctuation would has been as good as any other. All you need is the impossibility of ruling out fluctuations.
And structuralism lets you argue that fluctuations can't be ruled out until in fact structure starts emerging to produce its suppressive constraints. A fluctuation ain't even a fluctuation except retrospectively to the context it then revealed.
Quoting noAxioms
As I said, folk like Goldstein agree it is an issue and hope to solve it. But what is the point of just catching up to QFT with an inherently clunky QM interpretation when the goal is already to find a way forward to a full QG theory?
It isn't answering the question at all. Do you at all understand what I'm getting at? Any cause (material, formal, whatever) is still only related to a created thing, and the universe cannot be such a thing. That's the category error I was talking about. You're treating a causal structure like a caused structure. This is intuitive, yes, but only because language treats it so. It's still wrong.
No, a material cause cannot do that. The material in question has to already exist, so the 'fire' is already there (unexplained). A material cause (or any cause) is something explaining a caused thing, which is a different category.
Again, wrong category, but great example. Yes, I say a ball on a dome must roll off on some random side at a random time with computable probability even. But the question asked by the topic is, does there need to be an existing ball on a dome for this to occur, or will just a ball on a dome suffice? None of your causal discussion seems to be relevant to that question.
I thought I was clearly arguing against a "first cause" position. Emergence and development are different from "acts of creation".
So I would say you don't follow what I've actually said. You don't yet get the subtlety of the structuralist or systems perspective.
Quoting noAxioms
You were meant to pay attention to the mathematical structure of that example, not the substantial being that is some literal ball on some literal dome.
Again, my argument is that we start by following Aristotle in dissecting substantial being into its formal and material causes. And what we find is that we wind up where we do in mathematical physics. We have a tale of Platonic-strength structural necessity the inevitability of the invariances due to symmetries coupled to the most nebulous sense of "materiality" possible. QFT winds up talking about excitations in fields due to inherent uncertainty or instability.
So the fields must fluctuate due to a fundamental indeterminacy. And that is all that is required by way of material cause to breath fire into the equations of the Standard Model.
But if you can't shake a more concrete conception of Nature from your imagination the one based on a metaphysics of "medium sized dry goods" then yes, this won't compute.
The causes of substantial being have to be dissected. Once that is done, formal cause gives the reason for why structure has to be what it is under the further finality supplied by a least action principle.
And then material cause is reduced until it is virtually equivalent to a nothing a quantum foam of possibility or Apeiron of random fluctuation.
Structure supplies the determination. Fluctuation supplies the indeterminacy. Chance encounters constraint and an evolutionary cosmic process is unleashed.
Simple. :grin:
I'm not asking how the world we see emerges from the quantum foam. I'm questioning the objective existence of the quantum foam or any other structure or system, temporal or not.
But the substantial being (your term, not mine, so maybe I'm using it wrong) of the ball and dome is what the topic is about, so you were very much meant to pay attention to that. The mathematics says the ball rolls off after a while, uncaused if you will. It actually takes infinite time to do so, but they had a mathematical model of one that doesn't take infinite time. I cannot find a reference on short notice. All besides the point. The point is that the 'substantial being of the ball and dome' (its objective existence) isn't relevant to what happens to the ball. The ball/dome system doesn't behave differently depending on its ontology.
It's kind of an anti-platonic view. Plato says abstract things exist (that the existence property is meaningful, and that such abstract things have it). I say the property is meaningless, and that a triangle not being a circle is not a function of its ontology.
Either I am massively misunderstanding most of your post, or you're wildly off topic.
Can you explain to me what you think the topic is about?
OK. So how would you objectively measure the quantum foam? In what sense does it exist as a measurable stuff?
If you properly follow that question, you can perhaps start to see how a substance ontology one that says "show me the fundamental substance, and then tell me why it exists" is just an inadequate way of framing the ontological issues.
You keep looking for the "stuff" that breathes fire into the equations. Hawking was too. Pretty much everyone frames its as the hunt for the fundamental substance, that then brings with it it's own "well, why that?" question.
So my position is based on trying to get around that whole frame of thought. I follow the line taken by Anaximander, Aristotle and Peirce in particular. And this then leads to the kind of structuralism which explains the success of the mathematical equations, coupled to the "material potential" of Peirce's logic of vagueness, Aristotle's prime matter, and Anaximander's apeiron.
Or, as here, Wheeler's quantum foam.
Quoting noAxioms
I was doing so in arguing for Aristotle's hylomorphic view of substantial being. I was pointing out that you are taking substance for granted in a way that Ancient Greek metaphysics already shows is unwarranted.
Have you studied hylomorphism? That seems to be the sticking point.
Quoting noAxioms
And have you studied the Timaeus closely enough to see that Plato also needed to breathe fire into his equations by positing a chora or receptacle to take the imprint of his forms?
Both Plato and Aristotle were wrestling with the same metaphysics when it came to an explanation of substantial being. Neither had the perfect answer. But they point the conversation in its right direction.
Quoting noAxioms
I agree that Hawking is scratching at the right itch. But say he - like you, and indeed most still make the mistake of thing of material cause in terms of actually formed stuff. Substantial being. Something that can be measured in some basic way, even if it is a bland stuff like some kind of clay.
Remember that what breathed fire into Newtonian mechanics was the idea of objects with mass. These bounced about in an empty space and time void.
But then mass became confined energy under relativity. Energy in turn became an entropy gradient, and even information. Physics has kept moving its understanding of the animating fire into a more and more structural definition.
And this ain't wrong. It is correct. But it then leaves us asking what we mean by the stuff that breathes fire into all the maths? What is it that is being informed by all the form?
This is where we have to stop and be ready to give up on thinking of material cause as something fundamental rather than as something itself emergent. Material cause is something that structural necessity itself makes manifest.
That's a whole new metaphysical ballgame. Or in fact, one as old as Anaximander, the first real metaphysician.
@noAxioms, when you say this.....
Quoting noAxioms
you are, in fact, exhibiting Hawking's MDR. That's what it means by model-dependent: you have in mind a universe that has a mathematical structure. And the question you should be asking yourself is -- how do I know this? How did I come to think this way? MDR posits that it is inescapable. We, by default, think in terms of a model.
Agree, which is why I point out in the OP that "tell me why it exists' is the wrong question. It presumes it exists. A better question is to first ask if it exists, or if its existence can be meaningful. 'No' seems a better answer to both questions, so the question of why vanishes.
But I'm not. I'm saying its a mistake to presume it. The 'God did it' answer doesn't work for the reason you give: "well, why that?".
Aristotle starts with primary matter. Well, why that? If you start with something, it is just a discussion of how it evolves from that start. Off topic.
Seems off-topic since it starts with the presumption of potential. Why is there that potential at all?
No, Ive not studied most of the things youre bringing up, but I am looking at each one enough to see if any of it is actually addressing my point. Either I have poor reading skills or none of it does. I dont have any formal philosophy background in the ancient works.
No, but this one actually seems to have a potential for being relevant. I cannot seem to find a good reference discussing it. The receptacle seems to be a thing with presumed existence, which would make it off-topic. I could not find a decent description of what chora is, distinct from that.
This seems to be a statement of what youre talking about, not the subject for which I opened this topic.
Again, not sure what you mean by substantial being, but the kind of being that Im talking about should not be measurable at all, hence it being meaningless.
All this seems to be about what keeps it going, and not at all about why it is in the first place.
I am apparently not conveying my point at all. Nobody seems to get it, even if to just disagree with it. Youre all discussing other things.
Forget our physics and materials and quantum foam and such. Start with the simple examples like the triangle and such where talk of cause and such doesnt come into the picture.
Quoting L'éléphantOf course I am, but despite my usage of this tool, the tool isnt what the topic is about.
As one possibility, yes. Hard to think of a different one. It being a mathematical structure is a MUH topic, and this topic is an ontological one.
I dont claim to know this at all. Im claiming a solution to the problem naively worded as: why is there something instead of nothing?. Im not claiming that things cannot be otherwise.
Right, but the topic isnt about how we think. The disclaimer in the OP says it isnt about epistemology.
Yes, I agree. The mistake is to assume the universe was created to raise human emotions.
lol. Where did this come from? Are you just thinking out loud to yourself? Who in this thread is talking about human emotions?
We were talking about the problem of substantial existence - ontology rather than epistemology. So this is off the point.
Quoting noAxioms
Pfft. My argument is that this is about modalities of existence. We can have potential existence or actual existence. We can have accidental existence or necessary existence. We can have vague existence or definite existence.
You can give up on "existence" if you like. But my argument is all about more careful definitions of its modality. And I've pointed you towards the long history of metaphysical discussion on that.
Quoting noAxioms
Where did you lay out a triangle argument? You mean why a triangle is not a circle? You mean triangles as eternal Platonic forms?
If you checked out the Timeaus you would see that triangles become a good example of how Plato tried to breath animating fire into his ideal forms.
And so we arrive at a Pythagorean triangle - divided in two as the primal form from which nature could be atomistically constructed. The "two triangle universe" that hinges on the orthogonality of the right angle and the minimal number of sides that could bound an object in such a Euclidean notion of space.
It is like the ancient world's version of string theory. :razz:
But the point is even Plato was wrestling with the issue that I take Hawking as pointing towards.
Yes you can reduce reality to geometric or symmetry principles. Talking about the necessities of form really does seem to capture most of what needs to be said in modelling the world. And that is what equations do.
But you still need a khôra to supply whatever then breaths the animating fire into the structural forms. That is the bit of the puzzle which really demands breaking out of the mould of concrete thought. The question about the material cause of being is where the hard work has to be done.
Peirce said we needed a new logical category. And Peirce after all pretty much invented modern logic, even if Frege got the credit for his simpler more reductionist version.
I presumed a physics definition of measurement, not an epistemic one, so my statement stands: Measurement is meaningful between two systems, and thus is a relation between them. There is no objective measurement, at least not in the sense of the physics of our universe.
I really hate to keep pointing you to my disclaimer in the OP, but here I'm doing it again.
A rock measures the temperature (physics definition), but doesn't know that it's cold out (epistemic definition). But it being cold out at a particular location is true in this world and not others, so it isn't an objective measurement.
This is closer to being on topic. I spent quite some time failing to find a decent article on modality of existence. The modality page on SEP is quite careful to use the term existence only in a relational sense, and seems to not discuss objective existence at all, which, if nothing else, seems to lend weight to what I'm saying. They're not committing the category error that I pointed out above.
So sure, I can see why a planet in our solar system cannot be square, but I cannot see why the quantum foam must be.
All depends on the definition of existence again. As a property, I don't see how anything has necessary existence. Given a 'member of' definition, sure, all those things are relevant. The SEP article only seemed to use the relational definition. Apo exists in this world, and not in others. Apo does not exist in the set of integers. Apo has potential existence in the quantum foam. All relations. The article seemed not to delve into 'Apo exists' at all, but it's a long thing and maybe I missed it.
You can give up on "existence" if you like. But my argument is all about more careful definitions of its modality. And I've pointed you towards the long history of metaphysical discussion on that.
Let's go with the question "does a triangle have three corners?". I'm talking about a geometric triangle, not a physical triangular shaped thing. We can confine it for now to Euclidean geometry if you like. If the answer is 'no' or 'maybe', then elaborate. If 'yes', then my point has been illustrated.
I reworded it as a positive question (corners) instead of the negative one (round) which just made it confusing. As for forms, I suppose yes. I had no specific triangle in mind except a typical one (no weird edge cases where one angle is 180° or something). As for it being Platonic, I said my position was sort of anti-platonic, so probably not. Eternal? Planar geometry doesn't require a triangle to be contained temporally, so it is eternal (timeless) by that definition.
But what if I don't see the necessity to attempt that? Said ideal forms are no less forms without fire breathed into them.
Not sure what part of it is relevant. Per the wiki page, Timeaus says "Timaeus suggests that since nothing "becomes or changes" without cause, then the cause of the universe must be a demiurge or a god, a figure Timaeus refers to as the father and maker of the universe." which says the universe must be a caused thing, the usual 'God explanation' which just shifts the problem to explaining the being of this God.
Plato seems to just record all this and doesn't contribute. Maybe he does. The god explanation doesn't solve the problem. Spell it out for me, because I'm probably not going to take seriously a work by somebody who sees teleology in the universe.
You seem to not be able to describe my point in your own words, and you seem to be steering me to works that address a different point.
Hence my reaching to simple examples like the triangle. Once we analyze that (a simple question above), one can apply the conclusion to something complex like ourselves.
And perhaps making the same mistakes, except I don't actually see Plato contributing to the dialog.
I don't need that since I'm not positing the necessity of this fire breathing. The form is enough.
Frankly I tire of these weak arguments. There is no problem measuring different states of the one system at different stages of its development.
The problem with vagueness becomes that its measurement is in fact defined by becoming unable to make a measurement. It marks the point where the determined tips into indeterminacy.
That is what I asked you to think about to get a clear idea of what vaguess logically means. It is the point where counterfactuality ceases, where the PNC no longer can obtain.
The quantum foam is that kind of stuff. Uncertainty maximised. And yet we still want to call it a something in that it is now a complete certain lack of certainty. We can still treat it as a modal category that gets us over the familiar difficulties when it comes to metaphysical-strength inquiry.
Quoting noAxioms
Youre pissing around with quibbles because you havent understood what Ive said.
My epistemology is founded on an ontology of relations. Structuralism is simply that. But I agree that seems to leave the problem of the relata. Something must always anchor the two ends of a relation it would seem.
That is why you need to take the next step to a triadic metaphysics that can give you the threeness of relata in relations. And a developmental triadic metaphysics at that. You want to have a general logic of how relata in relations could arise out of a foundation of logical vagueness.
I realise this is a difficult idea. But this is a philosophy site.
Quoting noAxioms
Does a polygon have three corners? Did you notice that one corner of the triangle is very slightly dented so we could argue it has four corners. Etc.
We are always working within an ontology where formal descriptions and material measurements go hand in hand.
The necessary form of a triangle is in its structural definition. The substantial existence of a triangle is dependent on that form being actually actualised. The potential to actualise particular forms is where the material principle comes in.
The query would be more interesting if you asked the general question of is there a minimal polygon. The triangle could then emerge as a development of an inquiry seeking its maximal simplicity. Its limit condition.
But you just want to talk in particulars and bypass the reality of universals. Even when you mean to speak about universals.
Platos Timaeus arrives at triangles as the basic form of actualised reality - the kind that lives in time and thus fixes an energy - by applying a least action principle. And modern particle physics does its own similar sum over histories in arriving at the gauge symmetries that explain the Standard Model.
Quoting noAxioms
If even Plato couldnt actually go that far with Platonism, why do you think there is no problem at all for you?
Quoting noAxioms
Is the Platonic dialogue an unfamiliar format to you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaeus_of_Locri
Quoting noAxioms
I would say you didnt have a thought clear enough to articulate. And no progress is being made on that score.
Measurement is seemingly undefined for our triangle, therefore measurement is probably outside the scope of this topic. I'm keeping the example simple and abstract in an effort to sidestep the biases associated with our own particular universe.
OK, in your posts I can see that you're trying to show how the Greeks explained the fire breathing. There's a point to what you've been pushing. I don't get it since I cannot follow what is being said, and when I do, it all looks like invocation of magic. Apologies for my lack of formal education in ancient philosophy.
I would appreciate a decent modern article on modality of existence (where existence is a property, not a member-of relation).
Probably so, but what you're saying is mostly addressing the wrong point.
I suspect such an anchor is unnecessary. 5 is less than 7 (right??). That's a relation, neither especially anchored. Maybe you cannot accept that without an asterisk.
Example please. So much clarity can be added with examples. Most of the ideas I've actually researched seem to not address my concern.
Not all polygons have as few as three corners. A dented triangle isn't a triangle. This initial reply isn't an answer.
This is the first mention of 'material principle' which seems to have religious connotations when I google it, but perhaps it implies that the actualized triangle needs to be made of something (like three line segments). Does it count if the line segments themselves are not further actualized into say a set of points? Is there a more fundamental material for geometric points? I mean, our triangle isn't even assigned a coordinate system.
Isn't that enough to give it 3 corners?
OK. I didn't specify an actualized triangle, since the point of this whole topic is that the triangle doesn't seem to need to be actualized in order to have 3 corners. The form is enough, although it will need to be a less general form if it's to be a right triangle or not.
That seems to be the wrong question though, similar to asking if 221 is prime.
This doesn't tell me if the triangle gets actualized in the process of this emergence. I don't see why it should any more than 221 gets actualized because it divides by 13.
Kind of the opposite. No particulars, and no reality of universals. Everything could be a universal, some more minimal than others, but none to the point of the actualization required for it to be designated a particular.
I'm probably not interested in Timaeus then since I'm not talking about an approximately triangular shaped object in our universe. It seems that Timaeus defines actual things as those that are in this universe, meaning only our universe is preferred. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but it's how you're framing it. It doesn't explain why our universe is actualized, and not say the universe of Euclidean geometry. It's using a relational definition, which is fine, but no fire breathing is needed for that. It seems to require a god to do the actualization.
I've not had the problem pointed out, so I see no problem.
Seems so. OK, It's a conversation between fictional characters taking different sides of a debate. Again, I've not taken any classes in ancient philosophy. Plato requires a god to do the magic parts. I'm hoping for something a little more modern than that.
Just stop. You know that my epistemology is semiotic and pragmatic. The subjectivity and informality of acts of measurement are what it is all about, I only used objective in the conventional sense so as not to add yet another level of confusion to this thread.
Quoting noAxioms
Will you ever clarify your point then?
In what sense does your triangle exist? Where in nature does the abstraction reside? Does a count of corners say everything that could be said about triangularity? How many different kinds of measurements distinguish triangles from one another yet are also differences that dont make a difference to you proclaiming you see a triangle in your mind or somewhere?
You seem to want to claim a triangle as a Platonic form, yet have no proper theory of what that means. How are you imagining triangularity in terms of its measured essentials, and thus able to disregard differences that you consider accidental, or only essential now to some subclass of triangles.
Even if you go full Platonic idealism, you will find the same logic of vagueness coming into view. You will just be taking a different route.
Naming distinctions that break symmetries is how it works. It is counterfactuality all the way down until finally, in the limit, it isnt. And we need a larger logic, a deeper sense of modality, to handle such a cut-off in our descriptions of nature.
Quoting noAxioms
Your simple notion of a triangle as a three corner object arises in the limit of the sum of all the differences in triangularity that dont make a difference.
So you adopt the position that the three corners dont have all have the same angle, they only have to add up to 180 degrees. But someone else might insist that only an equilateral triangle is a true triangle. Someone else might point out that even your 180 degrees is a suspect definition as there are also hyperbolic and hyperspheric triangles.
What you claim to be simple and obvious just isnt that at all. Your replies seem to say you are either confused or insensitive to that fact.
Quoting noAxioms
Fine. You can make a hierarchy of distinctions and claim it is counterfactuals all the way down. Everything rests on its stack of turtles.
But what you have forgotten is that every counterfactual step describes some act of measurement. It specifies a way to separate what is formally necessary from what is materially accidental.
So in moving from some emergent notion of completely abstract triangleness to every acceptably nameable grade of triangularity - from a topological definition to increasing constrained geometric ones - you keep squeezing out the accidental features. But where do you finally exhaust this process and find the bottom of this chain of measurement? You can show me the last concrete distinction.
Or do you instead simply subdivide your general notion of triangularity to the limit of what seems pragmatically useful and interesting to you, and then declare any further differencing as merely accidents and not necessities. Noise not signal. And as the next step, conveniently forget that it was these accidents that were necessary to the formal counterfactualising all the way down to your chosen limit of interest.
Well this is the Platonic issue. This is the problem that exists even in Platonia. The accidental must exist for the necessary to claim its existence. It is the same metaphysical argument by which we say that formal cause must be matched by material cause in a theory of substantial or actual being.
That is why we can reduce the notion of material cause to accidents that dont matter - as in a quantum foam of virtual excitations or fluctuations. The material principle can be both as little as imagined, yet still absolutely necessary to breath fire into those damn equations.
Quoting noAxioms
Listen to yourself. You admit your understanding is superficial. You demonstrate your understanding is superficial. Then you give yourself an excuse not to address that superficiality in your understanding.
If you want something more modern, read Peirce. But you are even less prepared than you realise.
I will be on the road for a couple weeks will little enough web access to make long replies. Theyll come less frequently than one a day. Got a wedding to go to and were taking the scenic route.
Quoting apokrisisIt is a polygon, thus it exists as a member of the set of polygons, among other things.
Its why I brought up the prime number thing in the OP. 221 is not prime because there exist factors (13 & 17) that divide it. The triangle exists in the same sense as that usage of the word.
Thats the point right there, as clear as I can make it. Your extra questions all seem to drive away from this point. Further details about a generic triangle are irrelevant to how many corners it has.
It's a triangle, not a triangle in nature. There's no nature in geometry, despite there being geometry in nature. Despite your choice of epistemic/semiotic philosophy, I happen to be talking about the triangle itself and not a mental abstraction of it. I use symbols and a mental abstraction to refer to it, but Im not talking about how we consider it. Im talking about the triangle itself. It is not very particular. Ive only specified that it is a triangle.
Of course not, but said count is all we need to answer the question asked.
Measurement doesnt seem to be part of geometry. It only seems applicable to applied geometry in a universe where measurement is meaningful. You seem very reluctant to concede that it has 3 corners, or 3 sides for that matter. Something measuring it would be a very complicated addition. Trying to keep it simple.
I dont know Platos terminology. From what Ive read, form seems to fit. So does universal, but thats probably different than form.
Dont follow this, probably because youre still talking about our abstraction, measuring, and not the triangle itself. A system of multiple triangles sharing a plane is no longer a polygon. Its a more complex thing, a collection of polygons say.
Not sure what that is, but idealism suggests to me that mind is fundamental, which is exactly the opposite of what Im trying to convey, per the disclaimer.
Then illustrate it with the triangle, and without introducing an observer/measurer.
That sounds pretty correct. The question only asked the number of corners. The point of the topic was about a denial of the assertion that only actual triangles have three corners, and having 3 corners is not a property of triangles that are not actual.
Im actually denying the hierarchy. I said I disagreed with Plato, and I think the hierarchy comes from him. How are you using the term counterfactuals? Being in denial of any meaningful objective actuality, mathematics (or maybe law of form) is fundamental and its turtles all the way up from there. Actuality wouldnt emerge somewhere along the way.
I dont see how measurement can be meaningful in geometry. Its only meaningful to something like us utilizing geometry.
What Im doing to my concept of the triangle is irrelevant. I dont think you can conceive of the triangle itself. Sure, the other features are essential to geometry, but theyre irrelevant to the trivial question asked.
It must be, but it also cannot be. There is no material cause accounted for, hence my proposal to leave out the requirement of actuality, resolving this contradiction.
Maybe Im still not getting what youre saying. I dont really understand what you mean by accidents. Youre incredibly thin on examples. I know about accidents in quantum fluctuations, but this already begs the actuality of a quantum structure in order to give rise to the actual being of say a mug. This is why I went with the triangle example, to bypass your biases about quantum and even temporal rules. They dont apply to geometry. Once you accept that, the same conclusions can be applied to our universe.
Thats right. Its why I opened this topic, to explore and learn. But I didnt do so to hear an ancient rationalization. I mentioned Plato only because he pondered the reality of things (like our triangle) that are not part of our universe. What I want in this topic is to know why my proposal is wrong, not why some different rationalization might work. But you seem to be stuck in one idea and seem incapable of actually considering a different one long enough to critique it on its own terms.
Youre the only one left still engaging.
So a triangle as something free of all possible ontological commitments?
That is itself another ontological commitment even if you believe you have safely placed yourself beyond ontological questions.
I mean I cant stop you picking such a position. There just aint nothing to engage on if that is the case.
You declare equations need no animating fire and thats it. We can all go home. Nothing to see here, folks.
I was going to leave it there but then thought worth dealing with this from the epistemological angle that speaks to the need for ontological commitments in anyone's view.
My epistemology is semiotic and pragmatist. Peircean. And so what I would point out is how "triangle" is a word that functions as a sign a symbol that anchors a modelling relation between mind and world.
If I say "triangle", you will be put in mind of some suitable way to act. You will come at the world equipped with a certain communal habit of interpretation.
Is this a triangle....
Is this a triangle....
Is this a triangle....
Is this a triangle....
So the point is that the word is a sign by which we navigate reality via some habit of interpretation. We have a working sense of what it would mean for nature to be triangular in form in a materially instantiated fashion.
The meaning of the word "triangle" is the sum of all the possible ways we could stretch and yet not break the sense of what is essential. And essential in the sense of being a particular kind of formal constraint imposed on material being.
So in language, a sign is what we use to coordinate our behaviour. We are a community of speakers who learn the same habits of interpretation and so standardise our behaviour in regards to the worlds in which we must exist.
Maths then takes speech to the next level in terms of semiotic abstraction. The signs become even simpler. A triangle can be represented as three connected points. You mention three corners. More exactly, it is three edges with three vertexes.
Yet still, the drawing of a triangle its icon is just a much a sign as the word "triangle". As a community of thinkers, it is meant to put us in mind of a certain standard way of imposing form on the material world. It coordinates our actions. The sum of what the mathematical symbol means is the sum of all the specific set of acts it makes possible in the sense of stretching and yet not breaking the "essential" meaning.
So this should make it clearer what I mean about breathing fire into equations. An equation is just some set of squiggles on a page. But as a habit of interpretance, we can read it to impose formal order on material disorder. We can share a mental attitude as to how to organise our environments.
What breathes fire is the fact that there are minds making use of some set of symbols to make change in the world. The triangle doesn't exist in its sign a word or a picture or an equation. It exists as a modelling relation between a self and its world.
The symbol is a bit of technology or mechanism to anchor the two sides of the relation. And a triangle then exists to the degree that it makes to act "triangularly" in the world.
So you seem to be saying that a sign like "triangle" just exists, floating free of any ontological ground. Semiotics says a triangle is a sign that constrains action in some habitual or lawful way.
Any action is potentially possible in a material sense. But a structure of constraint then acts to restrict it in a concrete fashion in the formal sense.
And it is this fact the embedding of the sign in a system of meaning that allows an equation to be animated. Engineers can really do something with an equation that "knows the mind of God", or however Hawking put it.
I'm not saying it doesn't exist (which would be an ontological commitment). I'm saying there's no distinction between the two objects differing only in this actualization property. Given that, the statement of 'no need for ontology' is an ontological statement, but maybe you should elaborate in what way you see it to be a commitment.
Exactly! It solves the problem of why anything is actualized in the first place, all without the need to invoke magic. And since there's nothing further to engage on (no contradictions result), the question of 'why there is something and not nothing' goes away. All that remains is relations. The moon exists to me. It doesn't exist to the triangle. But to suggest that either 'is' or 'is not' becomes meaningless as does the something/nothing conundrum.
Quoting apokrisisI think it does, but it becomes a relation then. I can measure this. A rock can equally measure it since I don't define measurement as a conscious act. As for the view of a conscious being, I can knowingly interact with X. I can abstract Y. So X and Y exist as those relations. A unicorn (not the abstraction) cannot be measured by you or the rock in your presence, but it can be measured by the rock in the unicorn's presence. So the unicorn exists to the latter rock and you don't. Most people don't think that far and only worry about what they can see in order to sort things into exists (moon) and not-exists (unicorn) The list never changes for them, so it's natural to assume it's a property, but it becomes a bias, preventing open-mindedness to an alternate view, that this division into exists/not-exists is all just relations, not actuality. The property view seems unable to answer how this property comes about without invoking magic.
That it is. No argument. But I'm not talking about the word, the symbol, or the abstraction. I can't interact with geometry without those things (words, concepts, symbols) either, but I can talk about the triangle itself just like I can talk about a proton despite never having seen one, my only interactions being through words, symbols, concepts and abstractions.
None of them are triangles of course. I like the pictures. Technically, not even the clean triangle draws with a straight edge is a triangle since it has lines of finite width and is composed of matter which doesn't even have an exact location. That nit aside, all of your pictures probably invoke the concept of triangularness in people. The rock is more triangular than the typical rock. The Wankel part has three corners but like the first three, still isn't a polygon. Neither physical object is planar. A triangle cannot be part of our world.
The 4th picture invokes three triangles and three more concave polygons. They're actually just collections of pixels that represent/approximate these polygons, which is why I use the word 'invokes'. As I said, we have no access to a geometric world and hence no physical access to one. But our physical approximate triangles are close enough that we can observe and use their properties. Triangles are essential to sturdy bridges for instance.
A question came up though. A circle is a closed curved line, all points being equidistant from the center. Contrast this with a disk which is a circle filled in and contains all points <= radius from center. I attempted that distinction with a line triangle typically depicted and could not find a separate term for the filled-in version such as the one in your 4th image. They're both just referred to as triangles.
No argument. I just wasn't talking about our nature world with my question. I was deliberately avoiding it in fact.
Which is why I qualified my description with more words than just the one. I was quite explicit about it being a triangle as defined by planar geometry and not a physical one. I don't deny that the concept of triangle is invoked by each of your pictures, but I wasn't talking about the concept. I was talking about the triangle, just like I talk about the integer itself and not the symbol ('scribble' as H-H would put it) or the mental abstraction that we use to represent/manipulate it.
I know you think in semiotics, but when pondering the fundamentals of the the universe, one must be able to step outside that philosophy unless you want to suggest that the semiotics are fundamental, which is a form of idealism. Sure, they're fundamental to our interactions with other things, but this isn't a topic about how we interact with things.
I think you finally answered my question.
This defines actuality in terms of minds and symbols, which is a form of idealism, and it doesn't explain the actuality of the fundamental minds. Per my disclaimer, I'm not looking for such anthropocentric views. I don't question what's real to me, I question what's real, and conclude the meaningless of that phrasing of the question.
No!
1) I'm not talking about a sign at all. Your philosophy seemingly bars your from discussing anything except the symbols, preventing discussion of the referent. Your inability to do this doesn't mean I have such an inability.
2) I don't find distinction between something existing and not existing (being actual or not being actual), so I find any statement of something existing to be meaningless.
So there is a world where geometry exist and another where physics exists?
There is no material access but there is a relation?
Quoting noAxioms
You mean you were talking about the mathematicians concept and not the physicalists concept?
Quoting noAxioms
Well Peirce called it objective idealism. And I like it because it is indeed epistemology become ontology. Pansemiosis would be the position that the Cosmos develops into being as a rational structure. The logic of structure itself causes the Universe to come to have a necessary existence.
Quoting noAxioms
It aint about talking. It is about acting in the world as a community of mind. It I say draw a triangle, I doubt I will find myself protesting, but youve drawn a circle. Or a canoe. Or anything else.
Quoting noAxioms
So you say. But that is an eliminative assertion which you betray every time you in practice sit down without looking backwards to check the chair is still there.
I don't know how the relation of '
access' might be meaningful between different mathematical structures. They're both mathematical structures, so they relate in that manner.
Talking about the mathematical triangle yes, but the concept no.
I don't disagree with this, but it doesn't explain the actuality of the rational thing causing the necessity of the rest of the universe.
First of all, the chair being there is a relation with me, not a property of the chair.
Secondly, I do very much indeed hold pragmatic beliefs, or at least the part of me that makes the decisions in my daily life. The thing is, that part isn't very rational. It simply has a rational advisor that is occasionally allowed to make suggestions, but the rational beliefs held by that advisor are for the most part ignored by the first part that presumes the chair has the property of existing.
What, valid in the sense that the model and the world both exist and are in an empirical relation?
So we are in the land of epistemology and not ontology? We are talking just about what we agree to be observable rather than what we might believe in terms of our ontic commitments?
We simply never were interested in what might breath fire into our equations? I really was wasting my time? :up:
Breathing fire is vastly overrated. Exploring the math can do that job. No need for unicorns.
Spoken like a mathematician but not a physicist or metaphysician?
True enough. I don't have a Professional Degree in metaphysics. But I respect those who do. :cool:
Always coming back to this, eh? But no, as I stated up front, I'm not talking about epistemology. Apparently telling you this 20 times is not enough.
This has nothing to do with sorting things into categories of observable or not.
I was interested in it, but all I saw was magic or begging. I admit I cannot understand the terminology behind which such thinking is hidden. So no, I'm not going to read large volumes of ancient literature only to find out it is presuming idealism of some kind, or begging existence in order to explain existence. Maybe they're not doing that, but every time I actually think I understand what is being asserted, that is what I see. I do see fire breathing, but only by presuming fire already in the that which does the breathing.
I do have that respect for the supposed professionals, but only where I don't see fallacies.