Why Monism?
"Why posit an ultimate ground? Is not what is sufficient? Is the world too imperfect for it to exist without it depending on something else? Does being ungrounded cause vertigo? A yawning abyss one is too fearful to approach?" Fooloso4
From the thread Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14220/inmost-core-and-ultimate-ground
Monism: the idea that only one supreme reality exists. Why posit monism?
Science
Science tends towards monism. There are unnumbered physical objects but they are all composed of about 92 naturally occurring elements, which at one time were thought to be composed of 3 elements (proton, neutron, electron) but are today believed to be based on the 17 entities of the Standard Model. Science is searching for a theory of everything which unites quantum mechanics and relativity. If found, a theory of everything might provide a monist theory of all physical objects.
Philosophy
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophys entry on Plotinus
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plotinus
A central axiom of that tradition was the connecting of explanation with reductionism or the derivation of the complex from the simple. That is, ultimate explanations of phenomena and of contingent entities can only rest in what itself requires no explanation. If what is actually sought is the explanation for something that is in one way or another complex, what grounds the explanation will be simple relative to the observed complexity. Thus, what grounds an explanation must be different from the sorts of things explained by it. According to this line of reasoning, explanantia that are themselves complex, perhaps in some way different from the sort of complexity of the explananda, will be in need of other types of explanation. In addition, a plethora of explanatory principles will themselves be in need of explanation. Taken to its logical conclusion, the explanatory path must finally lead to that which is unique and absolutely uncomplex.
From the thread Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14220/inmost-core-and-ultimate-ground
Monism: the idea that only one supreme reality exists. Why posit monism?
Science
Science tends towards monism. There are unnumbered physical objects but they are all composed of about 92 naturally occurring elements, which at one time were thought to be composed of 3 elements (proton, neutron, electron) but are today believed to be based on the 17 entities of the Standard Model. Science is searching for a theory of everything which unites quantum mechanics and relativity. If found, a theory of everything might provide a monist theory of all physical objects.
Philosophy
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophys entry on Plotinus
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plotinus
A central axiom of that tradition was the connecting of explanation with reductionism or the derivation of the complex from the simple. That is, ultimate explanations of phenomena and of contingent entities can only rest in what itself requires no explanation. If what is actually sought is the explanation for something that is in one way or another complex, what grounds the explanation will be simple relative to the observed complexity. Thus, what grounds an explanation must be different from the sorts of things explained by it. According to this line of reasoning, explanantia that are themselves complex, perhaps in some way different from the sort of complexity of the explananda, will be in need of other types of explanation. In addition, a plethora of explanatory principles will themselves be in need of explanation. Taken to its logical conclusion, the explanatory path must finally lead to that which is unique and absolutely uncomplex.
Comments (300)
The ultimate ground and what is grounded are two different things.
Quoting Art48
Science does not posit an ultimate ground or one supreme reality. The terms 'ultimate' and 'supreme' are question begging.
There's a big difference between "tends towards" and "posits".
You are attacking a straw man.
Science on the other hand looks for it in the indivisible, zooming in ever further.
They are quite literally opposites.
You posited an ultimate ground in the other thread before moving your response to me here. In defense of it you raised science and monism.
Because logically identities boil down to that. Lets say there were two realities. We can now group them together into the one supreme reality that exists. Monism per your definition does not exclude breaking that monad into parts, it simply observes that everything can eventually be grouped into a fundamental identity.
Is there any reason using that logic we cannot group all the universe's entities together and call the grouping the one supreme entity? I think of the supreme reality as the fundamental reality upon which all things are based. For instance, everything I see on my monitor is at root a manifestation of light.
That is exactly what I am stating. Identities are mental constructs that we as humans can create. There is no limit to what we can identify. As such, it a logical allowance to do so.
True, but we seem to be talking about two different things. Monism, as I understand it, requires the "supreme being" to be the ultimate ground and basis of all that exists, much as water is the basis of ice.
Its not a supreme being, but a supreme identity. We could call it the summation of all sub identities. Thus talking about a multiverse still boils down to the summation of all multiverses being the supreme universe.
Monism is essentially foundationalism. You're trying to find a foundation that has no prior identity, and it is not a sub identity of anything else. Ice = water = H20 = molecules = existence. Existence is the final identity that basically describes everything that all entities can simplify down to.
Because we are the one's who essentially create identities, creating an identity that is supreme is not only possible, but logically inevitable.
The abyss is the substance.
Yes.
Quoting bert1
Is this like the emptiness of Buddhism?
Not sure, that's @Wayfarer's department.
EDIT: An abyss is a word of a general relating background that less-abyssal things stand out from. That seems to fit the idea of substance.
In addition to the reasons you listed, there's the issue of communication between the two halves of a duality. How does one substance impact the other if they're separated? Another reason is from mysticism: rational thought seems to require a duality, but the same rational lines of thought point to a transcendent unity.
Also, there's something about elegance and simplicity to take into account. One substance or thing is better that two substances, which is better than three, and so on.
Sometimes we can't reduce things further down. But to remain at pluralism, I don't think tells you as much.
That's my intuition anyway.
Plus in the realm of aesthetics, if you're viewing two things, there must be a single background against which the two appear in the foreground. It's not a logical implication, but it's a kind of psychological force leaning toward consolidation.
Yep! Quite true, it's a tendency we have in our nature and psychological makeup that makes us seek these things, which is curious.
Why seek unification instead of being content with plurality? From a psychological perspective, it shouldn't matter much.
:fire: Yes Democritus-Epicurus-Lucretius' void. QFT physicists hypothesize a true vacuum. For Buddhists it's ?unyata and Hindus it's Brahman; for Daoists it's the nameless, eternal Dao and Spinozists conceive of it as natura naturans. My own (pandeistic) thinking has strong affinities with the metaphysical (not mathematical) concept of hyperchaos (re: Q. Meillassoux) that posits 'every manifestation of order is a contingent phase-state, so to speak, of absolute, or necessary, disorder' (i.e. speculative materialism).
I think it's because the two imply one another. Unity basically means: the opposite of plurality. And vice versa. It's an opposition that can't be pulled apart without a breakdown in meaning.
I guess that's one reason property dualism and neutral monism are attractive. They cover all the bases. :razz:
I agree that science, as a methodology, does not presuppose monism. However, the modern scientific project begins with an attempt to reduce the "truth" of all observations to a unitary form that will be describable using the mathematics of the day (mathematics that could deal with qualitative or categorical differences being largely a more recent invention). In modern terms, we could say this required the supposition that all intensive traits can be reduced to extrinsic ones, a supposition that has not been proven to date, let alone in the early modern period.
This reduction isn't equivalent to ontological monism, but at times it gets close. That said, you could also say it has supported the growth of dualism as well, because it results in people talking about how color, taste, etc. are some sort of distinct "mental" phenomena.
It's worth noting that the idea that everything is in fact "determined by" a "multitude of minute particles," pre-dates anything resembling science by centuries, showing up in ancient Egyptian thought and the earliest Greek thought. This is a type of monism, and it has been related closely enough to the sciences that the two can sometimes seem to blur together. The same can be said of "everything being describable in terms of mathematics." I think these two points are very different though.
The "fundamental bits," argument is so old, and has been so robust in the face of evidence that suggests its displacement that, as I've mentioned elsewhere on the forum, I think we have good reason to believe that it might be rooted in human biology. That is, the same arguments for doubting the "true" existence of color can be directed quite well against the corpuscular model. And in any event, this isn't something that is essential for the sciences, although it does seem essential to popular conceptions of science.
The idea that the world can be described by mathematics, that it can be rationally understood at all, does seem more essential to science. If the world isn't rational, or if we cannot understand this rationality, then what good is science (and why is it so pragmatically useful)? Acceptance of the validity of induction and some elements of mathematics/logic seem to be a prerequisite for science. This can be interpreted as an argument for monism if you accept the premise that whatever is rational has to essentially be a single type of thing.
The argument would be "there are not multiple types of rationality, multiple, discrete logical necessities, and thus the intelligible aspect of the world must be, at some level, a unified type. The unintelligible aspects of the world, if such things can coherently exist, don't enter into the question because how can one know the unknowable?" That does seem like it could qualify as monism.
Eugene Wigner gets at this indirectly in the opening of his famous paper "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences."
That's true. But I suppose you can also add eliminitavism and idealism too. They can argue that those views cover everything.
But it's a matter of emphasis on some aspect of the world, rather than substance, with the exception of eliminitavism.
The psychological factor you mention is susbtantive.
Again, the key in such discussions is to refrain from objectification or reification: there is no ultimate thing, substance, entity, or anything of the kind that can be conceptually described and grasped (something especially emphasized in Buddhism). That is the realisation that underlies the 'way of unknowing' that has analogies in all the contemplative traditions East and West. It is also why entering into it requires more than verbal analysis, it requires access to other planes of understanding that are innaccessible to philosophy and science (and not the popularised 'macmindfulness' of talk show hosts and wellness gurus, either.)
??nyat?, translated as 'emptiness', has often been depicted in Western culture as a 'monstrous void' or 'the complete absence of anything' but I'm sure that is also is a consequence of attempting to conceptually represent a realisation that is outside the framework of conventional discourse (one of translator Thomas Cleary's books on Chinese Buddhism is called 'Entry into the Inconceivable'.) But those kinds of insights are firewalled off from Western philosophy by being categorised along with religions, even though they are very different to the prophetic religion of the Biblical traditions. (I think they're descended more from shamanism.)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The original impetus behind the idea of the atom was to solve the problem of the relation between the One and the Many. Atomism proposed that all matter is composed of indestructible units, eternal and unchanging. These atoms are constantly in motion, colliding and combining to form larger structures such as molecules and compounds. By positing the existence of these fundamental particles, atomism provided a way to explain the diversity and complexity of the world while maintaining its unity and coherence. This was the foundation of the legendary prose-poem of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, which was re-discovered by the French philosophes of the Enlightenment. Regardless of whether it really does describe the ultimate facts of existence, it has obviously been an extraordinarily fruitful paradigm for the advancement of science. But as is well known, the idea of the atom itself has now been absorbed into the more ethereal concepts of fields and waves, besides which there is also quite a strong tendency towards an idealist metaphysics in modern physics due to the 'observer problem'.
//I should add that the pole of the dialectic in ancient Greek thought opposite to that of the atomists, was represented in the Parmenides and the teaching that nature is One, and that only the One is an object of proper knowledge, as the world of phenomena is constantly changing and passing away and so can only ever be the object of opinion.//
Statement 1: there is no ultimate thing, substance, entity that can be conceptually described and grasped
Statement 2: the ultimate thing, substance, entity cannot be conceptually described and grasped
Im thinking about the difference between the two statements. Statement 2 can be understood in an obvious way in that a) ultimate reality cannot be described because it is utterly other than anything with which we are acquainted, and b) qualia in general cannot be grasped conceptually. The Marys Room thought experiment illustrates b). So, statement 2 allows that ultimate reality may be experienced but the experience may transcend words (i.e., be ineffable). And statement 2 points out that merely thinking about an experience is not the same as having the experience. (Only a bat really knows what its like to be a bat.)
Statement 1, I think, can be understood much as above, but it is also open to a very different understanding that would rule out experience of ultimate reality, that would say ultimate reality IS NOT (it does not exist; it does not occupy a state above existence, per Pseudo-Dionysius), or say it possibly IS but is in no way accessible to a human being.
Comment?
Pseudo-Dionysius is much nearer in spirit to the Platonic tradition and one of the principal sources for Christian Platonism. There's an intriguing connection in the philosophy of the early medieval monk, John Scotus Eriugena, who translated Pseudo-Dionysius into Latin (much to the astonishment of his peers). Have a read of the SEP entry on him on the 'five modes of being and non-being'. My heuristic for this, is that premodern philosophy retains a sense of levels of reality, which has generally been abandoned by modern philosophy. When you read the ancient and medieval description of the divine intellect as 'beyond being', I take that to mean 'beyond the vicissitudes of coming-to-be and passing-away' - an expression that is found in both the Western and Buddhist sacred literature. This is related to the ancient [s]iconography[/s] cosmological philosophy of the Great Chain of Being, which has generally fallen out of favour since the scientific revolution, I think due to its association with Aristotelian and Ptolmaic cosmology. But I think it's within that general philosophical framework, incorporating the neoPlatonic principle of levels of being, that the idea of 'the One' is meaningful. I don't know if there's anything corresponding to that in today's scientific cosmology (hence why I mentioined Heinrich Pas' book on Monism above.)
I think you could plausibly trace the lineage of an argument of that kind from traditional philosophy (not saying I know how it would be done, but something along the lines of every discrete thing being derived from the One). The other issues you bring up - the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, and Galileo's dualism - are also very interesting topics in their own right.
Thanks for your informative response. I've seen "beyond being," i.e., beyond existence, taken to mean that the source and foundation of all existence must itself be, in some sense, independent of existence, beyond existence, vaguely similar to the idea that the messenger must be independent of the message.
However they all have overlap, and the overlap portends to the truth.
There's a crucial point behind this, which is the meaning of what exists and what is, are not necessarily synonymous, whereas it is usually assumed that they have the same meaning: to say 'something exists' and 'something is', is to say the same thing. That is made explicit in positivism generally, and logical positivism in particular, which says that only statements about matters of fact carry any meaning. But it is also characteristic of empiricism and naturalism: that what is real are natural phenomena, which can be known objectively - what is 'out there, somewhere', ascertained to exist, or inferred as existing based on observed phenomena. But 'what is real' holds a larger sense than that, because (among other things) it includes the observing subject. It also includes the ever-shifting network of dynamic causal connections that together comprise the unique attributes of this moment.
It is the intuitive insight into that totality which has been called 'the unitive vision'. In Western philosophy, it is associated with Plotinus:
[quote=Plotinus, Class Lecture Notes;http://faculty.salisbury.edu/~jdhatley/plotinus.htm]Plotinus's philosophy is difficult to elucidate, precisely because what it seeks to elucidate is a manner of thinking that precedes what one terms discursive thought. Discursive thought is the sort of thinking we do most often in a philosophical discussion or debate, when we seek to follow a series of premises and intermediate conclusions to a final conclusion. In such a thinking, our minds move from one point to the next, as if each point only can be true after we have known the truth of the point preceding it. The final point is true, only because we have already built up one by one a series of points preceding it logically that are also true. In the same way, the meaning of the sentence I am now speaking only builds itself up by the addition of each word, until coming to its conclusion it makes a certain sense built of the words from which it is constituted.
Because discursive thinking is within ordinary time, it is not capable of thinking all its points or saying all its words in the very same moment. But Plotinus wishes to speak of a thinking that is not discursive but intuitive, i.e. that it is knowing and what it is knowing are immediately evident to it. There is no gap then between thinking and what is thought--they come together in the same moment, which is no longer a moment among other consecutive moments, one following upon the other. Rather, the moment in which such a thinking takes place is immediately present and without difference from any other moment, i.e. its thought is no longer chronological but eternal. To even use names, words, to think about such a thinking is already to implicate oneself in a time of separated and consecutive moments (i.e. chronological) and to have already forgotten what it is one wishes to think, namely thinking and what is thought intuitively together. [/quote]
Plotinus' philosophy was enormously influential on the successive ages of philosophy, up until and including Hegel, although subsequently deprecated, at least in English-speaking philosophy. The point being, that something like this 'unitive vision' is required to make sense of philosophical monism, if it is not to be reduced to a kind of caricature which takes 'the one' to consist of a kind of agglomeration of everything that exists. It is within the context of that unitive understanding that the distinction between 'what is real' and 'what exists' is, at least, intelligible, and which provides a framework for the meaning of monism.
I agree, mostly, but have one question: if theres a truth about ethics, would that imply that moral values are objective, not subjective?
I accept Humes is-ought distinction which rules out objective moral values. But if we choose a goalhuman flourishing, for instancethen science provides the map of reality and we can use that map to determine optimum paths to the goal. The optimum paths imply moral values, i.e., the best way to behave to bring about human flourishing.
Ive also seen the distinction that exists applies to what exists in spacetime and subsists applies to our ideas and other abstract objects.
If we take is to apply to everything, then we have the idea of direct experience of isness. The Hindu sage Ramakrishna taught we can taste sugar (i.e., experience isness as something other than ourself) and we can be sugar (which I take to refer to unitive vision).
P.S. as you may know, the thought of Plotinus entered the West via the mistaken identification of the Dionysius the Areopagite (also called Pseudo-Dionysius) who wrote in the 5th or 6th century with an individual named Dionysius that St. Paul is said to have converted.
Morality is telling the truth. Because truth portends to knowledge, power, control, capacity to reveal the nature of things but most importantly, to use the truth to good/benevolent ends (ethics).
A well informed/educated person can take on more ethical responsibility because they know more of the truth.
For example one who discovers how to correct poor vision now is faced with the responsability of freely sharing their knowledge (of the truth) to aid those that cannot see. They may also decide not to share it and let the poor sighted stumble and fall. Or they may choose to share only part, just enough to empower themselves, to serve their own needs/purposes and gain an advantage.
That's objective/absolute moral because the fundamental truth exists (a singular thing that underlies all of reality) and is objective (unchanging/consistent at all times - it wouldn't be the whole truth if it wasn't) and absolute (fundamental). Thus telling it is also objective and essential/fundamental.
If we don't know what the truth is it we can't tell it. We can tell at most a "guesstimate" - a rough, flawed approximation of it, containing some lies, deceit or delusions. That is subjective morality as opposed to objective morality.
Absolute moral is at one end of the scale (knowing the truth and telling it). Absolute immorality is at the other (knowing the truth and telling none of it), and in the middle we have a mix of delusions - a lack of a full set of knowledge of the truth, or, subjective "partial truths" to varying degrees of truthfulness.
In this way objective moral and subjective moral both exist simultaneously. The difference is the degree of awareness. How much of the whole truth one knows, and thus how much responsibility one is willing to take on.
Science is excellent at exposing the truth in a consistent measurable way. Sadly it is not a means to expose the whole truth. Because art is true. Emotions are true. Imagination is true. Science doesn't deal with these. If someone is alone and cries. Nobody witnesses it. Only that person knows it was true that they cried. Science is to no avail here. Therefore it cannot expose the whole truth. So in pursuit of a whole truth, science is but a single tool, common sense, reasoning, logic, empathy and intuition are a other tools that can be used to approach the aspects of fundamental truth that science does not deal with.
For Materialists, the term "Universe" is the ultimate reality. But philosophers have long postulated that there may be more than meets the eye. And we "see" that More in imagination. In some contexts, I call it "Ideality" as a parallel to "Reality". Since that unreal something More cannot be empirically proven to exist, I suspect that some philosophers created the Ontological term Monism (one substance) to represent both the physical substance of Universe, and the metaphysical substance*1 of The Whole --- including whatever gods may be, and abstract/ideal principles, such as Logos.
So, "why posit monism"? Probably because Monism is a philosophical ideal : unattainable perfection, by contrast with the complexities & contradictions of Pluralistic Dualism. Reductively, if you trace the evolution of everything real & knowable (the Universe : single circle : all encompassing) back in spacetime, you eventually arrive a singular point, at which Time & Space disappear into the immeasurable : Infinity. And that innumerable number has always seemed both scary & significant for philosophers, along with the all-encompassing notion of Unity : the bookends of reasoning : the Beginning and the End. E Pluribus Unum. Why stop short of perfection; even if it's only an Ideal?
Even before modern science began to put numbers on everything --- including invisible intangible things --- mathematical thinkers could imagine that all number series must begin with the concept of Infinite Possibility subsumed in Monism. Mundane Plurality is the beginning point for physical Science, which aspires to reduce complex things down to an essential Atom : the essence of Form. But Quantum Physics has discovered that it may be impossible to touch the bottom of an Infinite regression. So, the scientists eventually gave up on Atomism, and posited a singular universal virtual Energy Field of all physical possibilities. Yet, they still resist defeat of their doctrine of infinite Reductionism in the non-reductive concept of Monism/Holism/Infinity. That would be admission of a physical limit to human Reason. Which would require resort to the metaphysical Imagination of Philosophical postulation.
All encompassing Unity (real + ideal) is the ultimate goal for meta-physical {e.g.. the realm of ideas ; the Ideosphere ; the Dataome} Philosophy, which seeks to understand physical Reality by discovering what all things have in common : their Ultimate Pre-physical Source : The One. Ironically, both reasoning methods can only work with that which lies in between the imaginary brackets of First & Last : All = Alpha & Omega = Unity = The One = the Ultimate Category for both Reductionists and Holists. For all practical purposes, Infinity = Emptiness = Ultimate Ground : the limit of human Reason & Existence. Ooops! Is all that included in Monism? Metaphysical Ontology can get out of hand. And this stuff is over my head. :smile:
*1. Infinity and Unity : Mathematics and Metaphysics :
According to Leibniz, any living being admits of both infinite complexity and strict unity. The author develops an analogy between numerical and metaphysical unity: while substantial unities are presupposed by aggregates, a substantial unity is also presupposed by a substances infinite qualities, or by its sequence of states and perceptions. This point is exemplified and developed through Leibnizs use of a law of a series to define an individual substance. The author seeks to show that Leibnizs qualification of a substance as one being is primarily intended to emphasize the essential unity and indivisibility of a substance. This claim can also be expressed by noting that unity per se (or an indivisible unity) implies numerical oneness but not vice versa.
https://academic.oup.com/book/34904/chapter-abstract/298474842?redirectedFrom=fulltext
It occurs to me a tendency towards monism is built into our language when we recognize universals.
Suppose a child has a pet cat "Fluffy". If the child lives isolated, on a remote farm, for instance, the child may believe that Fluffy is unique in all the universe. But eventually the child learns that Fluffy is a cat and that there are other cats in the world. So, the child sees Fluffy as an instantiation of the class "cat." Later, the child learns that cats and dogs are instantiation of the class "pet," and that cats, dogs, elephants, and people are instantiations of the class "animal." An obvious idea is that all things are an instantiation of something deeper. Thus, positing monism is natural and understandable.
[To be explicit, I'm not claiming this proves monism, only that it makes the idea natural and obvious.]
IMHO, Monism contradicts common sense as well other things such as concept of dukkha taught in Buddhism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du%E1%B8%A5kha
If "God" or something like "God" did exist, it pretty much begs the question as to why he/she/it would also allow dukkha to exist. In the West this issue is similar to the issue know as the "problem of evil".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
I could be wrong, but religions based on Monism allow religions based on such teaching to have more power and control than religions NOT based on Monism. One only has to look at the difference between Abrahamic religions (the three most influent Monotheistic religions in the world) and compare them to non-monotheistic religions to see this difference.
Monism type religions are a means and a way to allow those in power to control those beneath them much like the totalitarian societies in George Orwell's book "1984" control the people beneath them. The only difference I see between them is Monism mostly rely on religious beliefs to control people where as the totalitarian societies rely on technology and psychology to control theirs.
The best solution I can suggest is to develope our best models of physical matter and biological brains to explain (understand) why we perceive past, present and future.
The last place I saw such a point being made was Quentin Lauer's "Hegel's Conception of God," which I realize has the unfortunate problem of coming from a commentary on a philosopher who no one can agree on :lol:.
That said, I can't think of any sense in which I've ever heard the contention of multiple types of logical necessity, as in, these different types being elements of fundamentally different things. Certainly, in the view that logic is merely a game, the different forms of logic are different, although the same sort of thing (games), but this would be a position that tends to deny that logic "really exists," independent of minds, not one that posits fundamentally different types of reason.
Anyone else know of one? The closest I can think of is the idea of different axioms in formal systems, but then those are still generally acknowledged to be the same type of reason, not multiple different types, and we have things such as model theory for looking across systems.
Saint Paul talks of the wisdom of the world versus the wisdom of God in the opening of I Corinthians, but this seems to be a difference in quality, not necessarily a difference in type. The hints at later Logos Theology in Paul's letters sort of undercut the idea of God's wisdom being its own type anyhow.
Thanks. I know very little about Plotinus and Neoplatonism, but the notion of "unitive vision" seems to be common to both Early Greek and Eastern philosophies. I suppose that today we would call it subjective "Intuition", as opposed to objective "Observation".
The "distinction between 'what is real' and 'what exists' " may be the crux where Materialism and Monism part ways. For a materialist, the physical/material Universe is all that exists, excluding all metaphysical (mental) phenomena, and mathematical possibilities. Apparently, for Monists, "all" is more inclusive, going beyond the scientific Real, that can be observed, into the realm of philosophical Possibility & Potential.
Yet the same anti-metaphysical "deprecation" is applied to both Spiritualism and Holism. Although they are not the same thing. As you implied, the monistic Whole is not just an "agglomeration" of many parts, but a separate entity in its own right*1, with global properties/qualities that do not exist in isolated components. Ironically, Quantum Physics has discovered a new kind of Holism in the strange physical phenomena of Entanglement*2 : unreal statistical/relational existence*3. What then, is the nature of such incorporeal existence? :smile:
*1. A Spiritualist might call it "God" ; presuming to attribute humanlike properties to The One. But a Holist, lacking direct revelation, must be satisfied with a more abstract conception.
*2.Merelogical Holism :
A composite quantum system has properties that are incompatible with every property of its parts. The existence of such global properties incompatible with all local properties constitutes what I call "mereological holism"--the distinctive holism of Quantum Theory.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.01438
*3. In logic, philosophy and related fields, mereology is the study of parts and the wholes they form. Whereas set theory is founded on the membership relation between a set and its elements, mereology ... Wikipedia
Very interesting article. The comments and responses were indeed fascinating.
I'd question that - it is because it is interpreted through the subject-object perspective that we fail to grasp its import. This interpretation subjectivizes or relativizes insight, making it a personal matter, whereas its import is precisely that it is transpersonal. Many will say that there is 'no intersubjective validation' available for such insights, but that is because today's criteria are generally empirical, recognising only what can be observed and validated by sense-perception.
There's a deep issue at the back of this that is central to my personal quest. It has to do with the emergence of objective consciousness at the basis of the modernity.
I put a question to ChatGPT:
So 'objectification' is the hallmark of the modern condition and state of consciousness, it's the water we swim in. Whereas the 'unitive vision' occurs in a different register, usually associated with poets, artists and mystics, although it is spoken of by scientists at times, such as an oft-quoted letter from Einstein.
I like the fact that physicists are exploring these ideas.
Here is what the Bingbot had to say in answer to the same question:
This is your area - any thoughts on the above?
Yes, I guess I took this as a given. But as an idealist are you not an ontological monist? How would you tentatively resolve the notion of different beings as expression of a great mind/cosmic consciousness? Or is your idealism of a different ontological status?
No reason to do the right thing because there is no one to help.
Since my personal experience has been solely from the "subject-object" perspective, I have difficulty even imagining what a God-object perspective would look like. Also, I've had no "transpersonal" cognition. And what "insights" I have had are easily dismissed as mere opinion, since I have no "intersubjective validation". Is extra-sense-perception something that can be cultivated?
I've seen TV evangelists who demonstrate divinely inspired "word of knowledge" (gift of Holy Spirit). But I don't personally know anyone who claims to have transpersonal Visions, as opposed to mundane imagination (or TV tricks). In a sensory deprivation float tank I experienced unusual imagery, but not so out of the ordinary as to call it "transpersonal". I'm also generally unimaginative & boring, not prone to fantasy ideation. Should I just accept the evangelist's word for his word of knowledge?
Quite a few Catholic saints are reported to have experienced transpersonal divine messages from God or Mary. Should I just take them at their word, or should I require independent verification? Presumably, miracles performed by saints could be witnessed by objective observers. But a vision would be hard to validate, except by faith. Anyway, I'm personally familiar with internally-generated Intuition, but not with externally generated Visions or Knowledge. Are such extra-personal insights an aspect of your personal experience?
We humans have a talent that most animals lack : the ability to convert "sense perception" into mental conception (imagination ; to see what's not really there ; abstract mind pictures). When some of those non-sensory images arise unbidden by the perceiver, should they be interpreted as "transpersonal" --- I.e. originating from outside the conceiver? Even my notion of a Monistic Whole (of which I am a part, who can only postulate the Whole) is known by reason, not insight. :smile:
Extrasensory perception or ESP, also called sixth sense, is a claimed paranormal ability pertaining to reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses, but sensed with the mind. The term was adopted by Duke University psychologist J. B. Rhine. ___ Wikipedia
GOD / WORLD PERSPECTIVE
I equate them with conversion experiences, or steps on the path. I don't regard such insights as instances of extra-sensory perception. In late adolescence, I had some pretty momentous acid trips, which were revelatory in their own right (but I won't dwell on that as I have no intention of advocating illicit drug use). But I also had some real epiphanies at quite a young age. They are practically impossible to convey to others, and if I try to do so it will usually be misunderstood, but one of them was a vivid realisation of the 'I' as the universal ground of being. When I later encountered books about Advaita Vedanta I recognised that insight in them.
I studied Buddhist philosophy and attempted to practice meditation along Buddhist lines for many years, although that's now fallen away. I was member of an informal discussion group for about ten years. Through all of that, certain insights arose, and some of them stayed with me, but it's hardly like its depicted in a lot of popular literature. I had hoped these insights would be sufficiently transformative to burn through all my bad habits (samskara, in yogic terminology) but alas not. Finding a milieu of like-minded others is difficult, and maintaining a commitment without that, also difficult.
I found kind of a bridge to Catholicism through the Christian mystics and ecumenicals, like Thomas Merton. There's actually a thriving albeit small sub-cultural grouping of Zen Catholicism. The Sermons of Meister Eckhardt are a perennial favourite. I like Richard Rohr.
Quoting Gnomon
I don't see that as the key ability in this context, although it's hugely important in culture and technology. The key insight I see is the ability to cut through the illusion of otherness. The illusion of otherness is a fundamental aspect of the human condition, it comes with being born, and sits underneath all our experience. But as Albert Einstein wrote in a letter of condolence, 'A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.' That is very much the key insight of non-dualism.
Oh, man, the stories to be told, but only significant to those that already know them. (Sigh)
I suppose my boring non-Catholic, non-mystical Fundamentalist Protestant upbringing didn't prepare me for mystical experiences. The Bible was not taken as fantasy or mystery, but a literal history & prophecy of mundane events in the past, and things to come. We didn't do any of the fun stuff, like speaking in tongues of angels, or preaching "words of knowledge", or faith healing by laying-on of hands.
In Fire In The Mind, by George Johnson, he reviewed the history of Quantum Physics in Los Alamos & Santa Fe, New Mexico. The subtitle is Science, Faith, and the Search For Order. So he compared & contrasted the rational faith of the scientists, with the ancient mystical beliefs of local Indians (indigenous people). He also noted that the converted Indians found compatible expressions for their traditional mystical experiences in their own local brand of Catholicism.
In the final chapter, A Leap Into The Unknown, the author made this comment : "As we learn from the particle physicists, if we ascend to a higher level of abstraction, things that seem different on the surface suddenly appear as manifestations of a deeper unity". Could that "unity" be the same Monism that we are discussing in this thread? :smile:
I had no prep, and at the time, and for many decades later, I never associated that experience with religion. I thought it was about the nature of reality.
Quoting Gnomon
100%. I think that's the thrust of the book I mentioned at the beginning of the thread (here). I'm endeavouring, once again, to read up on neoplatonism, which provides a metaphysical basis for these ideas, and which Heinrich Pas refers to.
Say, relativity will have spacetime being one whole, if you will, yet with dual aspects, space and time (perhaps more, depending). And, on a simplistic view, energy and mass relate by a constant factor, E=mc².
On another angle, I suppose Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate and parsimony together suggest monism. After all, what we learn is all connected/related in one way or other, a kind of unity of the reality we know, or (non-hierarchical) holistic "whole" maybe. By that account, the numinous "wholly other" doesn't seem reachable, but an idea alone.
If that makes any sense.
It appears to me that Pas is seriously underrepresenting the work of David Bohm in the Aeon piece.
Bohm, a quantum theorist, had interests in philosophy and Eastern thought. He believed that the whole is fundamental, the pieces are fragments. Anti-reductionism. He wrote about it in a book Wholeness and the Implicate Order. It seems to me that Bohm had it worked out far more completely than Pas. You can get a sense of Bohms thinking by checking out Implicate and Explicate Order in Wikipedia.
Bohm used the notion of holographic film, which has the characteristic that each fragment of film contains the image of the entire hologram. Mysteries such as entanglement become less mysterious with some of Bohms ideas.
Bohmian mechanics is an unpopular understanding of quantum behavior, but it makes the exact same experimental predictions as wave mechanics and matrix mechanics. And it is essentially deterministic. Its probably unpopular because physicists not named Einstein seem to not prefer hidden variables theories. Physicists seem to forget that John Bell studied Bohms work which was in part the inspiration for Bells Inequality, which indeed demonstrated the viability of Bohms non-local hidden variables theory.
Seems to me that Pas is standing on Bohms shoulders to a fair extent and should more fully acknowledge such in places such as the Aeon piece.
If you can't explain this then your theory of monism has failed. I think it can be done but some thought needs to go into how our brains existing in a physical present have this ability to hold subject matter outside of the physical present as well as endless other subject matter.
Actually, it seems that people who use their brains productively have better instincts about this than the philosophers who fail to explain it.
In the section, A Matter of Taste, we see that de Broglie did local hidden variables. Von Neumann propagated the notion that hidden variables theories are false, and the notion stuck for decades. Bell got the Nobel for showing that Von Neumann was wrong: Local hidden variables theories may not be able to account for phenomena but non-local hidden variables theories are viable. Bohms mechanics is not only a non-local hidden variables theory, it makes exactly the same (correct) predictions as wave/matrix mechanics. One interpretation is as good as another when it gives the right answers and when nobody understands physically whats going on inside the black box. So we are free to pick the weirdness that we prefer, popular or not - a matter of taste.
Again, my only point was that Pas is seriously short-changing Bohms contributions. I dont mean to disrupt the flow so Ill bow out.
I just started reading an internet article on the topic of Quantum Theology. Disclosure : Theos Think Tank is a Christian organization "researching the relationship between religion, politics and society". Since I have no religion to defend, my interest in Quantum Theology is related to Phillip Ball's recent book on the philosophy of Quantum Physics : "Beyond Weird".
In the article, what caught my eye was the phrase : "using language to describe things that cant really be described". In my experience, philosophers have always used specialized language (metaphors, symbols, allegories, etc) to describe concepts that can't be described in physical terms. Ironically. the pioneers of Quantum Physics were forced to describe the objects of their study in unconventional meta-physical language : "non-locality ; "entanglement" ; "superposition", etc. I suspect that the "weirdness" of many of those queer notions derives from the difference between Monistic (metaphysical) and Pluralistic (material) worldviews.
I suppose that ancient mystics were faced with the same problem : how to describe their metaphysical experiences (feelings & imagery) in common subject-object language. Since I have had no experience with "extra-sensory" phenomena, I'm in a similar position with the Mystical realm as to the Quantum realm. I have to try to interpret the esoteric metaphors into concepts that I can relate to. Some people may take their analogies -- e.g. an atom as a miniature solar system --- too literally, because of the limitations of their experience and vocabulary.
I'm not trying to become a mystic --- too old and set in my real-world ways. But I've been led down the meta-physical road by my Information & Quantum based thesis : Enformationism. So, on TPF, I'm just trying to understand what some serious thinkers on this forum are talking about. And why other posters react emotionally/politically to the foreign language of "woo". Other than immersing myself in mystical literature, do you have any suggestions? :smile:
Quotes from essay :
[i]"First, this essay draws from Philip Balls recent book Beyond Weird: Why everything you thought you knew about quantum physics is different. Ball is Britains leading popular science writer"
"I suspect there are implications in quantum physics for the kind of universe in which believers think they live,if only by casting shadows over the allegedly closed and deterministic Newtonian universe in which, for centuries, we were told we lived. As we will see, it is easy to see why so many philosophicallyminded believers, whether religious, spiritual, new agey or secular, make this move."[/i]
https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2018/09/14/quantum-theology
Quantum Weirdness : Blog post
http://bothandblog7.enformationism.info/page43.html
The argot of mysticism has crept into the modern lexicon through various routes. Have a look at a NY Times opinion piece by David Brooks, The Neural Buddhists.
Then there's the mystical element in 'the new physics'. It is certainly true that there's a lot of third-rate content written about the subject but there's a serious core of ideas too (as your reference notes). I read Tao of Physics not long after it was published, and I still regard it. I know many of the mainstream commentators rubbish it, but Capra interviewed Heisenberg extensively for that book, and he does after all hold a doctorate in physics. I interpreted that book in part as the attempt to find an alternative to Aristotelian metaphysics. And I'm sure a lot of the discussion of 'consciousness' is influenced by Eastern philosophy - the Vedanta Society was established in New York in 1894 (see American Veda.) //Oh, and I've always found Paul Davies a congenial science communicator.//
As to the culture wars and woo - I'm often accused of that myself so whatever I say is going to annoy someone. My take is that there really is a battle going on between the materialist worldview and its opponents, but I think that hardcore materialism is loosing that battle. Science itself has become considerably 'greener' in the last few generations, partially because of the growing social consciousness of scientists and the awareness they have of the power science provides and partially because the philosophical model of materialism is seriously challenged by the emergence of new philosophical paradigms. To quote the article you linked to:
He goes on:
(I found the film version of that play recently, with Heisenberg played by Daniel Craig, I think on Amazon Prime.)
Anyway - I'm rambling. But there's some grist for the mill.
Although I don't practice any formal religion, including New Age beliefs & practices, I'm often accused of pushing "woo" whenever I mention "Metaphysics". That's ironic, because -- for me -- metaphysical inquiries are all that remain for "feckless" philosophers to do ; since Empirical Science became the dominant practice of rational thinkers, by producing tangible money-making products instead of debatable worthless theories. Until, that is, Quantum Physics pulled the material rug out from under the axioms & assumptions of Classical Physics.
From my superficial study of Aristotle, I concluded that he deliberately divided his encyclopedia of Nature into Material Physics (observations of natural phenomena) and Mental Meta-Physics (ideas about ideas). The former is what later became the focus of Modern Physics & Chemistry & Mechanics. But the latter was eventually adopted by early Catholic theologians as the rules for their philosophical studies.
Those unquestionable authoritative concepts & rules, from "The Philosopher", served them well for the purpose of justifying some counter-intuitive (mystical) notions, such as the Trinity (three persons in one god). A time-honored authority figure wouldn't have been necessary though, if the plebeian Jesus cult hadn't evolved into a world empire, modeled on the official polytheistic state religions of Imperial Rome. Christian theologians were tasked with distinguishing the "True Religion" from both Polytheism and from competing Monotheisms. Their "woo-woo" inter-faith arguments were mostly about un-provable metaphysical beliefs, instead of empirical facts*1.
It's those non-sensical notions that were intellectually offensive to some of the early empiricists, such as Galileo. So, materialistic science could be construed as a protestant movement away from theological "woo". But today, the spiritual authority of ancient theologians & philosophers was undermined by the flood of empirical gadgets to make this mundane life materially better. Until that is, conventional Physics eroded its own material foundation with the discovery of immaterial & non-mechanical Quantum mathematics, where spooky-action-at-a-distance must be accepted as a real thing, and sub-atomic Quanta are no longer deterministic or quantifiable, and hard little atoms have evaporated into ethereal Quantum Fields of inter-relationships*2.
Many of the quantum pioneers began to engage in woo-ish philosophy, as they struggled to understand the real-world implications of mystifying quantum experiments. Yet, more pragmatic scientists decided to ignore the Ideal meanings, and to focus on the Real material products : to "shut-up and calculate". Consequently, Materialism has survived & thrived based on its effectiveness in producing technological tools & marvels. Meanwhile, the philosophy of Quantum reality languishes on opinion-swapping forums.
I have no problem with the Materialism embodied in my cell-phone. But I do take issue with ignoring the philosophical questions raised by the spooky foundations of the material world. If we can't discuss the intellectual products of modern science on a philosophy forum, what's the point of having a theory only forum? The woo-boo-birds don't see a problem with ignoring metaphysics, but I agree with you that the separation of Science (Realism) & Philosophy (Idealism) is a "culture war". And the materialists have the Atomic Bomb on their side (the ethics of power). However, since there is no actual engagement ---between Materialistic Pluralism and Idealistic Monism --- how can we tell who's winning? :smile:
*1. Theological Woo :
"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" is a phrase that, when used in modern contexts, can be used as a metaphor for wasting time debating topics of no practical value, or on questions whose answers hold no intellectual consequence, while more urgent concerns accumulate. ___Wikipedia
*2. Quantum Particles are now Continuous Fields :
In the end, weve learned that quantum mechanics is fundamentally flawed on its own. Thats not because of anything weird or spooky that it brought along with it, but because it wasnt quite weird enough to account for the physical phenomena that actually occur in reality.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/quantum-fields-quantum-particles/
The term "metaphysical" refers to concepts or principles that transcend the physical or empirical realm and are typically associated with supernatural aspects of reality (bearing in mind that the Greek-derived 'metaphysical' is a synonym for the Latin-derived 'supernatural'). Metaphysics posits the reality of immaterial or non-physical factors that are not necessarily amenable to empirical observation or scientific investigation. Accordingly, philosophical materialism is considered anti-metaphysical because it rejects such principles. Materialists argue that all phenomena, including consciousness, mental states, and abstract concepts, can ultimately be explained in terms of physical processes and interactions between material entities and that that there is no need to invoke metaphysical explanations when accounting for the nature of reality.
Quoting 180 Proof
I think this is based on the premise that a key characteristic of philosophy is insight. Insight provides an avenue of interpretation which may not be generally available to any and all observers; it is grounded in the judgements of meaning. Buddhologist Edward Conze refers to what he designates 'the perennial philosophy' (which he says includes aspects of classical Western and Eastern philosophhy) which holds (1) that as far as worth-while knowledge is concerned not all men are equal, but that there is a hierarchy of persons, some of whom, through what they are, can know much more than others; [2] that there is a hierarchy also of the levels of reality, some of which are more "real," because more exalted than others; and [3] that the wise have found a "wisdom" which is true even though it has no empirical basis in observations which can be made by everyone and everybody; and that in fact there is a rare and unordinary faculty in some of us by which we can attain direct contact with actual reality--through the Prajñ?p?ramit? of the Buddhists, the logos of Parmenides, the sophia of Aristotle and others, Spinoza's amor dei intellectualis, Hegel's Vernunft, and so on.'
I know you're likely to reject all the above, but as you asked.....
//ps - incidentally, you can see how profoundly non-politically-correct the traditionalist/perennialist attitude is. This surfaces in the link between the perennial school and fascism, e.g. Julian Evola in particular, although he was rather an extreme and eccentric example. But those who hold to the perennialist ideals are generally very ant-modernity - see Mark Sedgewick's book on them, Against All Modernity.
I was drawn to the perennial schools as a consequence of my overall philosophical orientation. I don't feel that sense of profound hostility to the modern world that they do, although I do understand the idea that modern culture is basically deranged in some fundamental way.//
Materialism is perfectly sound basis for engineering material outcomes. The issues start when these same principles are applied to the problems of philosophy. In fact that is all that philosophical materialism amounts to. But as you note physics itself has begun to throw physicalism into question (irony of ironies).
Aristotle is enjoying a renaissance, particularly in life sciences, and because of the principles of formal and final causes, on the one side, and aspects of his matter-form (hylomorphic) dualism on the other. See Aristotle's Revenge, Edward Feser.
I don't remember ever making such an assertion about "anti-metaphysics". What I usually say, when challenged for evidence, is the obvious fact that metaphysical topics are not amenable to empirical Science*1. Hence, Metaphysics is not provable ; not subject to physical/material evidence. As you noted, such topics "transcend" the classical physics of Newton, and cross-over the invisible line between modern Science and ancient Religion, into a no-man's land of quantum mysticism*2.
Instead, it's usually the Materialists who deny or denigrate traditional metaphysical arguments, on topics such as Consciousness. They seem to be requiring physical evidence of Consciousness, in all the wrong places, such as Neural Substrates. Personally, I don't know what the causal "substrate of Consciousness" is. Only that it is typically associated with Brains & Nerves. So, my discussions usually assume that "C" is not a material object, but a holistic function of material substrates.
On TPF, in posts by presumptive Materialists, the notion of Holism is typically rejected as mystical "woo". Even though the only mysterious feature in question is something like, "what is it like?" (i.e. what does it feel like; what is the form of personal experience?) Yet, when I point out that the term "holism" was actually coined in the 20th century by a Western-trained thinker, they still remain convinced (prejudiced) that it is a nutty New Age notion. Moreover, the basic concept --- although originally presented in terms of Evolutionary theory --- is amenable to Quantum Physics*3, if not to Classical Physics. That may be why several of the quantum pioneers turned to Eastern philosophy for insights into the non-classical, non-mechanical,immaterial aspects of quantum science*2.
As I said before, I have no problem with the pragmatic physical products of material science. It's only the non-physical philosophical mis-interpretations that I take issue with. And I don't substitute Spiritual theories for Mechanical explanations. I try to remain as close to the established physics as possible. Yet, any non-classical physics is quickly dismissed as spiritualistic "woo". So, I have learned the hard way to avoid getting into red-faced Political arguments with hard-line believers (defenders of classical Truth) in the ancient doctrine of Materialism. :smile:
*1.Metaphysics :
It is not easy to say what metaphysics is. Ancient and Medieval philosophers might have said that metaphysics was, like chemistry or astrology, to be defined by its subject-matter.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/
Note -- Ironically, the term "subject-matter" is biased toward Materialism, and seems to exclude immaterial ideas about the material world. For me though, the subject of Meta-Physics is the non-physical aspects of the world. Specifically the mental Ideality of the human mind.
*2. Quantum Mysticism :
Pauli favored a hypothesis of lucid mysticism, a synthesis between rationality and religion.
https://phys.org/news/2009-06-quantum-mysticism-forgotten.html
Note -- Wolfgang Pauli was a one of several quantum pioneers who acknowledged the limits of classical mechanical matter-based physics to make sense of the sub-atomic foundation of the real world.
*3. Quantum Holism :
A composite quantum system has properties that are incompatible with every property of its parts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.01438
A good time for you to actually study his First Philosophy which has come down to us as metaphysics. :smirk:
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, at least we agree that materialism (e.g. classical atomism) is anti-"supernatural" (i.e. anti-woo). I prefer the Greek conception of tà metà tà physikà biblía which I'd summarized recently:
Quoting 180 Proof
Also, an older post ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/667780
To equate the metaphysical with "the supernatural", as you do, Wayfarer, is both contrary to Aristotle's first philosophy (i.e. reflective thinking on what can be known of nature) and a species of irrationalism (i.e. magical thinking ... that transcends nature) which, IMO, is why our disagreements are so intractable my positions and arguments are mostly grounded in (a version of) first philosophy whereas yours are mostly committed to (perennialist / dharmic) magic, miracles & mysteries. And perversely, you (and like-minded others) frequently make use of modern physical sciences in ad hoc attempts to justify anti-physical ideas, or ideals, about "reality" which you believe in.
Well, here's a post in which you use "anti-metaphysical prejudice" ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/781277
... and elsewhere "opposes / blocks philosophical speculation" (i.e. metaphysics) and "anti-philosophical". Remember now? :smirk:
Quoting Wayfarer
At last, a confession. They say it's good for the anatta. :up:
Materialism is a metaphysical standpoint. Metaphysics is not restricted to "concepts or principles that transcend the physical or empirical realm and are typically associated with supernatural aspects of reality". Also 'metaphysics' is not synonymous with 'supernatural'; the former term, in its "popular" sense may share some associations with 'supernatural', but not so in its philosophical sense. There is no 'philosophy of the supernatural'.
My guess is that it's much easier to cope with much more intuitive than voidism (Democritean / Buddhist).
What's voidism?
FYI, the reference to "anti-metaphysical prejudice" was about the "pro-science, anti-philosophy" attitude common to devotees of Materialism*1. Not to anything that could be interpreted as "anti-metaphysics" on my part. Ooops! apparently, your "anti-metaphysical prejudice" did cause you to make that reversal of my intention. This is just another instance of the reason I tried to stop giving you fodder for exercising your preconceptions against non-empirical philosophical Meta-physics*2. Which you smirkingly interpret as "super-natural"*3. Oooops! I did it again -- trying to reason with a shuttered mind. It's like looking into a warped fun-house mirror.
As I have explained repeatedly though, I am not aware of anything supernatural in the natural world*4. The Meta-Physics I talk about is simply the products of a human mind : Ideas. Apparently, Materialists are forced by their dogma to assume that Ideas are material objects, that can be probed by the tools of physical science. By the same presumption, Consciousness would not be a debatable metaphysical notion, but a provable empirical physical object --- or collection of objects such as the Neural net.
FWIW, I don't think Consciousness is a super-natural phenomenon. It's a mundane feature of the real world, inhabited by thinking & sensing creatures. But Consciousness per se is a holistic Function of the neural net, not something physical. A Function is not a thing, but a relationship between things in a holistic system. For example, the function of the eye is Vision. You could destroy Vision by removing the eye. But unless you could reattach all the rest of the occular system, that eye alone would be blind. Vision is not in the eye, but in the system of interrelationships. BTW, the practical scientific application of Holism is known as "Systems Theory". :smile:
PS__ I use the term "Materialism" -- descriptively, not derogatorily -- to describe your standpoint in contrast to my own personal worldview. Yet, I could also use "Physicalism" or "Naturalism" or "Realism". Your criticism of my posts seems to indicate an antipathy to what you imagine to be "Spiritualism". But I labeled my personal worldview as Enformationism, because Quantum science & Information theory have discovered that Information plays two different roles in reality : both Matter and Mind. You may not agree with that interpretation, but it's my personal opinion, not a formal religion --- no spooky ghosts or supernatural magic --- just spooky "action at a distance", and the mundane mystery of Consciousness. Hence, no reason for hostility. Unless, you are afraid it is an aggressive challenge to your own personal belief system. It's not intended that way. For all Practical purposes, I am also a Materialist. It's only in impractical Philosophical purposes that I feel free to look at reality from a different perspective. :cool:
*1. Gnomon reply to Universeness on the Emergence thread :
No. I'm merely trying to untie the ropes of anti-metaphysical prejudice that dump all non-physical notions into the anti-science (religious) waste-bin.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/781277
*2. Ironically, you keep trying to re-open a dead-end dialog. If you think Gnomon is such an idiot, why bother? Yet "blind faith" can be defined as doing the same thing, while expecting different results. Dialoging is not about winning.
*3. Smirk : one of your favorite smilies : :smirk:
to smile in an irritatingly smug, conceited, or silly way.
Note -- a smirk usually is a sign of a supercilious attitude :
behaving or looking as though one thinks one is superior to others.
*4. Super-natural :
When a philosophical dialogue goes beyond the limits of the Natural universe, we are treading on Super-Natural turf. You may imagine the hypothetical Multiverse or Many Worlds theories as-if they are natural things, but they are definitely not subject to empirical proving. Hence, by my definition, they are just as super-natural as a Heavenly World. Or perhaps, since those theories exist in human minds. they must be natural. Be careful how you use that notion. It could work both ways.
"... voidism (Democritean / Buddhist)." ~180 Proof
Now your "never mind" has disappeared into the eternal ether....never mind. :wink:
Another question: "Why Monism why not moremonism". Apologies...I'm losing the serious...
That may be true. But the pertinent point in this thread is that Materialism is presented as a natural fact, while alternative metaphysical notions are rejected as Super-natural fictions. It's like an old western showdown : there ain't no room in this town (Truth) for both tangible Matter and intangible Mind.
Some posters may imagine that Mind & Consciousness are ghostly spirits floating around in space. But in most of the dialogs I'm familiar with, Mental phenomena may be described as immaterial-but-natural Functions dependent on material substrates. We could debate about which came first -- Mind or Matter -- but that would be simply a contrast of personal opinions, not of objective Truths vs subjective Fictions. Even Objectivity is a subjective metaphysical concept, an Ideal to aspire to. :smile:
Quoting 180 Proof
That's pertinent in many a thread. This is why I keep referring to Thomas Nagel's essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, although it is often misconstrued as an apologetic for religion, which it isn't. What Nagel is saying, is that there are certain avenues of thought that are cut off because of their association with religious ideas. And it is very much relevant to the point you're making.
He starts with a passage from C S Peirce, which concludes:
Nagel says that he finds Peirce's musings 'congenial', but also notes that they're 'quite out of keeping with present fashion.' He says 'the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable. The thought that the relation between mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in this day and age nervous. I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.'
There is then an often-quoted elaboration of the fear of religion which I won't reproduce again (you can find it here). But Nagel is not, as I said, preaching - he declares that he himself is an atheist. It's more that what he sees as the fear of religion has pernicious and generally unstated philosophical consequences. The argument then goes on to discuss 'the sovereignty of reason' and, in particular, whether reason can be understood as a consequence of evolutionary biology, without undermining it. (The tension between philosophical rationalism and naturalism is another very important theme in my opinion.)
He develops this argument in more detail in his 2012 Mind and Cosmos, where he argues that the materialist concept of mind is self-contradictory. According to the materialist neo-Darwinian view, consciousness and subjective experience are seen as byproducts of physical processes, understandable solely through the perspectives of evolutionary biology and neurobiology (which is the view expressed by Daniel Dennett and other scientific materialists).
Nagel argues that this perspective falls short in providing a comprehensive account of consciousness because it focuses solely on objective, third-person explanations rooted in physical processes and fails to address the subjective, first-person aspects of conscious experience. He argues that subjective experience, or what it is like to be a conscious being, cannot be reduced to any purely physical or functional explanations and that to depict it as a kind of accident is basically absurd (as many philosophers have said about Dennett's philosophy.)
Which is basically one of the main subjects of argument in this and any number of threads. I think the majority view maintains defensive or presumptive materialism - defensive, because questioning materialism seems to open the door to religious philosophy, or presumptive, because it is presumed in the absence of a defensible model of idealism, having first defined idealism in terms of the 'ghost in the machine' model of Cartesianism. In that context, the presumption of materialism, whilst itself not a religious view, is held for religious reasons, namely that to question it, is to open the door for what is not, in Nagel's terms, 'secularly comfortable'.
My use of "immaterial" is indeed "tendentious". It's intended to discriminate between tangible objects and intangible feelings. For example, Nagel's question "what is it like to be a bat?" is not inquiring about the stuff we can see or touch, but about the inner being : the sense of self. Even the terms "sense" & "feeling" may be biased (tendentious) toward materialism, in their literal reference to the five senses. That's why I sometimes refer to "Reason" as a sixth sense. It's a way of knowing that is not limited to physical sensations. By that, I don't mean that Reason is Extra Sensory Perception in the mystical meaning of that term. But merely that the brain can produce abstract concepts from concrete experience : by metaphorically removing the material flesh from the immaterial bones. Reason goes beyond the physics of matter (meta-physics). So, Materialism is literally irrational in that it excludes the immaterial function that we call "Reason".
As you said, Abstractions are not material objects. Which is why they can be described as immaterial. I don't mean that mental images are Spiritual, but merely that they are Ideas or Theories or Generalizations that have left behind their material substance, and exist in the Mind as imaginary Concepts, not sensory Percepts. Ghosts & Spirits are abstractions from real-world experience. But some people interpret those mental images as-if they are external objects in the real world, instead of internal ideas about the real world. "I ain't afraid of no ghosts", because ideas can't hurt my flesh.
Our matter-based vocabularies are problematic for philosophers, when we try to discuss anything that is not material. That may be why Aristotle made a distinction between "Substance" and "Essence". But some philosophers, such as Spinoza, used "substance" to refer to what Aristotle defined as "essence". In one sense, the essence of a thing is "what it's like" to be that thing. But in another sense, "essence" is the logical or ontological structure of a thing. Yet again, the word "structure" has a material bias, which makes it difficult to make sense of abstractions without sounding like non-sense. :smile:
PS__A Brain State is not a physical object but a functional property or quality of interrelated inter-operating neural elements. A neurosurgeon can't remove a specific brain state with his scalpel, It's not a physical organ. Brain states are excluded from literal Materialism.
To Abstract : existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence.
Note -- In my vocabulary, Abstractions (ideas) are "immaterial". Thus, excluded from the Materialistic worldview.
The above is or was well known to the ancients who ruled this Earth long before the advent of both Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The idea of god is not so simple as we are led to believe... The ancients knew more than we, today, about the organization of the Earth's heavens.
As usual, Christianity is behind the curve. They are the last ones to be enlightened. One can only wonder why.
What would be the responsibility of a lesser god inhabiting a star with no solar system to maintain?
Yes. The materialistic Enlightenment era not only categorically rejected all Religious doctrines, it also rejected all philosophical beliefs that "go beyond" actual/factual descriptions of the world based on the five senses (meta-physics). It's such a categorical exclusion that makes calm reasoned discussions almost impossible, for those who wish to discuss anything that exists mentally but not materially : such as Consciousness or Monism.
Back when I tried to justify my rejection of my youthful religion, I had to make clear that I was not debating personal beliefs, but merely that I had found the material Bible --- often carried around like an ancient idol --- to be an unreliable foundation for such beliefs. Now, I'm having to reverse that strategy; to provide specific material facts for my worldview. Today, my philosophical beliefs are often categorically characterized as New Age instead of Christian. That's because Materialism ( a metaphysical system of belief) leaves no other trash can to put ideas about ideals into. :smile:
Note -- In the old TV series Dragnet, no-nonsense detective Sgt. Joe Friday often cut-off his rambling witnesses with : Just the facts ma'am". Ironically, Philosophy doesn't deal with "facts". That's the job of science.
Quoting Janus
Quoting Gnomon
From the fact that abstractions are not material objects it does not follow that they are immaterial. They may be material processes. Digestion is a material process which is not a material object.
Ideas, theories and generalizations only exist insofar as they are physically instantiated. Also, the idea of "material substance" is questionable; at the very least it is ambiguous. In ordinary usage it refers to tangibility, to some sensorially apprehensible aspect of the objects we see, hear, touch, and so on.
:up: :up:
To my mind, simply put, material corresponds to instantiated (observable); physical corresponds to material system (configurable); and natural corresponds to physical structure (invariant).
Much of the fault lies with the rule of fear of the Churches and disgust with the religious wars and power struggles.
Enlightenment philosophy may have demystified established doctrines of the era, but at the same time, initiated its own doctrines under religious, or at least theological, conditions, so the Enlightenment didnt categorically reject all religious doctrines.
And the general Enlightenment philosophical arena certainly didnt so much reject metaphysics altogether, but rather, merely created a new way of doing it, in which the a priori domain as subjects, rather than the five-senses descriptions of the world as objects, assumed primacy.
It isnt so much what the Enlightenment rejected, but what it initiated; not which forces were diminished as much as which forces were empowered.
Since the prefix "im-" literally means "not", it follows that whatever is "not material" is literally "immaterial"*1. Yet apparently, those not-matter words have an unplatable implication for you. Perhaps, to you "immaterial" is equated with "unreal" or "spiritual", and "material" means "real" or "mundane". If so, your definition of "material" is even more metaphysical*2 than mine. Instead of those spooky notions though, I'm thinking in terms of reductive/pluralistic scientific categories, in which massive Matter is merely a condensed form of ethereal Energy (E=MC^2), or ultimately of elucidating Light.
In the metaphysics of Materialism, both tangible things and conceptual processes are included under the umbrella of Physicalism or Realism. Yet, physical scientists routinely make a distinction between Matter and processes affecting material objects. For example, Matter (mass) has inertia, and does not change position unless acted upon by some outside Force. But what substance is a force made of? For scientists, a Force is a type of Energy acting upon Matter*3. Ironically, The ancient philosophy of Materialism, led 18th century scientists to imagine Energy as a material substance : Phlogistion*4. But today, Energy (causation) is accepted as an immaterial & non-mechanical influence on matter (spooky action at a distance).
Materialism is a monistic doctrine*5, based on evidence of the physical senses. But my personal Enformationism worldview is also monistic, and based on the non-physical (immaterial) element of the real world that we know in various forms, such as Energy or Mind or Reason. According to Materialism, the Mind must be material. But that presumption leads to the philosophical Mind/Body Problem. Yet, if you assume that Generic Information is the basic element of the world, the "problem" vanishes as you look at it from a new perspective : Information Physics*6. I won't go into the details of that worldview here. I'll just mention that it's a novel form of Metaphysical Monism. :smile:
*1. A Prefix 'im' is used in the following two situations: Meaning not or no: when the prefix 'im' is used with some adjectives and nouns that begin with b, m, or p, it states the opposite meaning. For example immortal, immature, imperfect, etc.
https://theglobalmontessorinetwork.org/resource/elementary/prefixes-im-english/
*2. Metaphysical : referring to an idea, doctrine, or posited reality outside of human sense perception. In modern philosophical terminology, metaphysics refers to the studies of what cannot be reached through objective studies of material reality. ___Wiki
*3. In physics, a force is an influence that causes the motion of an object with mass to change its velocity i.e., to accelerate. ___Wiki
Note -- Influence comes in many immaterial forms, from physical forces to social influences.
*4. Phlogiston, in early chemical theory, hypothetical principle of fire, of which every combustible substance was in part composed. In this view, the phenomena of burning, now called oxidation, was caused by the liberation of phlogiston, with the dephlogisticated substance left as an ash or residue.
https://www.britannica.com/science/phlogiston
*5. Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds matter to be the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions of material things. ___Wikipedia
*6. Information physics, which is based on understanding the ways in which we both quantify and process information about the world around us, is a fundamentally new approach to science.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1009.5161
Note -- 21st century scientists now posit Information as the fundamental element of reality.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundamental/
Monism, materialism, physicalism and presentism all have the limitation of only existing in the physical present. So how do our brains perceive past and future which are physically non existent? An obvious answer is our brains are physically in the present but have the ability to hold the immaterial...our ability to think outside of the present time proves it. So what else do our brains hold that is immaterial? Basically all mental content...it appears me.
And since you referenced information physics I'll just say I don't think it's good science at all. A better view is that information simply exists in the form of physical brains holding immaterial content. This would be at the physical scale of complex neuron groups and not at quantum scales.
We seem to be in agreement on the material vs non-material question. But not on the emerging concept of Generic Information as the fundamental element of reality. That still emerging "science" grew out of Information theory & Quantum physics since the early 20th century. And due to the subject non-matter, it is still more philosophy than empirical science. So, I'll have to agree with your assessment that it's not "good science"--- meaning productive of hard goods, like Atomic Bombs & Cell Phones.
However, since I am not a scientist, I am more interested in its philosophical implications, than in its material products. FWIW, the Santa Fe Institute views Information theory as essential to the emerging sciences of Systems & Complexity. So, maybe tangible results will eventually come from their studies of intangible Information.
Nevertheless, In my Enformationism thesis, I have made immaterial Information (power to create actual forms from unformed Potential) the foundation of my personal worldview --- regardless of any material toys that might result from understanding complex interacting systems as various manifestations of universal causal power : what I call EnFormAction --- conventionally known as Energy. :smile:
The Santa Fe Institute is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, including physical, computational, biological, and social systems. ___Wikipedia
https://www.santafe.edu/
That all makes sense to me. So, on those definitions if consciousness is observable via brain-scanning then it would qualify as physical. On the other hand, if we each know from experience that we are conscious, then it must also be observable in another sense, the difference being that this other kind of observation is not publicly confirmable.
Quoting Gnomon
I don't know why you are trying to bring what you speculate are my personal reactions to the term "immaterial" into the conversation.
When something is said to be material a common meaning is, as @180 Proof outlined above, that it is observable (or detectable in some way), and when something is said to be immaterial there are two common meanings: either that it doesn't exist or is unimportant, or that it exists in some way other than the material. So, which of these meanings do you intend, and if the second, then what other way of existing than the material are you proposing, or if you intend some other meaning altogether, then what is it?
Small digression. Is there an example of an immaterial 'something' we can point to uncontroversially?
Good question! Not to my knowledge.
Interest rates.
But do such examples transcend physicalism?
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't know what it could mean to say that logic and maths transcend physical reality. Would it mean that they would still exist, even if nothing else existed?
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think this is true. Money has a physical existence as gold, or paper, or electronic configurations. The agreements exist as written or electronic documents, or as enactions or as thoughts which only exist by virtue of neuronal activity.
The point is that our rational grasp of things is constructed around abstractions, which are fundamental to language and therefore the basic operations of predication (is, is not, less than, same as, and so on.) None of those abstractions are materially existent but they're intrinsic to our ability to reason. That is one of the reasons that reason is unique to h. sapiens. We kind of straddle two worlds, the world of sensable objects, and the world of thought, from which we are able to envision and then realise possibilities - which is the ability that has provided the technology that we're using to mediate this discussion. Hence Wigner's 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics'.
Quoting Janus
It would mean that at least some of the primitive terms of both of those would be the same in all possible worlds, that if intelligent life evolved elsewhere, it would still be obliged to recognise the law the excluded middle and the notion of 'equals', for instance. I think they precede existence, in the sense that they are associate with or constitutive of the natural order, from which life evolves in the first place.
Human babies develop a 'theory of mind' that is strongly correlated to their "publicly confirmable" observations of others' behaviors. As for one's own "consciousness", or subjectivity, I think it is only assumed and not observed (any more than an eye sees itself seeing). My "publicly confirmable" behavior strongly correlates to others' 'theory of mind' as applied to me (and one another) and, on the basis of the persistent circumstantial evidence, I don't have any observational grounds to doubt or disbelieve that I am (at least, occasionally) "conscious". Do you? As far as I'm concerned, 'eliminativism' is only a research paradigm which treats "consciousness" as a counterintuitive "user-illusion" that deconstructs the incorrigible basis "conscious" of our folk psychology (i.e. practical woo) in order to publicly investigate (an) objective physical structure of subjective information processing (i.e. experience).
Quoting Wayfarer
I think it would only be the case that the law of the excluded middle and the notion of "equals" would need to be recognized in a world if its physical characteristics were such as to necessitate it. Perhaps it would be physically impossible for that not to be the case; fact is, we don't know and have no way of knowing such things. If our universe is a quantum universe where everything is entangled and ultimately one, then those kinds of laws and qualities might just be artifacts of the human embrained body, for all we know.
How do we know the logical absolutes of identity, non-contradiction and excluded middle hold everywhere in the universe? Perhaps all we know is that we cannot imagine it being otherwise; we certainly have access only to a vanishingly small sample of the universe. And even if it were true that they obtain everywhere, that would speak to the physical constitution of things, because that is what our study of the universe is: a physical study. In any case, QM seems to contravene some of those principles, so maybe they are artefacts of our macro-minds.
Indeed - I should have said, 'is purported to operate throughout... ' etc. I agree.
Sometimes I may be looking at something; I may not be conscious of what I am noticing, but if you asked, I could tell you what I've seen. At other times I am very conscious, in the moment, of looking at something, and of noticing what I'm noticing. You could observe me in either of these states, but you would not be able to know for sure whether I was conscious of what I was looking at, at the time. So, my own experience tells me that I can notice whether I am conscious or have been daydreaming and it is in this sense that I say this observation is private.
Quoting 180 Proof
So, I agree with you that we have no observational grounds to doubt that I am ( at times) conscious, and I would go further and claim that I have observational grounds to believe it.
Quoting Tom Storm
:up:
Numbers are abstract objects (or structures) which are real only in so far as they are physically instantiable. I guess this view makes me more Aristotlean (hylomorphic) than Platonic-Pythagorean (supersensible).
Yes; ergo, IMO, a fiction.
Using proper brain scans and algorithms one could easily observe your real-time un/conscious-states.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6119943/
But I'm thinking that once we have this ability to contain the immaterial then we have an environment were the immaterial can affect other immaterial content. Much of our mental activity works this way, not just maths. In some ways this immaterial world can operate independent of the physical world.
(Regarding Platonism)
An example would be how we control the future.
So our brains have this interactive ability to connect past, present and future...and the material and immaterial.
And as 180 Proof pointed out abstract objects really only exist in a physically instantiated form, which I agree with.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
The past and future are ideas; are ideas immaterial? Ideas are abstractions, generalizations but they are not necessarily immaterial, except in the sense that they are not objects of the senses.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
Actually, I pointed this out earlier in the thread and 180 agreed:
Quoting Janus
In any case, if abstract objects exist only in physically instantiated forms, then why refer to them as 'immaterial"?
It seems to me that those who insist on using this tendentious term have something invested in the belief that there is some reality over and above the physical.
Edit:I mean physically instantiated immaterials. A stand alone immaterial would not exist.
The search for proof for the incorporeal is at the heart of idealism, I guess.
So, the situation as I see it is that there are some phenomena we can observe and other phenomena that can only be detected via observable effects.
Since there seem to be only two kinds of proof or evidence: the logical and the empirical, I think it's going to be a
very
long.........................................................................................................................(and fruitless)
search.
:fire:
This confuses me. Please clarify how an "immaterial" Y is "contained in" a material Z.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
I am an emergentist (re: holism), not "monist" (dualist or pluralist).
Don't know were the rubber duck came from???
1970's maybe.
Story of my life... I hear you, Brother. :cool:
Okay, a step away from talk of the "immaterial" to the "imaginary" is progress. But how do you "hold an imaginary" X? A map of Middle Earth, for example, is instantiated on actual paper, but that map does not correspond to an actual place.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
As 180 says you seem now to be speaking about the imaginary when you refer to the "immaterial". So, if consciousness. or mental states, to return to the original example should be counted as immaterial, does it follow that they are then to be thought of as being imaginary?
So physical non existence of the subject matter is my use of the word immaterial and it exists as brain state in an entirely physical form. What's the problem?
And identifying this mental ability should lead to the conclusion that mental content is universally immaterial. Identifying this ability gives a better understanding of how information physically exists. So information doesn't need to be defined as an abstract concept. Does that explain it? I'm surprised at the resistance to the idea.
As a basically rational & non-religious introverted personality*1 --- who has been called "Spock-like" on another forum, and a "New Age mystic" on TPF --- I stand somewhere in the middle of the Materialism/Mysticism spectrum. So, I can understand why the early scientists preferred the pragmatic philosophy of Materialism to that of impractical Mysticism. A typical view of the spectrum might say that Materialism appeals to "rational" practical/realistic intellectuals on one end, while Mysticism is embraced mostly by "emotional" theoretical/idealistic feeling-type persons on the other extreme*1. Doctrinal Religions though, captured the loyalty of sheep-like masses who want/need to be told what to believe. { Note -- The Rational vs Emotional labels are simplistic either/or categories that ignore the median*2.} Ironically, the thinkers on both ends often view the opposite type as a member of the brain-washed majority.
However, my interest in feckless philosophy has exposed me to other (non-material) ways of thinking about the world and its people. Jesus responded to the skepticism from his critics with "he who has eyes to see, let him see". Apparently, I was born blind to the objects of "spiritual consciousness". But, I can see that at least half of the population is equipped with mystical eyes or hearts. So, I try not to "pass judgment" on those who don't see & feel as I do. Some of them can give elaborate reasons for believing as they do.
Having read the encyclopedic book Mysticism, by Evelyn Underhill, I understand that there is a long tradition of mystical ideation in the history of philosophy. Yet ecstatic mystics have typically lived on the fringes of staid formal religions. She said, "that while mysticism is an essential element in full human religion, it can never be the whole content of such religion". She could be very critical of formalized religions, and even referred to theology as "empirical mysticism". By contrast, she seemed to view the true mystics as "spiritual anarchists". Even the Catholic church, with its history of rational theology had an uneasy relationship with mystics, who ignored official dogma in favor of their own inner revelations.
It's true that the Enlightenment era scientists didn't immediately & categorically reject their religious doctrines. From Galileo to Newton, physical scientists attempted to reconcile their newly observed "facts" with their inherited belief systems. Yet eventually, the trend away from acceptance of formal religious institutions & doctrines became almost categorical*3. Ironically, in a 2009 poll, " just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power". So, even pragmatic practicing scientists seem to be able to reconcile their professional Materialism with a bit of personal Mysticism. :smile:
*1. rational vs emotional personality :
In common usage, being rational is assumed to be good, whereas being irrational or emotional is assumed to be bad and to lead to error. Psychological science, however, is primarily interested in understanding rather than in passing judgment on kinds of thought processes.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4128497/
*2. Psychology and the Rationality of Emotion :
Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky discovered some of the judgment heuristics that people use in everyday reasoning (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Much to the dismay of economists guided by rational choice models, it has become clear that people reason using whatever short-cuts or heuristics are available.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4128497/
*3. Categorical rejection of religious doctrines :
92% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject a belief in God or higher power.
https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1936-6434-6-33
All good.
I suspect that our definitions of "abstraction" are confined by our definitions of "concrete" or "real". From the perspective of monistic Materialism/Physicalism, nothing can be immaterial or unreal. The problem with lumping matter & mind into a single category though, is that we can't make the kinds of distinctions that philosophers are interested in. For example, in Plato's allegory of the cave "the shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world."
That's why Aristotle defined a contrast between "Substance" & "Essence". Metaphorically, it's like the difference between your body and its shadow. There is obviously a connection between them, but they are not the same substance. The shadow is not a thing, but merely the absence of light, which we interpret abstractly as-if it's a material thing. The old Peter Pan cartoon had some fun, showing Peter trying to sew his independent minded shadow onto his feet. As a materialist, he was interpreting an abstraction as a substance. Some of our abstractions may have physical instantiations, but some exist only in imaginative minds. :smile:
PS___A unicorn is an abstract idea based on real world experience with horses & narwhals. But we don't go out looking in the real world for an instantiation of the unicorn concept. Unless, that is, our worldview doesn't allow us to make the distinction between an instantiated concrete object and an imagined abstract idea.
I didn't mean to offend you by inquiring into your personal preferences. But, it's that "some other way" definition of immaterial that is controversial. Besides, on this Philosophy Forum, personal feelings about hot-button words are all too often the crux of argumentation on divisive topics, as opposed to dictionary definitions.
As you noted, the use of "immaterial" could be simply a bland acknowledgment of the existence of abstract ideas, or a bitter put-down based on a negative value judgment against alternative belief systems. For example, "matter" & "antimatter" are usually not as emotionally laden as "material" & "immaterial". Some people highly value "spiritual concepts", while others openly despise them, or dismiss them as "immaterial". So, it's the emotional baggage attached to some words that make rational dialog difficult.
It doesn't matter to me personally which side of that divide you are on : a> immaterial good or b> immaterial bad. But in order to communicate I need to know which implicit meaning of the term you are intending. To be explicit, when I use the term "immaterial" or "meta-physical", I'm referring to concepts that may be "unimportant" for scientists, but centrally important for philosophers. Are you approaching the topic from the science side or the philosophy side? :smile:
Immaterial :
1. unimportant under the circumstances; irrelevant.
2. un-real or non-existent
3. Philosophy -- spiritual, rather than physical.
___Oxford
Put-down :
a remark intended to humiliate or criticize someone.
___Oxford
We also have memory and anticipation, which I think are also enabled, or at least greatly augmented, by language. I don't think this means that "the past or future can exist in our brains"; to me that idea doesn't make sense, so I see no need for an alternative. The reason I think it makes little sense is that past and future are just ideas. If they exist at all they exist as now, meaning that when the past existed it was present and when the future will exist it will be the present. Perhaps all moments are always physically existent, just not so for us we crawl through time.
So, I'm not being "resistant", I just don't see the reasoning that leads to your conclusion that "mental content is universally immaterial". I don't even know what that could mean, to be honest. But that's OK; we don't have to agree, it's just a matter of different perspectives.
Quoting Gnomon
You didn't inquire into my personal preferences, but spoke as if you knew what they were, and here you go again; assuming what my personal reactions are. But don't worry, I don't get offended by people in online exchanges, it's just ideas being exchanged, or ignored, or critiqued or whatever.
Quoting Gnomon
I don't see "some other way" as being uncontroversial, but as being philosophically useless unless it is explicated in a cogent manner. I haven't encountered any such explications, on here or anywhere else.
Quoting Gnomon
I'm not attached to any metaphysical views, but I realize that some, in particular those who have developed some kind of system or relate to some pre-existent dogma they are attached to, may have emotional baggage or investment in their ideas and beliefs. If you want to function fruitfully on this forum you would do well to drop such attachments and be open to learning new things. I'm referring here to the general "you" here, not you in particular, just to be clear.
I've seen quite a few people over more than a decade on these and other forums, touting the same set of ideas. like dogs who won't let go of their bones, and I'm astounded how attached some people become to their ideas. They are just ideas, for fuck's sake!
Quoting Gnomon
For me, 'metaphysical' denotes 'speculative ideas about the nature of things', which cannot be empirically tested or logically proven. As such, they may be interesting or not, fruitful for science or not. So, I agree with Popper that (some) metaphysical ideas are not unimportant for scientists, and I also think some metaphysical ideas may be important for some philosophers.
In general, though, I would say that only those metaphysical ideas which are informed by science can be important for philosophy as a whole, since Kant. So, for example, I don't think the idea of God is of much philosophical use these days, which is not to say that it could not be useful to some individuals in relation to their own personal philosophies; it's just that there are some things it is futile arguing for (or against).
So, to sum up, I don't see a division between the "science side" and " the philosophy side". Science informs us about ourselves, but it cannot answer all the questions that may be of importance to people, and it cannot prescribe how people should live either, but those are ethical, not metaphysical, issues.
@Gnomon "Im-material" = not instantiable (i.e. un-observable), ergo in-consequential.
Yes, philosophers have been debating Formalism (Platonism) versus Physicalism for millennia*1. But even Aristotle's theory of physical bodies combined Hyle (concrete matter) with Form (abstract pattern or design)*2. So, it seems that physical stuff and mathematical/logical patterns go together like birds of a feather. In reality, you can't have one without the other. But in ideality, Plato thought that the abstract Idea (form ; concept ; definition ; design ; pattern) of a real thing necessarily existed prior to its instantiation in the material world.
Consequently, a related question remains : which is primary, or which came first : real matter or the ideal potential for matter? The only scientific answer to that query may be the Astrophysics notion of "Singularity"*3. The astronomers traced the current contents of the universe back to near the beginning of space-time. From a Materialism perspective, they imagined that point in pre-time as infinite density of matter (e.g black hole). But from a slightly different angle (Mathism???) they viewed the point of "not yet" as the infinite density of gravity (a mathematical concept)*4. Whatever the Singularity is though, it is not a measurable material object. Hence unreal, or not yet real.
That's why I interpret the Big Bang theory as describing the point in pre-time where Ideality (potential) became Reality (actuality). But then, we could continue to argue about such hypothetical non-empirical concepts for a few more millennia. In the meantime, I agree with both Plato : that "Form is Ideal", and with Aristotle : that "Form + Matter = Real". So the complementary concept of "Ideal + Real = All Possibilities" is Monistic, not Pluralistic. :smile:
*1. Form :
Plato believed that concepts had a universal form, an ideal form, which leads to his idealistic philosophy. Aristotle believed that universal forms were not necessarily attached to each object or concept, and that each instance of an object or a concept had to be analyzed on its own.
https://www.diffen.com/difference/Aristotle_vs_Plato
Note -- Universal form (the idea of a kind of thing) is a category (generalization) that applies to all instances, hence it exists only as an Idea, not a particular thing.
*2. Hylomorphism, (from Greek hyl?, matter; morph?, form), in philosophy, metaphysical view according to which every natural body consists of two intrinsic principles, one potential, namely, primary matter, and one actual, namely, substantial form. It was the central doctrine of Aristotle's philosophy of nature.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/hylomorphism
Note -- Potential is a mathematical (statistical) concept, not a concrete tangible (actual) object
*3. Singularity : PhysicsMathematics
a point at which a function takes an infinite value, especially in space-time when matter is infinitely dense, as at the center of a black hole. ___Oxford
Note -- But philosophers want to know how that pre-real matter came to be compressed into the un-real density of Infinity.
*4. Gravitational Singularity :
A gravitational singularity, spacetime singularity or simply singularity is a condition in which gravity is predicted to be so intense that spacetime itself would break down catastrophically. As such, a singularity is by definition no longer part of the regular spacetime and cannot be determined by "where" or "when".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity
Note -- An indefinite point is immeasurable, hence equivalent to zero (nothingness) or Infinity (everythingness). Or it could be defined as Potential (not yet real) instead of Actual (real thing).
Actually, it's not always "just ideas" that are being exchanged on this forum. Sometimes it's ideas with emotional connotations (feelings) that are used, not to simply convey information, but to sneer at the worldview associated with those words.
As I said above, for all practical purposes, I am a Materialist. But for philosophical purposes, I am an Immaterialist (ideas about ideas). Consequently, when I insist on using immaterial (metaphysical)*2 language on a philosophy forum, some posters get riled-up. Sometimes an inquiry into weltanshauung itself triggers an emotional response*1. Monism is not a specific physical topic, but a general metaphysical belief system.
For example, has made his implicit emotional reaction explicit, as in the post above : "@Gnomon "Im-material" = not instantiable (i.e. un-observable), ergo in-consequential."*3. But in your case, I did not know in advance where you stood. Hence, the question about "personal preferences" of worldview. I want to know which toes are touchy, so I can avoid stepping on them.
Since he has made it clear that he trivializes my "Immaterial" (meta-physical) terminology as "inconsequential", I no longer dialog (dance) with him. On a philosophy forum, I expect metaphysical concepts ("ideas about ideas") to be taken seriously. If I wanted to discuss physical/material objects I would post on a Physics or Chemistry forum. As you said, "it's just ideas" -- immaterial concepts -- "being exchanged". Sticks & stones may step on your toes, but metaphysical words can't hurt you --- or can they? :smile:
*1. A worldview or a world-view or Weltanschauung is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual's or society's knowledge, culture, and point of view.[1] A worldview can include natural philosophy; fundamental, existential, and normative postulates; or themes, values, emotions, and ethics. ____ Wiki
*2. Metaphysics :
Physics is all about nature, natural phenomenon, and our understanding of all relationships while metaphysics also tries to answer "why" questions. Why do we or universe exists or where have we come from and what is the cause of our existence are some of the questions that are tackled by metaphysics.
https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-physics-and-vs-metaphysics/
*3 Inconsequential :insignificant, unimportant, trivial, worthless . . .
___Oxford
Your silly projections aside, Gnomon: given that X is "immaterial" (i.e. not instantiable), what (non-trivial) difference does this X make (i.e. how is X consequential)? :chin:
It seems to me from having observed your interactions over a few years that it is more the case that others think your ideas are under-determined by evidence, and over-determined by arbitrary speculation, and that it is you who becomes defensive and riled up when your ideas are challenged and then go on to project your own anger and defensiveness onto others. That's an honest assessment and not intended as a put-down.
I don't understand why you are apparently so bugged by @180 Proof; it's true he annoys a few posters on here by asking for actual arguments to support their pet theories or speculations. As I see it, he's very well informed philosophically and is providing a good service. If you find yourself being annoyed when your ideas are being challenged, it's a good opportunity to rethink your own assessment of the worth of the ideas you are apparently attached to. (Of course, I'm referring to the general 'you' here).
Quoting Gnomon
Now here's an example of misusing Aristotle: for him form is not "abstract pattern or design" but the substantial actualization of potential (matter) as evidenced by your own footnote:
Quoting Gnomon
Thanks for your honest assessment. But 180 is the only poster on this forum that I cannot communicate with, due to his argumentation by name-calling, and his constant sniping. I may disagree with others, but the dialog usually remains civil. I can usually communicate with you because, even though our worldviews may be different, you don't often descend to snippy sophistry. So in the spirit of an "honest assessment", your attributions to me above are wrong.
FYI, when I followed the term "Form" with parenthetical information, it was not an attribution to (or misuse of) Aristotle; but merely alternative meanings of the word that are pertinent to my argument. I often expand defintions because some posters (especially 180) seem to insist on the simplistic "one word : one meaning" fallacy. In Philosophy though, we have to deal with the complexities of common language. For example, the excerpt below*1 indicates that the term Form was indeed equated with recognizable Patterns, "in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle". Moreover, there are accidental patterns (noise) and intentional or designed patterns (signal). And that distinction does make a difference in philosophical exchanges.
Not to beat a dead horse : In the Hylomorphism quote from my post, Aristotle makes a pertinent distinction between Potential (not yet real ; insubstantial) and Actual (substantial) Form. So, I was not "misusing" Aristotle. Your own preferred definition of Potential as "substantial actualization of potential", is in agreement with my assertion that, prior to actualization, Form is an unreal abstract idea : a pattern in the mind, not in matter*2. Do you agree that Abstractions are patterns stripped of substance? If so, then we can continue to discuss Monism. :smile:
*1. Form, In the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle the active, determining principle of a thing. The term was traditionally used to translate Platos eidos, by which he meant the permanent reality that makes a thing what it is, in contrast to the particulars that are finite and subject to change. Each form is the pattern of a particular category of thing in the world;
https://www.britannica.com/summary/form-philosophy
*2. Is potential real? :
Potential generally refers to a currently unrealized ability.
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/54962/is-potential-real
Quoting Gnomon
I agree Aristotle makes a distinction between potential and actual. but I don't read him as thinking of potential as 'Insubstantial form" but as "primary matter" which I take to mean formless matter. We were not discussing Plato, but again I don't understand Plato's forms to be "abstract patterns" but rather understood to be things more real than actual forms.
For example, Aristotle, as I understand it, thought the form of the oak was in potential in the acorn, but not as something abstract, but a kind of real "concrete" potential. However, I am no scholar of Ancient Greek philosophy, and I welcome correction (or confirmation) by someone more knowledgeable; perhaps @Fooloso4 might weigh in on this.
I think of "abstract" as denoting general ideas which are arrived at by abstracting away from the concrete details of particulars to arrive at common patterns or structures, so abstractions in this sense would be secondary and derivative, not primary and determining.
There are two senses of "form" in Aristotle, one is the formula, abstract pattern or design, the other is the form of the individual, particular object, as united with the matter in hylomorphism.
Quoting Gnomon
I would say that this is essentially correct. The abstraction, or "pattern" referred to here is "the form" in the sense of the formula, but the accidentals are proper to the form of the individual, and therefore not included in the abstracted form. This is the independent form, the form of the particular.
Quoting Gnomon
This is the important point, form is what is active or actual. So there are two sources of activity for Aristotle, and this completes Plato's resolution to the supposed "interaction problem" of dualism, making dualism much more sound. One source of actuality, or causation is found within the mind, as the source of intentional acts (final cause), and the other source is found within the external world as the independent forms of material objects.
Quoting Janus
Aristotle discusses the possibility of prime matter, as pure potential, but refutes this possibility as actually impossible, with the cosmological argument. This argument shows that if there ever was a time when there was matter and no form (prime matter), there would always be matter with no form, eternally, because prime matter could not actualize itself. But what we find in reality, is that there truly is form, actuality. Therefore it is impossible that there ever was matter without any form, prime matter.
According to Aristotle, living beings, ousiai (substances is a misleading translation from the Latin) are formed matter. Form, eidos, and matter, hule, are inseparable.
Joe Sachs explains it this way:
Aristotle rejects the idea that forms are patterns (Metaphysics 991a-b).
With regard to telos Sachs says:
I'm also not an authority on Plato or Aristotle, but my information-centric philosophy incorporates several of their ideas where relevant to quantum & information theory. My unconventional usage of terms like "abstract patterns" may be unfamiliar to those who are not conversant with some of the ideas coming out of quantum physics and information science. Some of those "weird" notions could be described as Platonic. For Plato, the idea or meaning or model or definition or design of a thing is its ideal Pattern*1. The rational mind recognizes abstract patterns in concrete things that are characteristic or typical of other similar things. Moreover, from a single Abstract or Potential pattern, many similar Real or Actual objects can be instantiated*2.
For example, as an architect, I create nonphysical "forms" (ideas) in my mind, then transfer that abstract design pattern onto paper to communicate the idea. So that later the abstract conceptual pattern can be constructed (in wood, stone & brick) to create a real enformed object (pattern + matter) that we call a "house". The bricks lying randomly on the ground would be "formless matter", and meaningless to the physical senses. However, the matterless forms or patterns (blueprints) are readily imaginable & meaningful to a rational mind that is trained to interpret those abstract patterns*3.
There are at least two kinds of "form" : Real Forms (physical instantiations) and Ideal Forms (mental abstractions). Metaphorically, those mental images have no "flesh" on their bones. So they could be described as "abstract patterns" or " "defleshed skeletons". But from a more common perspective, "formless matter" would be meaningless, like an "undefined definition". Material objects are the Real Forms from which we humans abstract ideas of Potential things (statistically possible, but not yet actualized). For example, in ancient times some people imagined Dragons, even though they had never seen one. Perhaps they combined three real patterns (definitions) : lizards, bats, and Greek Fire (flame throwing weapon) into a single abstract (unreal) concept : a flying, flame-throwing reptile.
When Plato asserted that Ideals are "more Real" than physical instantiations, he actually meant that they are "more Perfect". That's because material reality imposes physical limits on things, that could be ignored in an immaterial Ideal world. When an idealized house plan is converted into a real building, many compromises must be made to accommodate physical constraints. For example, Frank Lloyd Wright sometimes designed cantilevered roof overhangs that later drooped, because the wooden structure lost rigidity over time. He also designed beautiful innovative windows & skylights that later leaked, because the sealants available at the time deteriorated under ultraviolet light, and allowed water to penetrate. So, FLW was often described as "ahead of his time", and it took years for Actual technology to catch-up with his Potential imagination. :smile:
*1. Platonic idealism is the theory that the substantive reality around us is only a reflection of a higher truth. That truth, Plato argued, is the abstraction. He believed that ideas were more real than things. He developed a vision of two worlds: a world of unchanging ideas and a world of changing physical objects.
https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Platonic_idealism
*2. Forms :
Platonic Forms are Archetypes : the original pattern or model of which all things of the same type are representations or copies. Eternal metaphysical Forms are distinguished from temporal physical Things. These perfect models are like imaginary designs from which Things can be built.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
*3. Abstraction :
The essence of abstraction is preserving information that is relevant in a given context, and forgetting information that is irrelevant in that context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(computer_science)
A BLUEPRINT IS NOT A HABITABLE HOUSE, but it is imaginable
Can you cite a passage from Aristotle where he speaks about abstract pattern or design?
Quoting Fooloso4
Thanks, I'll check that reference.
Thanks for giving me a rundown of your understanding of form and matter; I didn't find that to be unfamiliar or contentious.
You have given two footnote references to Plato's ideas, but we were discussing Aristotle's understanding of form. not Plato's. Also, one of your footnotes appears to be your own writing amd the other does not seem to come from a scholarly source.
If we are going to cite Aristotle or Plato on these questions, I want to know what they thought, not what you or someone other internet poster thinks about what they thought.
Leaving the Ancients aside, my own understanding is that form and matter are inseparable. The blueprint drawing you showed is just another example of configured material: in this case ink on paper or pixels on a screen. It's true that it represents something else: a house that may or may not be built, but my main point is that patterns are never abstract but are always materially instantiated.
Yes. I don't know how the experts interpret the slightly different Plato/Aristotle worldviews. But I get the impression that Plato imagined a Dualistic world, composed of both Ideal and Real stuff. Yet, Aristotle tried to merge Plato's duality into a Monistic worldview with his Hylomorphic theory*1. Apparently, the early Catholic theologians also tried to have it both ways : Physical and Metaphysical. They adopted Plato's Ideal realm as a heavenly or spiritual "uber-reality" in their Super-natural musings, and used Aristotle's more physical/material worldview as the basis for Natural Philosophy, which eventually became modern Science : always searching for useful functional patterns in Nature*2. Consequently, philosophy has been schizophrenic ever since.
The April/May issue of Philosophy Now magazine has an article entitled : How Descartes Inspired Science. The author notes that Descartes' mechanical model of reality was adopted by later scientists. Ironically, in his more theoretical & idealistic writings, Rene seemed to be a Dualist, as indicated by his Body/Soul model. In his Principles of Philosophy, he wrote : "We likewise discover that there cannot exist any atoms of matter that are of their own nature indivisible". The article then infers that, "In other words, atoms may not be actually infinitely divided, but they can be divided indefinitely". {my bold} To that, I would add that it's the imaginative mind that can "divide [ideas] indefinitely". {my brackets}
The article goes on to describe how Quantum scientists, eventually, were forced by their evidence to divide uncuttable Atoms indefinitely. "Murray Gell-Mann, then proposed the existence of Quarks, the particles that themselves make up protons and neutrons." And so-on to this day, they keep finding ever smaller constituents of the former fundamental element of Reality. On the other hand, mathematical quantum theorists have abandoned Monistic Atomism altogether, in favor of Quantum Field Theory*3, in which the defining "patterns of points" are abstract mathematical locations in space, in the form of cartesian coordinates. That continuing trend indicates to me that in theory (ideality), humans can divide reality indefinitely. :smile:
*1.Aristotles Categories :
Whereas Plato treated the abstract as more real than material particulars, in the Categories Aristotle takes material particulars as ontological bedrock to the extent that being a primary substance makes something more real than anything else,
Note -- I don't know if the ancient Greeks had a word equivalent to our modern notion of "Abstraction". Our term derived from the Latin "to remove, or forcibly pull away". Likewise, the notion of "pattern" may also be a modern concept, especially in Information theory. However, in his Four Causes, "Form" is often translated as "pattern" or "design".
*2. Pattern : anything cognizable
" Aristotle coined the word [i]syllogism for any valid pattern of inference[/i]"
http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/aristo.pdf
*3. In theoretical physics, quantum field theory is a theoretical framework that combines classical field theory, special relativity, and quantum mechanics. QFT is used in particle physics to construct physical models of subatomic particles and in condensed matter physics to construct models of quasiparticles. ___Wikipedia
Note -- What Wiki calls "quasi" [not quite real] particles are labeled by others as "virtual" particles, which implies that they are not physically existing, but are merely hypothetical entities
Note on Design Intent :
For Architects and other designers, the Design Intent is to create a physical Form which fulfills pre-specified functional requirements. Without intention the resulting Form would be accidental, probably non-functional, but definitely un-designed.
The thing itself does not yet exist and isn't the state of neurons alone but the forming of a state of neurons to fulfill a design requirement. The process is best understood as the manipulation of the non-physical or the immaterial.
If you won't take my word for it, I think it's best if you do your own reading. Otherwise I might just use Fooloso4's technique of taking quotes out of context, and giving inappropriate meaning to those quotes.
I suggest you start with his Physics to get a good preliminary and basic understanding, where form is said to be the formula, statement of essence, or definition. Then in On the Soul he describes the two distinct types of actuality, or form. To understand how form is the design of a thing, read Metaphysics Bk 7 very carefully. Happy reading!
As I said, I don't see much point in quoting passages. Read carefully Metaphysics Bk 7, though, that might help you. You ought to find that in Ch 7 he specifically focuses on things which come to be by design. He compares and discusses the similarities between things which are produced by art, and things produced by nature: "...but from art proceed the things of which the form is in the soul of the artist." 1031a, 34.
If you want to know what Aristotle & Plato thought on a particular question, you'll have to consult those authorities directly. But then, you'll have have to do the work of reconciling their differences into a single concept. On the other hand, if you want to know what a mere forum poster thinks on that question, you may have to endure some personal opinions and indirect references to the wisdom of the past. Since A & P literally wrote the book on Philosophy, anything I or anyone else might say will be merely footnotes*1 to those auteurs.
Apparently, you are only willing to accept the manifesto assertions of authorities on the subject, and not the humble suggestions of mere amateurs. FWIW, my understanding of the relationship between Form and Matter derives mostly from modern Quantum Physics and Information Theory. And I frequently add quotes & links to those sources. In my view, the ancient concept of "Form" is now known as "Information" (the power to enform)*2. Therefore, links to my own writings are more to the point I'm making.
For Aristotle, Form & Matter are inter-related as dual principles. But, in my thesis, I go on to propose a monistic Ontology/Epistemology, in which the power to join potential Form with actual Matter is the ultimate principle : EnFormAction*3. And what joins (Energy) can also dis-join (Entropy). I'll apologize in advance, for adding a link to my own non-authoritarian ideas. :smile:
*1. The renowned British philosopher A.N Whitehead once commented on Plato's thought: The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings.
https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/whitehead-plato
*2. Is it possible that everything is made of information? :
That's certainly a conjecture that was held by John Wheeler. This idea has gained more traction as the field of quantum information theory has developed. . . . It then becomes also self evident that everything is made of information as that is the essential definition of epistemology.
___Mark John Fernee , 20+ years as a physicist
*3. The EnFormAction Hypothesis :
Unsatisfied with religious myths and scientific paradigms, I have begun to develop my own personal philosophical world-view, based on the hypothesis that immaterial logico-mathematical "Information" (in both noun & verb forms) is more fundamental to our reality than the elements of classical philosophy and the matter & energy of modern Materialism. For technical treatments, I had to make-up a new word to summarize the multilevel and multiform roles of generic Information in the ongoing creative act of Evolution. I call it EnFormAction.
https://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
I would question your idea that information is the most fundamental thing but since you gave your references I'll check that out if I can get to it.
My view is information (not the abstract consept definition but as it physically exists as brain state) is on the derived complex end of the spectrum... existing in emergent and well developed biological brains.
I don't mind hearing about one or the other or any alternatives. There will be physical scales associated with any model and all the details need to be addressed like chain of control from the micro to the macro worlds.
Sure check it out. Skepticism is good ; especially when presented with novel or unconventional ideas : informed skepticism. Most people are only aware of Shannon's definition of Information, and its relationship to computers*1. But quantum physicists are now equating Information (the power to enform or to transform) with Energy. That's why I refer to the "most fundamental thing" as Generic Information*2. That's my term, not the physicists'. Note -- I spell "inform" with an "e" to distinguish it from data processing, and to indicate its relationship to causal Energy.
To give you an idea what I'm talking about, imagine that "in the beginning there was Generic Information, and that information begat Energy, and causal Energy begat Matter, and energized matter begat Mind". If that sounds like a fairy tale, wait until you hear the rest of the story. It's the story of Genesis, but as told by scientists, not ancient priests. The Big Bang theory assumes as an axiom that Energy & Laws (Enformation) existed prior to the beginning. And that's the key to a modern Monistic (all is information) worldview*3.
In my thesis, Generic Information exists in the form of both physical Neurons and metaphysical Brain States. "States" are not things, but (logico-mathematical) relationships between things. And it's the human mind's unique ability to recognize those immaterial patterns & states that has allowed humans to create and live-in artificial environments. Note --- "artifice" is similar to the "design" you referred to.
There's a lot of information out there about "Fundamental Information", but you have to go looking for it. And then you'll have to tie all those separate lines of information together. I list a few websites below. And the Enformationism thesis and blog have hundreds of references. One physicist in particular, Paul Davies*4, has been promoting this novel way of thinking about Information, in regard to both physics (matter) and metaphysics (mind), for years. :smile:
*1. Information, What Is It?
Claude Shannons Information is functional, but not meaningful. So now, Deacon turns the spotlight on the message rather than the medium.
http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page26.html
*2. Generic Information :
Several physicists and Neuroscientists of the 21st century have revived the ancient term Panpsychism to represent the evidence that metaphysical Consciousness (in the generic form of Information) is the primary element from which all physical and mental forms of the current world emerged.
https://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page29.html
*3. Monism :
One sense of non-dual is the opposite of Cartesian dualism, in which body & soul are completely different kinds of stuff. But if everything is made of Mind, or Consciousness, or Information as assumed in Panpsychism then Mind is simply the natural-but-immaterial function of the material Brain.
https://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page62.html
Note -- For the record, I'm not promoting Panpsychism, but quite a few physicists & cosmologists are using that term to describe what I call Enformationism.
*4. Paul Davies :
https://cosmos.asu.edu/
Is Information Fundamental for a Scientific Theory of Consciousness?
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-10-5777-9_21
Forget Space-Time: Information May Create the Cosmos
https://www.space.com/29477-did-information-create-the-cosmos.html
Is Information Fundamental?
https://closertotruth.com/video/llose-003/?referrer=8329
Chapter 1: Information is Fundamental
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/9789811234101_0001
I don't get to deep into the quantum stuff because you should understand the math first before you even have an opinion and, beware, a lot of the people writing about this for mass audiences are clueless.
Maybe just check backgrounds, but even some of the scientists seem a little off.
Again, you are making unwarranted assumptions about me. I am willing to accept anything that seems plausible to me, that is sufficiently enough supported by cogent argument and/ or evidence to be convincing enough to at least be entertained, if not believed, whether it comes from amateurs or professionals.
I'm familiar enough with the idea that information is metaphysically fundamental to know that it seems that position cannot be coherently expressed; it always just seems to consist in some kind of handwaving exercise. The very idea of information that is not physically instantiated makes no sense at all to me. The medium of conveyance of information, and the energy necessary to convey it, must be more fundamental than what is conveyed, in other words, or so it seems to me.
As I said, in Aristotle there are two senses of "form".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Someone might say one or the other is "first and foremost" but what would one base that judgement on?
I accept the other sense, but all I am asking for is textual evidence for the above sense as being more, something ontologically fundamental and at the same time "abstract" according to Aristotle, than merely the commonsensically obvious fact that every particular form or pattern can be reproduced, copied or visualized.
In short, as I see it. abstractions are not primary or fundamental they are abstracted from particulars, so they are therefore secondary and derivative.
Quoting Janus
:up: :up:
I told you, Metaphysics Bk 7, Ch 7. I even gave a brief quote. The form of the artificial thing comes from within the artist. This is not a reproduction or copy, it is 'the design'. In this section, Aristotle compares the coming-into-being of artificial things with the coming-into-being of natural things. This form of the thing, what the thing will be when it comes into existence, is prior in time to the thing, it is not derivative.
He has at this point, already demonstrated that the form of a material thing is necessarily prior to the material existence of the thing, as the cause of the thing being what it is, and not something else (necessitated by the law of identity). So he proceeds to inquire 'where' the form comes from. In articles of art, the form comes from the soul of the artist, but in natural things the question is much more difficult. The acorn provides an example. I discussed this section with @Dfpolis extensively in the past. Df insisted, at that time, that the form is intrinsic to, or inherent within the matter, I think that Aristotle demonstrated a similarity between natural things and artificial things, showing that the form comes from somewhere other than the matter, like the soul of the artist.
Hi!
Browsing the "All Discussions" page, I keep seeing "Why Monism?" among the topics, updated everyday, and this question has started to haunt me! :grin:
The discussion has reached 7 pages and I can't read thoroughly every comment to find some answer, or at least a frame of reference within which this question is explicitly answered or posited.
Yet, I'm still interested in it since the first day I read about this topic and responded to it ...
So, since it's your topic and you are watching its progress, can you tell me anything that supports the question "Why Monism?" and can maybe remove at least some part of the mystery it created in me? :smile:
As a scientific perspective, Monism could be construed as reductionist in that it reduces complexity & plurality down to a single principle, as in Spinoza's single substance "god sive natura". But as a philosophical worldview Monism is Holistic, in that it combines many parts into a single integrated system. Some call that system "universe" (implying all-encompassing), and others call it "Nature" (implying reality as opposed to super-natural), but more poetic scientists, such as Einstein, dare to refer that unity-of-all-things as "God"*1.
Harold Morowitz is "a leading figure in the science of complexity". In his book The Emergence of Everything, he writes : "Emergence is the opposite of reduction"*2. He goes on to define "emergence" in terms of Holism : "These are the emergent properties of the system, properties of the whole. They are novelties that follow from the system rules but cannot be predicted from properties of the components that make up the system". {my bold}
A Holistic & Monistic understanding of the universe has important philosophical consequences*3. Morowitz has the temerity to propose, in a science book, that "those studying natural Complexity should pay attention to the Idealist philosophical tradition". Again, some on this forum would consider such talk as blasphemy against Classical Science. What do you think about Monism & Holism? Are those notions too spooky for you? :smile:
*1. "God does not play dice" Albert Einstein once said, expressing his contempt for the notion that the universe is governed by probability - an idea fundamental to quantum theory.
https://plus.maths.org/content/why-god-plays-dice
Note --- Probability is essential to the science of complexity, and computers are unperturbed by the uncertainty of statistical laws of nature.
*2. In the Emergence thread on this forum, the notion of progressive directional emergence was shouted down, probably because as a non-reductionist concept it seemed to be anti-scientific to some posters. But the science of Complexity is a 21st century phenomenon, because a multiplicity of things is confusing to the analog human mind, but not to digital computers. In the book mentioned above, I made a marginal note : "classical science is reductive and elemental. The next phase of science will be pro-ductive and holistic. Now that we know the elements [including sub-atomic particles] we can begin to see how they work together to create holons that are, in turn, the elements for the next level of complexity".
Note --- A holon is something that is simultaneously a whole in and of itself, as well as a part of a larger whole.
*3. One novel idea to emerge from the science of Complexity is the notion that Mind is inherent in the rules of physics. Morowitz noted that "the reductionist behaviorist traditions would argue that mind is an epiphenomenon of the activities of collections of neurons". Then he argued that "the pruning rules of the emergences may go beyond the purely dynamic and exhibit a noetic character. It ultimately evolves into mind, not as something that suddenly appears, but as a maturing character of an aging universe".
Note --- Noetic : relating to mental activity or the intellect.
Ironically, Time Reversal has been interpreted from observations of experiments. But they don't know how that glitch might affect our perception of forward flowing time. Time reversal is an abstract mathematical phenomenon that doesn't seem to be translated into concrete physics. So, why would it be worth mentioning in a discussion of Monism?
I was forced to get somewhat deep into the philosophical implications of "Quantum Stuff", without understanding the math, because of my interest in Information theory. Even the scientists themselves don't understand the meaning of the math*1. All they know is that it reliably predicts the outcome of experiments. The pioneers of sub-atomic science were baffled by the counter-intuitive implications of such phenomena as Superposition and Entanglement. So, they used metaphorical language to make some sense of it.
Likewise, philosophers don't have to do the math in order to derive some meaning (some clues) from the uncertainties of quantum math. Theoretical Philosophy is not constrained by the mathematical requirements of Empirical Science. :smile:
PS__Most of what I learned about Quantum Physics was derived from the dumbed-down writings of mathematical scientists for a popular audience.
*1. Shut-up and calculate :
The cliché has it that the Copenhagen interpretation demands adherence without deep enquiry. That does physics a disservice
https://aeon.co/essays/shut-up-and-calculate-does-a-disservice-to-quantum-mechanics
*2. Poetic Metaphors in Philosophy :
According to this view, metaphors can be characterized as-strictly speaking-non-philosophical but extrinsic to constitutive forms in constructing theories. In this view, their function is not to explain, and they cannot be used as arguments. But, often they contain numerous implications with value for innovation, as they can anticipate holistic projections which are not yet fulfilled by theoretical analysis.
https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Meth/MethPere.htm
There you go again : accusing me of accusing you of something nefarious. Rather than "unwarranted assumptions," my rephrasing of your posts is an attempt put them into words that I can understand. If your words were clear to me, I wouldn't have to make assumptions. If my interpretation is wrong, please correct my "assumptions". This kind of re-phrasing is common in philosophical dialog. The "warrant" is in the ambiguity. :smile:
Note --- The pertinent assumption (interpretation) was in the second phrase. Is it true (warranted) that you don't want to hear what amateur philosophers have to say about the ideas of ancient authorities? If not, would you clarify what you meant by "not what you or someone other internet poster thinks about what they thought".
My interpretation of your intention :
"Apparently, you are only willing to accept the manifesto assertions of authorities on the subject, and not the humble suggestions of mere amateurs".
Since I came late to this thread, I haven't directly commented on the OP. So here goes.:
Fooloso4 seems to imply that Monism is a fearful attempt to avoid the "abyss of nothingness". But your rational response turns the imputed "fear" into a search for clarity. "Taken to its logical conclusion, the explanatory path must finally lead to that which is unique and absolutely uncomplex." The principle of simplicity is inherent in both philosophical argumentation and scientific experimentation.
From that perspective, Monism is simply a result of applying Ockham's Razor to the whole universe. Unfortunately, that notion could also imply the necessity for a singular Necessary Being or Supreme Reality, or other holistic notions that do not appeal to the pluralistic Reductive Mind, which favors parts over wholes. Is a singular Ground of Being a fear-inducing concept? :smile:
Simplicity theory is a cognitive theory that seeks to explain the attractiveness of situations or events to human minds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicity_theory
The view that simplicity is a virtue in scientific theories and that, other things being equal, simpler theories should be preferred to more complex ones has been widely advocated in the history of science and philosophy, and it remains widely held by modern scientists and philosophers of science. It often goes by the name of Ockhams Razor.
https://iep.utm.edu/simplici/
Here's worthwhile video called The Coherence of Platonism by Irish youtuber Keith Woods. It's a talk on Lloyd Gerson's book, Platonism and Naturalism. The jacket copy:
A modern equivalent would be Cognitive Behavior Therapy or Gestalt Therapy: if you undertake that practice, you are not there to argue about their different metaphysical or phenomenological claims, but rather to accept the set of ideas that constitute the therapy and practice in accordance with them to (hopefully) gain the result.
So, as Hadot points out Stoicism, Skepticism, Cynicism, Epicureanism, Platonism and Neoplatonism all had very different sets of metaphysical ideas, but they were all similar in there status as philosophical and ethical practices designed to live in better ways. Epicureanism, for example, explicitly rejects the idea of afterlife.
So, I don't think you can cite Hadot to support any contention that it was the metaphysical ideas in the ancient philosophies that were of primary importance: it is more likely that such ideas were as diverse within the systems as were the different kinds of people with their different mindsets, that they sought to attract.
Do you really want to argue that Aristotle knew about DNA?
:clap: :fire: Excellent synopsis!
Your background understanding of the nature of the world will have a bearing on your practice. If you accept the materialist attitude that the Universe is inherently unintelligible and that life is the product of chemical necessity, it's hard to see how you could incorporate any kind of stoicism as anything other than personal affect. The Stoics, while materialist, also believed that the universe was animated by the Logos. The entire milieu of ancient philosophy was spiritual in a way that can be challenging to the modern attitude.
The passage I linked to from Hadot put it like this:
Whether you believe in an afterlife, in resurrection, rebirth or reincarnation or you don't believe in any afterlife at all is irrelevant. I find it most plausible to think that people are simply attracted to systems that accord with their personal views.
This is evidenced by the diversity and incompatibility of the metaphysical views associated with the various practices and cultures throughout history.
As to believing in an afterlife it can be plausibly argued that such beliefs are motivated by self-concern, and so if anything, might be thought to work against achieving equanimity and non-attachment to ideas of self and self-interest in general.
The burgeoning secular buddhist movement also speaks in favour of thinking that ideas like karma and rebirth are unnecessary to spiritual practice.
Quoting Janus
N?g?rjuna said that all spiritual teachings are like a stick you use to poke the fire. When the fire is well alight you can thrown the stick in with it. But only then.
That says nothing about having to entertain any particular metaphysics in order to practice. Of course if you are drawn to a particular tradition with its particular set of metaphysical views you are not there to question the views, but to use them as aids and/ or inspiration for practice. Different traditions have different views and practices and will appeal to different aspirants.
Ancient philosphy, according to Hadot, consisted in several such schools or traditions. Nowadays there are schools which eschew metaphysical concerns altogether in favour of workable techniques. What is important is what works, and that will differ depending on the individual.
We all seem to enjoy thrashing out these issues, maybe by way of diversion. I don't see any profoundly important moral battle going on between metaphysical materialism and spiritualism in modernity.
The only form of materialism I find ethically and spiritually compromising is the kind of materialism that consists in attachment to excessive material profit, wealth and status, and I think that exists equally among people of all kinds of metaphysical persuasions.
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.063.than.html
:100: :up:
Quoting Janus
Again. :up: Nicely put.
Unless they turn out to be fallacious. Ideas have consequences.
What Aristotle shows is that there necessarily is a form (actuality) which is prior to the potential (matter) of the acorn. This would be the prior oak tree. The prior oak tree puts the form into the acorn, and the existence of the acorn, as the potential for another tree is dependent on the existence of that prior form, the tree, as cause, just like art is dependent on the artist who puts the form into the piece of art.
This would be similar to the which came first, chicken or egg question. When it is put in terms of "actual" (form) and "potential" (matter), Aristotle shows why potential is always dependent on a prior actuality, so actuality is necessarily first. This is known as the cosmological argument, and the Christian theologists have adopted this necessary, prior actuality, as God.
The ensuing issue which is evident, is that from the materialist/physicalist perspective, we look at the temporal existence of physical objects, and we realize that in every case the potential for the object precedes the actual material existence of the object. The simplistic, monist, inclination tends toward the conclusion that potential is prior to actual, because of this materialist/physicalist perspective which inclines us to think in this way. Furthermore, our conceptions of time tend to bind time with physical/material actuality. This allows the materialist/physicalist to simply assume an unintelligible origin to material existence, as the potential for actual material existence is represented as prior to time.
The problem with this materialist/physicalist, monist, perspective which Aristotle demonstrates, is an issue with the nature of "potential". Potential provides the possibility to be actualized in a number of different ways. Not any single, specific actuality is necessitated by a condition of potential. But since there is in reality, one specific and particular actuality which proceeds (we might say emerges) from any condition of potential, we need to assume a cause of that particular actuality. There is a reason (cause) of why one particular actuality is derived from any condition of potential, rather than some other particular actuality. This is known as the contingency of material/physical existence. "Contingent existence" means that the particular material object which exists was necessitated by a cause. It is contingent on a cause. This cause is the necessary actuality, and the need to assume such an actuality negates the possibility of potential being prior to actual, in an absolute sense.
Quoting Janus
What I am claiming, is what Aristotle actually painstakingly demonstrates. The prior actuality, which comes from "somewhere else", is not properly represented by spatial terms. In his "On the Soul" the soul is described as that prior actuality. And, he makes an effort to show that it is a mistake to represent this immaterial existence in spatial terms. In his "Metaphysics" he demonstrates why it is necessary to assume an actuality (Form) which is prior to all material existence (cosmological argument).
Quoting Janus
Don't you think that the presence of DNA requires a cause? If "DNA" represents the potential for a living body, and DNA exists as an actual material form (itself a material object), wouldn't you think that it's reasonable to believe that there is a specific cause of this particular and unique material object?
Suppose that prior to the existence of DNA there is some sort of "matter" which would serve as the potential for DNA. This matter would have to have a particular form to serve as that potential. Then we would have to assume another potential as prior to that form. As we proceed in this way, to avoid infinite regress, and also to properly represent the reality of the situation, the "potential" involved becomes more and more general, providing a wider range of possibility. So each time we step backward in time, toward the original material condition of possibility, the range of possibility gets greater, approaching infinity as the limit, in the manner of calculus. Consequently, the materialist perspective is to assume an original infinite potential (in Aristotelian terms, prime matter).
The cosmological argument shows the deficiency of this perspective. What happens, is that when we look backward in this way, toward the wider and wider range of possibility, the cause which 'chooses' to actualize this particular actuality rather than some other, becomes more and more important, as providing significant and very important direction. So the actuality which corresponds with this proposed possibility becomes more and more significant, in the sense of important or meaningful. In the case of your example, DNA, you can see that the actuality which 'chose' to create DNA, and not something random, is extremely significant. As we approach the limit, the proposed infinite potential, the magnitude of potential (number of possibilities) would get so high, and coincident to that (to provide the reality of that very high degree of possibility), the level of actuality must be conceived of as extremely low. However, the first step, of that actualizing cause, to go in the required direction, is at a correspondingly high (approaching infinite) level of importance, and this is not provided for by that extremely low level of actuality, logically necessitated by the high magnitude of possibility.. So the idea of that extremely important actualizing first cause, coming from that very low degree of actuality provided by the almost infinite potential, becomes just as highly (approaching infinity) improbable.
One problem I see is if brains handle non-physical content then when you scale down there is no physically simple mechanism that exists to do that.
Just some observation might give some understanding though. This containing of non-physicals occurs in masses of neurons in neural networks that are connected to our senses and muscles through our central nervous system. This brings things to the physical scale we deal with.
If you want to propose information at the quantum level, then there is the problem of chain of control all the way from quantum events to our physical scale. The biological solution seems much more plausible.
I think the Dualist view might have better instincts about what mind is and the Monist view puts things off limits that should be part of philosophy.
Quoting Janus
That response misses the point that Wayfarer was making. Of course Ari did not know the modern concept of DNA as a physical repository of genetic information. But, he captured the basic idea metaphorically, by using the philosophical concept of "Form". In his Hylomorph theory he made a pertinent distinction between physical Matter and metaphysical*1 Form. Those categories are equivalent to Quanta (res extensa) [that which you see] and Qualia (res cogitans) [that which you know]. Therefore, DNA could also be defined in Hylomorphic terms, as a combination of quantitative Matter (deoxyribonucleaic acid) and qualitative Form (genetic information).
The modern scientific concept of "Information" is similar to Aristotle's, in that it can exist both as mental logical pattern (general ; transcendent) and as material instantiation (specific ; immanent). Before Shannon, the word "information" referred only to the invisible intangible contents of private minds (ideas ; meanings). After Shannon, "information" was found to be transformable from res cogitans (ideas) into res extensa (objects). So, now Information is known to be both mental and material. FYI, that's the basis of my personal BothAnd worldview.
In the example of DNA, the instructions (design) for building a body are recorded in hundreds of spermata (blueprints), but normally only one instance of that design is actually constructed of protein building blocks. All the other wiggly packages of Potential are summarily erased, without being Actualized. By that, I mean the physical containers of metaphysical data are deconstructed by enzymes. So yes, the Form (data) is immanent (embedded ; recorded) in the physical acorn, but the Information (design) itself exists nowhere as non-physical logico-mathematical patterns (inter-relationships). In what sense does Math or Logic exist : extensa or cogitans? :smile:
*1. I use the term "Meta-physical" in the non-religious non-super-natural sense of merely non-physical or im-material. It's simply the abstract mind-stuff we call "ideas" or "meanings". There are no abstractions in reality, only in ideality. Those private ideas can only be conveyed to others when they are expressed in physical vibrations or light reflectance. But they exist covertly in the metaphysical container we call "Mind" to distinguish it from the physical machine known as "brain".
You discount the most useful functions of brains if you rule out the ability to process non-physicals.
Pi for example is a non-physical... It does not physically exist. A ratio of circle circumference to diameter. Basic math, and it's a manipulations of brain states like this that are what information is about. Compare that to DNA molecules that are physically fixed and obviously they are not the same thing.
We agree that non-physicals do not exist, but what about brain contained non-physicals. I say that does exist and we use it all the time.
Yes. Information is multi-faceted. It is universal, but emergent, and expressed in many different ways : ideas, data, genes, rocks, quantum bits, etc.--- even as Time/Change. If you want to blow your "information repository" (mind), check out the article*1 below by Sarah Walker, of the Santa Fe Institute for the study of Complexity. Her novel theory says that evanescent Time has a physical size, depending on the amount of information contained. It's OK to be incredulous --- I was, am --- but when you think about it, it makes sense, that Time is something a sentient observer can sense --- not by sniffing, but by reasoning.
Oh no, I don't rule-out the ability to process non-physical stuff. I explicitly rule it in. As I have come to understand it, largely by learning about quantum weirdness, Information exists in our world as both Mind (conscious matter) and Matter (physical forms)*2. So, for me, it now makes sense that a material information processor (brain) can generate the "non-physical" outputs that we call Ideas (as contrasted with Real objects). This theory is a novel form of Monism*3. :smile:
*1. Time is an object with physical size :
A new form of physics called assembly theory suggests that a moving, directional sense of time is real and fundamental. It suggests that the complex objects in our Universe that have been made by life, including microbes, computers and cities, do not exist outside of time: they are impossible without the movement of time. From this perspective, the passing of time is not only intrinsic to the evolution of life or our experience of the Universe. It is also the ever-moving material fabric of the Universe itself. Time is an object. It has a physical size, like space. And it can be measured at a molecular level in laboratories.
https://aeon.co/essays/time-is-not-an-illusion-its-an-object-with-physical-size
*2. Mind/Body Problem :
[i]Philosophers and scientists have long debated the relationship between a physical body and its non-physical properties, such as Life & Mind. Cartesian Dualism resolved the problem temporarily by separating the religious implications of metaphysics (Soul) from the scientific study of physics (Body). But now scientists are beginning to study the mind with their precise instruments, and have found no line of demarcation. So, they see no need for the hypothesis of a spiritual Soul added to the body by God. However, Enformationism resolves the problem by a return to Monism, except that the fundamental substance is meta-physical Information instead of physical Matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page15.html
*3. Information is :
[i]*** Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world.
*** For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such.
*** When spelled with an I, Information is a noun, referring to data & things. When spelled with an E, Enformation is a verb, referring to energy and processes.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
(... an operational definition rather than a platonic reification fallacy ...)
@Gnomon @Wayfarer @Janus @Fooloso4
Thoughts?
Isnt Aristotle (and his teacher) one of the main reasons the scientific revolution happened in Europe and not India or China? (Excellent undergrad essay topic.)
Quoting Mark Nyquist
The same goes for numbers generally, and any number of other intellectual objects, such as rules, laws, conventions and logical principles. Theyre all constituents of rational thought, and none of them physical (although purportedly supervening on it whatever that is taken to mean.)
I already acknowledged that Aristotle's hylomorphism was prescient, so I don't know what point you think I missed. I do disagree with "metaphysical form"; the very idea seems meaningless to me; all forms are physical as far as I know.
I don't see any fundamental difference between mental and physical, so, nothing you've said there convinces me that mental information is not supervenient on physical processes.
Cheers Tom
Quoting Wayfarer
If an idea makes you miserable, or afraid, or ecstatic then yes it can have consequences. But such responses are not inherent in the idea: the same idea might make one person afraid and another ecstatic, for example.
Perhaps you are suggesting ideas might have afterlife consequences. I can't entirely rule that out, but how could you ever decide which idea, assuming that there is an afterlife, was the beneficial one? If rebirth is the right idea, then all the Christians who believe in resurrection are fucked, and vice versa for the Buddhists if resurrection is the right idea? All those who believe there is no afterlife are fucked regardless? The idea seems absurd to me, so I'll have to presume that is not what you meant, since I think you are a reasonably intelligent fellow.
When I said that I don't buy the idea that the form of the oak in the acorn comes from somewhere else I wasn't referring to previous oaks; in fact, I explicitly said so.
Quoting 180 Proof
I agree with you: the idea of non-physical information makes no sense at all to me, since all information requires a medium, and there does not seem to be any other medium than the physical as far as I can tell.
I realize your question wasn't directed at me, but my $0.02 anyway...
Provided your "computational" is meant to be construed broadly enough to include connectionism that sounds good to me.
Subjective and relative.
So we deal with non-physicals. I think monism can handle that but it is worth a closer look or you will end up arguing for Dualism. Physical and non-physical.
I remember writing last week that all mental content is in the form of contained non-physicals.
That is probably not right. If you are in the presence of some object you will have the benefit of your direct physical senses. Sight, sound, touch. So then you have both active. Like at your job, there might be no substitute for putting eyes and hands on a problem.
Of course, we are always in our physical environment but our minds can be elsewhere.
I have not read enough of the information on information to have formed an informed concept. I agree that without physical processes there would be no information.
I think some formulation of Aristotelian matter-form dualism might be quite in keeping with anything that science turns up. Remember, it doesnt posit the spooky mind-stuff of Descartes, instead it is the conceptual division between matter and form.
Theres a major philosophical dispute in modern culture about the reality or otherwise of number. Invented or discovered? My view is that while artificial mathematical systems are clearly intellectual constructs, at least some of the primitive constituents of mathematics are discovered rather than invented. Likewise, there are any number of principles that can only be grasped by reasoned inference - scientific, mathematical and logical. They are not created by the mind, but can only be grasped by the mind. They are the basis of the synthetic a priori, and, contra empiricism, are grasped by faculties innate to the intellect, not derived from experience.
Well, then what did you mean when you said you don't buy that idea. Obviously you accept as a reality, that the form comes from somewhere else, prior to the acorn, so why did you say that you don't buy that idea?
Since the form obviously comes from "somewhere else", then this is the reality that we need to understand, rather than to try and argue that the form's origin is that it is intrinsic to the acorn. In reality, the acorn is created as a purveyor of the form, which comes from somewhere else.
Quoting Wayfarer
The reality of the matter is that modern science is based in Aristotelian principles. While it's true that his physics and biology were superseded long ago, his logic and categories formed the basis for scholarly study throughout the formative period of early modern science.
But the issue is, that the form is always "somewhere else", prior to being in the material object which bears it. So if we postulate a chain of material objects of prior existence of the form (an acorn before the prior tree, and a tree before that acorn), we have an infinite regress. The infinite regress runs into the problem I explained, of extremely high (approaching infinite) improbability. So if we allow a first material object, the prior "somewhere else" must be a non-material existence (transcendent realm?).
Sure the form is not fixed. The point is that the form comes from a prior form. And if each is a material form, then there is an infinite regress of material forms. This causes the problem of improbability. The improbability of infinite regress is resolved by removing the requirement of matter. Then we have immaterial forms as prior to material forms. This solves the improbability problem that the "evolution of forms" otherwise leads to when adhering to the requirement that a form is material.
Why not monism? What we seek is to try and understand how everything fits together, what is it about the world that allows so much variety, if the base constituents are simple, as they seem to be?
You can choose to accept pluralism, like William James and simply marvel at the multifaceted aspects of the world - this is valuable and instructive especially in terms of aesthetic appreciation. But it won't get you far, it seems to me to stop the search for underlying principles.
And who knows, the actual monism that exists in the world may be quite different from the idea we commonly get from monism in intuiting only a single thing, like a metaphysical big bang type substance. It could be very different from such notions.
As long as it's a dynamic, nonreductive monism, I'm cool with it. :up:
The infinite regress is the result of the materialist/monist perspective which requires that a material form is always the cause of another material form. This produces the endless chain of causation commonly understood as the problem with determinism. By introducing the immaterial cause, the endless chain is broken because this cause is of a distinct type, category, or substance, as implied by "substance dualism". With this principle we can say that it is not necessary that there is a material object which is prior, as cause, of every material object. We thereby allow for real true causation of what would appear from the materialist/monist perspective as the spontaneous generation of a material object. From the materialist/monist perspective this would be nothing other than magic (or a highly improbable symmetry breaking, or random fluctuation), but from the dualist perspective there is a true cause, the immaterial cause.
The question of "how" this occurs is unanswerable because of the current deficiencies of human knowledge. But understanding reality in this way provides us with the direction we must take if we want to expand our knowledge so as to be able to answer this question. From this perspective it becomes very clear that our understanding of time is inadequate. We base our measurements of the passing of time on observed changes to material forms. This limits or restricts our measurements and applications to that theatre, changing material forms. But if we allow the reality of changing immaterial forms, and the possibility that immaterial forms can change without necessarily resulting in any change to any material forms (a true proposition by thinking without acting), then we must conclude that time may pass without any change to material forms. This truth will open our minds to the reality of periods of time which are shorter than physically possible (when "physically" is restricted by observed changes to material forms).
I understand that, from a Monistic Materialist/Physicalist perspective, matter is the sole substance in the world. But, some physicists, especially quantum physicists, have concluded that non-physical Information is more fundamental than any material substance*1. That's why they now call the basis of reality a spacious massless mathematical "field" instead of a minature massive particle. I'm not a physicist, so I'll let you argue with the scientists about those counter-intuitive conclusions.
So, what you missed is Aristotle's reason for defining physical objects as a combination ("compound") of two essences : physical material observable "hyle" and non-physical mental logical "form"*2. Why didn't he just specify a single "physical entity"? I guess it's for the same reason that modern quantum physicists still think in terms of physical local particles, even though their theory now accepts non-local non-physical Fields as fundamental. It's just easier to think in terms of things you can see & touch, instead of non-things that exist only in the realm of theory.
Anyway, I think I understand where you are coming from. But I left that classical physics position behind many years ago, when I started studying the cutting-edge of modern physics. For people who never travel beyond the valley they were born in, and don't have access to satellite imagery, the Flat Earth concept adequately serves their pragmatic needs. Likewise, materialistic classical physics still serves the needs of those who don't push the boundaries of reality*3. So, I'm not trying to denigrate your worldview, but just to help you understand mine. In the new information-centric physics, Information is not "supervenient" upon matter, but matter is an emergent form of Generic Information*4. Hence, immaterial Information is the essential substance of the new Monism. :smile:
*1. Is information the only thing that exists? :
Physics suggests information is more fundamental than matter, energy, space and time the problems start when we try to work out what that means.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431191-500-inside-knowledge-is-information-the-only-thing-that-exists/
*2. Hylomorphism is a philosophical doctrine developed by the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, which conceives every physical entity or being (ousia) as a compound of matter (potency) and immaterial form (act), with the generic form as immanently real within the individual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism
*3. Classical physics is no longer used in research -- it says that mass is conserved, time is absolute, there is no laser possible, quantum levels do not exist, and the hypothesis of continuity is true. Mass is only conserved as an illusion, its value changes according to E0=mc2, and binding energy.
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Would-be-better-for-students-to-avoid-classical-physics
*4. Is Information Physical and Does It Have Mass? :
Some researchers suggest that information is a form of matter, calling it the fifth state of matter or the fifth element. Recent results from the general theory of information (GTI) contradict this. This paper aims to explain and prove that the claims of adherents of the physical nature of information are inaccurate due to the confusion between the definitions of information, the matter that represents information, and the matter that is a carrier of information. Our explanations and proofs are based on the GTI because it gives the most comprehensive definition of information, encompassing and clarifying many of the writings in the literature about information. GTI relates information, knowledge, matter, and energy, and unifies the theories of material and mental worlds using the world of structures. According to GTI, information is not physical by itself, although it can have physical and/or mental representations. Consequently, a bit of information does not have mass, but the physical structure that represents the bit indeed has mass.
https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/13/11/540
Sci is an international, open access journal which covers all research fields and is published quarterly online by MDPI.
QUANTUM FIELD : matter is the dots ; information is the links
According to Aristotle biological beings are a single physical entity. There are no separate forms and hyle floating around waiting to be combined. There is not one without the other, substantiated in living physical entities, that is, substances.
Good point! The general or universal Principles that Plato & Aristotle referred to are not physical objects, or even one primary object among many. Instead, a Principle is an assumption or axiom serving as a premise for explaining Complexity *1 *2. Obviously, those assumed principles are not empirical physical objects, but theoretical meta-physical*3 concepts. They are the presumed Wholes that overly Plurality like a blanket.
Since we are just guessing about those long-ago and far-away principles, we can't say for sure what the ultimate Monism of the world actually is. The Big Bang (act of creation) was one such hypothetical Monism or Principle intended to explain the plurality of physical entities in the universe. It was an alternative to traditional Genesis-like God-Monisms. But even that so-called "Singularity" has been hacked into bits, as we search for a more satisfactory explanation for "how everything fits together". Nevertheless, the notion of all-encompassing Monism meets the philosophical principle of Simplicity within Complexity espoused by Ockham. :smile:
PS___For the record : What I mean by this modern usage of the ancient term "metaphysics", is not supernatural or spiritual entities, but the natural concepts or feelings or principles that we call unique "Qualia" to distinguish them from enumerable "Quanta"*3.
*1. Principle :
Principle in philosophy and mathematics means a fundamental law or assumption.
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Principle
*2. Axiom :
An axiom is a foundational premise that is supposed to be self evident.
http://www.gavinjensen.com/blog/2014/5/29/introduction-to-some-philosophical-principles
*3. PHYSICS : OVERT QUANTA . . . . METAPHYSICS : COVERT QUALIA
***Quantifiable things are easy to talk about, because we can point to them and enumerate them. For example, "woman" is the female half of the Sapiens species. We can recognize them by their quantitative features : tits, ass, etc. These are itemized parts of the whole we categorize as "female". But "femaleness"or "femininity" is a Qualia, which is not so easy to express in specific words. It's a je ne sais quoi [i], (I can't say what) or (I can't be specific). And "quoi" (pronounced "qua") may be etymologically related to Latin "qualia". So, it's the quality of wholeness that is knowable in general, but difficult to express in particular words.
***Physicalism is all about Quanta (things), while Meta-physicalism is about Qualia (ideas or opinions or feelings about things). Quanta (e.g. boobies) are sensuous --- we can see & touch them. But Qualia (femininity) are intellectual, because they are invisible & intangible.
***Feelings are holistic, and difficult to express in words. We gesture when we talk, in order to express the unspeakable. In philosophy, we use metaphors to conjure images of things unseen (qualia).[/i]
I knew that the paradigmatic idea that information is fundamental is Wheeler's notion of "it from bit", so I searched on that and found this abstract from here:
Since special relativity and quantum mechanics, information has become a central concept in our description and understanding of physical reality. This statement may be construed in different ways, depending on the meaning we attach to the concept of information, and on our ontological commitments. One distinction is between mind-independent Shannon information and a traditional conception of information, connected with meaning and knowledge. Another, orthogonal, distinction is between information considered as a fundamental physical entity (Wheelers it from bit), and an ontological agnosticism where physics is about our information of the world rather than about the world itself. Combinations of these lead to various possibilities. I argue that adopting mind-independent information as ontologically fundamental is a hitherto undefended position with important advantages. This position appears similar to Floridis informational structural realism, but is fundamentally different. Rather than epistemically indistinguishable differences, it requires a robust conception of information as consisting of readable and interpretable messages.
Note that according to the author Wheeler conceived of information, not as non-physical, but as "a fundamental physical entity"!
You also might want to read this to educate yourself as to the diversity of views on the matter of information.
This is nice apt summation:
Quoting Fooloso4
I'm not arguing a "first cause", I am arguing a cause of material existence. This is an actuality which is prior to material existence, as cause of material existence. Since it is prior to material existence it is immaterial.
All material things have a cause. This is essential to the nature of being a material thing. Material things are generated and destroyed, they are contingent. This is simply the defining feature of being composed of matter. So a material thing without a cause (which is what would be required for a material thing to be the first cause), would require changing the definition of "matter". But then we would just be within a different conceptual structure from the Aristotelian hylomorphism. If that's what you want, go right ahead, but how would you propose to define "matter"?
Quoting Janus
This is not the issue. The issue is to conform human reasoning to be consistent with reality. If we assume something uncaused, like your proposed material first cause, then this thing is designated as unintelligible to us. A significant part of understanding things is learning the cause of them. So when we stipulate that a certain thing is uncaused (like spontaneous generation for example) we are designating that thing as unintelligible in that respect.
What we have here is a case of human reason not operating in accordance with reality. Reality, as we know it, is that all things have a cause (principle of sufficient reason). So when we allow ourselves to say that such and such a thing has no cause, we are really allowing our reasoning to be not in accordance with reality, by accepting this premise. So to conform our reasoning to be in accordance with reality to the maximum extent that we know reality, we must deny this premise of an uncaused material cause.
Why must there be a cause of material existence? Thinking of the universe as being of finite age and consisting in temporal successions of causes and effects constitutes the usual purported justification for thinking there must be a first cause. The point is why could the cause of material existence or the first cause not be physical?
The Big Bang model posits nothing physical or otherwise before the first physical event.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
"Reality as we know it" is reality according to human thinking, so it is circular to then say that the idea that something might have no cause is not in accordance with reality. What we should say is it would not be in accordance with reality as we know, that is reality according to human judgement, to say that an event could have no cause. But saying that tells us nothing other than about the nature of our own thinking. And that also assumes that there is just one version of human judgement on this issue of cause.
I told you, this is a premise which is necessary in order that material existence may be intelligible.
Quoting Janus
I answered that in my last post.
Quoting Janus
It is not circular, because the intent is to portray aspects of reality as intelligible, yet not known. If the claim was reality as we know it is all that can be known, this would be circular. Instead, the claim is that reality as we know it indicates that the unknown can be known. And that is not circular.
Quoting Janus
I think you misunderstand Janus.. My understanding of reality is what induces the claim that material things have a cause, and as you say, this statement is reality according to a judgement of mine. However, the judgement concerns reality, it says something about reality, as the subject. It does noy say something about human judgement as the subject. Therefore it really doesn't tell us anything about the nature of our own judgement. It says something about reality, as the subject, and nothing about how that judgement was derived. I really did not explain why "matter" is defined in this way. To say something about one's own thinking requires that the person analyzes and describes how this judgement was derived. But that's not the case here, I am saying something about reality, and if you do not agree that it is true, then so be it, because the concept of "matter" is not explained in a few simple posts.
It says something about reality as you judge it to be. Others may not judge reality to be as you do, and reality may not be as anyone judges it to be, if we are talking about anything other than what is observable.
:fire: :100:
You have this confused. Conclusions drawn from observation are what we most disagree on. That material things have a cause is a conclusion derived from observation, and that is what we seem to disagree on. The disagreement becomes even more evident when we start discussing particular occurrences.
You quote Janus on Aristotle simply because it is what you like. I just spent days explaining to Janus how Aristotle demonstrated that it is logically necessary to assume the reality of immaterial form. This is commonly referred to as Aristotle's cosmological argument. But Janus did not listen, and still insists that Aristotle did not talk about separate form, simply because the Foolso4 says what Janus wants to hear. We have a bunch of parrots here in this thread.
Yes. That's why I referred to it as "cutting edge". As I said, the reference to Classical Science was not intended to be derogatory. No need to take offense, because the majority of people today, including philosophers, seem to take intuitive Classical Newtonian Physics for granted, and ignore counter-intuitive Quantum Physics as mysticism unrelated to their daily lives. The notion that Information occurs in both material and non-material forms is a minority concept. But it is essential to my own personal information-centric worldview, including my understanding of Monism. Are you laughing at my mindset, or at the novel ideas of professional physicists, or both?
As a "fundamental physical entity" Information exists in the form of Energy*1 --- which is the active ingredient of Physics, yet is immaterial itself. Energy is invisible and intangible*2, so we know it exists as a Cause only by rational inference from its Effects on matter. But then, immaterial Energy can transform into Matter, by means of Einstein's E=MC^2 formula. As a philosopher, you don't need to know or worry about such "non-sense", unless you are interested in such non-sense as Causation & Monism. :smile:
PS__A century ago a patent clerk made some risible jokes at the expense of Sir Isaac Newton : e.g. empty space can be warped into light-bending waves and causing the Earth to suck via "spooky action at a distance". Are you still still chuckling at that non-sense? Or do you accept it as an implausible fact because it is now the majority opinion?
*1. Information is Energy :
In 2019, physicist Melvin Vopson of the University of Portsmouth proposed that information is equivalent to mass and energy, existing as a separate state of matter, a conjecture known as the mass-energy-information equivalence principle.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/information-energy-mass-equivalence/
*2. Light energy is an invisible energy which causes the sensation of vision in the eye.
https://infinitylearn.com/surge/question/physics/is-it-true-that-light-energy-is-called-invisible-energy/
So, in the context of Monism, the question of information is very messy. Going point by point there is little consistency and little consensus.
This list is just a hodge podge of what's been put up here. It should be a red flag that we are not doing well at all.
Feel free to add items to this list of what you think information is in regards to Physical Monism or Dualism if you like. Do a quote.and add ons if you like. It's not supposed to be a good list, just anything that is out there.
I don't agree with others here that information can be thought of as the raw material of existence, because the word itself is polysemic - it has many meanings - and furthermore, that the term in itself has no meaning unless you specify what information you are talking about. The idea of 'generic information' is oxymoronic - information has to specify something, otherwise how does it constitute information?
There is a famous and often-quoted statement from a book by Norbert Weiner, one of the creators of information science, to wit 'Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.' So, how does materialism respond? It adds 'information' to the list of fundamental furniture of the world. And then Claude Shannon came along with the ground-breaking theory of information which is another of the fundamental discoveries in information science. A lot of the speculation about information being fundamental is based on using Shannon's theory as an analogy (although it's often not clear as to what it is an analogy for.)
That said, there is an interesting way in which information has been conceived as fundamental in biology, that being biosemiotics, about which one of the occasional posters here, Apokrisis, has provided much information. (See Marcello Barbieri A Short History of Biosemiotics if you're interested.)
Quoting Janus
There is a lot of documentation nowadays on the fundamental cosmological constraints that must be the case in order for a cosmos to form, and not simply dissipate into plasma or collapse into a mass of infinite density. These can't be explained in terms of consequences of the singularity as they must exist as causal constraints. I think they bear at least a suggestive similarity to a priori conditions of existence (see for example Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees.)
Right, but that wasn't my point. If the constraints had been different a different cosmos may have formed or no cosmos at all. Or perhaps the constraints could not have been different. These are things which cannot be known, just as, if the Big Bang model is accepted, then the question of what "preceded" it makes no sense. Let us not underestimate human intellectual hubris.
I agree that information has specific content. Good point. And generic information is oxymoronic. I agree again. I am saying the polysemic use of the word information is a problem. Of course it's use can be found in context or also cause confusion.
By making a list I was pointing out that we have a tendency to over assign the word information to things.
I missed the point, in my list, of information being only in the physical present (or not).
I'm thinking the best approach is brain state, a singular definition, existence in the present moment only, and physically based on neurons holding specific content. There is the difficulty of how the brain has the ability of manipulating non-physicals but there is no alternative. It's how math is done, to give an example.
I think I read John Wheeler worked with yes/no questions. But that also can lead to different results...everyone has their biases built in. John Wheeler, interesting guy.
Also, genetics works just fine as physical matter only. These are processed of molecules interacting with other molecules. Just chemistry.
Physicists use the term physical information.
Very confusing. Does it exist or not?
You're projecting again.
Quoting Gnomon
Firstly, citation is needed. And in any case, whether novel ideas in physics are cutting edge or not is something that gets worked out over time. If the experts cannot reach consensus, then citing experts as cutting-edge authorities to support your own pet theories is nothing more than indulging confirmation bias in my opinion.
Are you familiar with Aristotle's cosmological argument?
When the the cosmological argument supposedly demonstrates the necessity of an independent form, why would you accept Fooloso4's assessment that for Aristotle there are no independent forms?
An old post exchange between you & I on this topic:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/350254
Whether the argument is unsound or not is irrelevant to the point, which is whether Aristotle upheld the notion of independent form. Since Aristotle produced the argument, which was intended to proved the reality of independent form, then I think we ought to respect the fact that he did believe in independent form, and therefore reject Fooloso4's statement as false
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I cannot find this post (wherein I "agree"), reply with a link please.
But that is reductive physicalism, which I'm constitutionally averse to. The argument against it is that it somehow has to posit that these neuological states are at once physical and semantic, i.e. meaning-encoding. And as meaning can be encoded in so many completely diverse ways - like, different languages, different symbolic forms, different media - then I don't see how you could ever establish a 1:1 correspondence between meaning and a specific neural configuration or 'brain state'. Not to mention the ability of the brain to completely re-organize itself to compensate for trauma or to adapt to changing circumstances. which again suggests a kind of plasticity that is not found in case of physical objects.
With respect to Wheeler, have a read of Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking?. There's also a speculative article of his, Law without Law, which is available in .pdf format from various websites.
By your comment I would guess your are weighting language higher than you should.
We have big brains that are very adaptive.
The way I break it down is neurons in large numbers holding mental content. Mental content would include everything. Language, math skills, your education, memory, your environment or mental maps on and on, so the affect of just language gets diluted.
The brain is undoubtedly the most complex phenomenon known to science - but that is not the point. The point is, there are philosophical objections to the claim that brain states equate to or are the same as the content of thought. There are also issues sorrounding how to understand or explain the causal relationship between the neurological and the semantic, and also the neurological and the experiential. But it's a highly complex area of science and philosophy so I won't try and pursue it, at least without doing a whole lot more research that I don't have the time to undertake.
I don't think I said brain states are the same as the content of thought.
I would say brain state can have the ability (not always) to contain non-physical content. This non-physical content may have properties independent of any existing knowledge or brain state.
I used the example of the number pi. If you did not know it you would have to start from scratch to find the first second third ......digits. I think you use isosceles triangles but I've never done it. You could make mistakes. You couldn't use trig tables as they have limited decimals. Don't know how. Anyway the point is mental content is independent of preexisting brain state. I'm trying to explain the environment of brain/mental content as it exists.
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Quoting 180 Proof
I agree.
And that brings up the real question: what do we gain from the idea? What's the use?
OK, we have a reality, be it however multiverse or whatever that we don't know.
We simply need many times to look at things from the viewpoint of pluralism. Especially when we don't know the answers. Information is a good example. The definitions and thinking of information differ, which is a bit tricky for monism.
And there are the downsides: Monism can easily lead to thinking that our present theories are all encompassing, answer everything. This is just a way that humans look at their own times. Many won't to accept that "Now in the 21st Century we don't know many things and have errors in our understanding of nature and science". Because if the respected well-known scientist admits this, you will be sure that all the pseudo-science of humbug movements and science haters will surely pick up the line and denounce present scientific knowledge altogether. But would you treat 19th Century science to be correct? Or 17th Century science? Weren't they already standing on the shoulders of giants back then?
And if there are question that cannot be answered, well, they aren't important. And it will lead many times to simple crass reductionism. Because everything is one, there's a theory of everything, right?
So really, what does monism give us?
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/811145
... informed by modern information / computational theory. I stand by my earlier dismissal of Aristotle's cosmological argument as a pedantic aside by you, MU, that misses Fooloso4's conceptually salient forest for your anachronistic trees.
Wayfarer was asking about a one to one correspondence yesterday.
I can give an analogy of something easy to understand that might point to how brains work.
Take the example of a contour gauge in carpentry. It has plates or sliders that will take the shape of irregular shapes like crown moldings. When you apply the tool to the shape it will take that shape and you can transfer that shape to a work piece. Moving to the non-physical, if you would like to create a new shape you could invent a shape by moving the sliders.
This would physically instantiated the shape to your tool and you could then transfer that shape to a work piece same as before.
In the case of physicals brains, the brain state will be the configuration required to instantiate non-physical mental content. It's reasonable to say the non-physical content does not physically exist and cannot be physically detected.
Monism could be a dead end. Our mental worlds are very much about manipulating the immaterial. I said before Dualists might have better instincts about this.
Ultimately it's all done by physical means. I don't know all the details but you will function better if you know you have the ability to process non-physical content.
Not what I had in mind. The philosophical question is, how could you account for propostional content in terms of brain-states. The brain-mind identity theorists hold that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain. It's a complicated subject in philosophy of mind (Stanford article).
One line of argument against that is a variation of what is known as 'the argument from reason'. This says that, whatever we understand 'brain states' to be, if we are arguing that they are physical in nature, then they're incommensurable with propositional content (incommensurable meaning not able to be judged by the same standards; having no common standard of measurement.) Why? Because propositional content is wholly dependent on the relationship of ideas and if-then statements - if this is the case, then that is so. Any arguments relying on rational inference or logical syllogisms make use of something like this, and are instances of logical necessity - that is [x] is the case, then it must also be that [y]. But physical causation is of a different order to logical necessity. This is the subject of this thread from about a year ago.
Back on the topic of monism - I'm convinced that the original monist systems were derived from 'the unitive vision' in, for example, Plotinus. It is a fact that the word 'Cosmos' means 'ordered whole', and it was the conviction of many pre-modern cultures that the Universe functions as an ordered whole. Cosmology began as an attempt to conceive of the nature of that order. But the prospects of seeing the universe as an ordered whole in our day and age are very slight indeed, what with the multiverse conjecture and the realisation of the inconceivable vastness of the Universe. Maybe is beyond the intellectual powers of anyone to imagine the cosmos in those terms any more. 'All the kings horses and all the kings men, couldn't put Humpty together again.'
I think you got lost in mixed metaphors Rig Hand (I hope you don't mind me calling you that). An anachronistic tree cannot be part of the modern day forest. So the fault is really Fooloso4's who tries to fit the anachronistic tree into the modern day forest, and in so doing kills the tree. Regardless of how conceptually salient Fooloso4's forest is, it only consists of pretend trees which are really dead, so it's all imaginary.
Yes, I think there was a form of Neo-Platonism which denied the reality of matter, making it monist idealism. I don't think Plotinus would quite fit that bill though. But I think monism was prevalent in philosophy before this, Parmenides being monist idealist (all is being), and Heraclitus being monist materialist (all is flux).
If microphysical entities can be both particle and wave why could not neurological states be both physical and semantic. Perhaps your unexamined preconceived notion of what it means to be physical is blinding you to the possibility.or perhaps it just doesn't suit you to believe suvh a thing is possible.
I actually offered an argument, not an 'intuitive preconception'. If you would like to address the argument, then I might respond.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
So, how to validate that statement is what is at issue. How do you think you could ascertain the empirical fact of that statement, on the basis of neuroscience.
Well, it can't if the nature of our thinking makes it impossible to explain. It does not follow that because we cannot explain it, it must be impossible.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think we can, with the present state of our knowledge and understanding, validate that statement either.
:up: :up:
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, they don't cash counterfeit idealism at my local bank. :smirk:
Not unargued. The argument is that logical necessity can't be accounted for in terms of physical causation as a matter of principle.
You seem to be pressing some point of logic that I don't see as relevant.
Maybe explaining my method would help. For some problems you can start with initial conditions and work all the way through to the end point. In philosophy we have this problem where we know something about our physical world but we inhabit a mental world. I think my best effort is placed in starting at the ends and working to the middle to find a solution.
So pi doesn't physically exist but there is a history of mathematicians finding it's value to more and more decimal points (accuracy, fractional value). To me it seems like a good example of were physical brains and the immaterial meet. Of course the immaterial does not exist but also pi is not dependent on some preexisting state of brains either. It has to be discovered.
My guess to find pi was to use isosceles triangles but then I looked it up and it's not so easy. The first to do this used polygons but no trig or calculus. They made slow progress. And just to remind ourselves, trig values and pi are fixed relative to each other so you need to know one or the other first. You can't just calculate pi if you don't have the trig values.
Isaac Newton made the most progress on pi but you need to check that yourself. I've just read it for the first time. Of course, calculus methods and a few original tricks, I think.
Anyway. I'm critical of Monism that only goes so far and doesn't get into the environment that brains operate in, such as advanced maths.
Something like the ability to derive pi could be used.
Human brains can derive pi and I consider that a demonstration of the ability to hold, process and apply information.
So if deriving pi is the litmus test, then human brains pass.
Shannon information fails.
DNA information fails.
Quantum information fails.
Information as energy fails.
This actually makes things easier for the Monism model to deal with. No longer do you have multiple definitions of information but only one.
At this point, Monism only has the single problem of how brains do it.
Monism is the belief that the variety of things in the world can be traced back to a single Origin or Substance or Cause. That is exactly what the Enformationism thesis attempts to do. The First Cause in that case is, not a person, place, or thing, but the creative power to enform. Presumably, it is empowered to create both material forms, such as stars, planets & rocks; and immaterial forms, such as rational minds --- from the same original source : Unrealized Potential. Since UP is not something that we experience in the real world, we can only conjecture about it. That's what Plato & Aristotle did with their First Cause (creator) and Prime Mover (causal energy) theories. It's something to think about, but being un-real, any such Monistic Origin cannot be scientifically-proven to exist, only philosophically shown to be plausible.
One "functional test" of such an un-real (ideal) Potential --- ability to create from scratch*1 (perhaps even via the gradual evolutionary process of en-formation*2) --- is the emergence of creatures that are more than just material real objects, but also immaterial ideal minds. And the primary function of a Mind is to see what is not obvious to the physical eye. For instance, the mathematical function PI is not a thing, but a relationship between two ways of measuring circular objects : circumferences & diameters. Any animal with eyes can see round objects. But perfect circles & circumferences & diameters are invisible to the eye. So the irrational ratio we call PI is only apparent to rational minds. How could such an abstract function arise from a merely material origin? :nerd:
*1. Create from scratch :
from the beginning, without using anything that already exists
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/from-scratch
*2. Enformation :
to form (fashion ; create) something new from something old, or from unrealized potential
Quoting Mark Nyquist
One definition of Monism is "a theory or doctrine that denies the existence of a distinction or duality in some sphere, such as that between matter and mind, or God and the world". If there is no ultimate distinction between Matter & Mind, then the duality we conceive must be missing some essence that is the same in both aspects of the world. In the Enformationism thesis, that ultimate essence is the power to create from scratch : to Enform (to give Actual form to formless Potential). We get glimpses of that creative power in : a> information as Energy ; DNA information ; Quantum information ; and Shannon information*3. All are capable of transforming one thing into another : Energy into Mass ; DNA into proteins ; Quantum fields of potential into actual particles of matter ; and meaningless Shannon information (data) into meaningful concepts (ideas) in human minds.
Monism is a holistic philosophical problem, not a reductive scientific project. So, the "how" of Monism is not subject to empirical evidence; only theoretical argument*4. In the Enformationism thesis the single definition of Monism is "The Power to Enform". :smile:
*3. Multiple definitions of Information :
Knowledge ; Intelligence ; meaning ; Energy ; DNA ; Qbits ; Shannon data ; Deacon "causal absence" ;
Note --- "Shannon information is not a semantic item: semantic items, such as meaning, reference or representation, are not amenable of quantification." https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/10911/1/What_is_Shannon_Information.pdf
*4. How does Information transform Matter into Mind? By the reverse of Energy into Mass. In that case, Mind is not a physical Thing (brain), but a non-physical Power (potential) : to conceive of immaterial Ideas from experience with Real material objects.
I think you have mentioned giving form to the formless, and that could be the issue (or part) of what the monism/dualism question is about.
We deal with the formless but not without our physical brains.
I have to be sceptical of your idea that the formless could be a first cause because the only way we see it at work is in our brains. So how could the formless exist pre DNA, pre biological brains? DNA is a special case of something that controls it's own environment but not anything close to information as it exists in our brains.
Apparently, you are talking about material Form (substance) that is visible to the eye, while I am referring to immaterial Form (meaning). The philosophical First Cause, that I talk about, existed prior to all contingent causes, such as the Big Bang*1. So, there was nothing (no material things, no physical forms, no brains) to see at that point in pre-time*2. Your skepticism seems to be due to a common communication barrier on the forum : when one is talking about Physics and the other about Philosophy. :smile:
*1. Chaos :
Plato postulated a distinction between physical time-bound enformed Cosmos, and metaphysical timeless formless Chaos. You might say that his First Cause was a "pre-cause", the Potential to cause Actual events. He didn't personify that Potential as a god, but only as a philosophical or mathematical Principle.
A Void of nothing-but-unrealized-formless Potential makes no sense in Classical Physics, but for Philosophy & Quantum Physics, it allows us to talk about infinite unformed possibilities and other unreal notions as-if they were real things, like Virtual Particles. Therefore, for philosophical purposes, we can talk about a formless possibility that exists only as statistical Potential in an abstract mathematical realm with no squiggly DNA and no jello-like Brains. Does math exist in brains, or in minds?
For scientific purposes, when quantum physicists refer to "Superposition", it's not a place or thing, but merely an imaginary statistical state with no actual matter, position, momentum, but only the Potential to produce a physical particle when triggered by an Observation. Quantum Superposition transcends our physical experience with an actual position in space you can put your finger on.
Perhaps that's just a modern notion of formless Chaos, triggered by a mental Cause into producing a real world. The pioneers of quantum physics were, at first, skeptical of such a formless state of existence. But they were forced by the evidence to accept a metaphysical philosophical concept as having physical effects in the real world : the collapse of Potential into Actual.
*2. The Time before Time :
Time is not a thing, but a system of measurement. For physical purposes, we measure Time in terms of changes in physical objects : sun. moon, etc. But for philosophical purposes we use the word "time" metaphorically instead of materially. When Plato & Aristotle postulated a First Cause to explain all real world contingencies, they were not talking about any material form in space-time that could be seen with a physical eye, but an immaterial formless concept that can only be seen by the mind's eye : reason, inference, imagination. That's the difference between Physics and Philosophy.
Time is Energy :
http://bothandblog7.enformationism.info/page63.html
I try to follow your arguments the best I can. I still don't see how nothing can become the physical universe based on formless potential.
I don't have an answer to that.
Nothing...big bang...physical universe, seems something is logically missing in that simple model.
Can you give reasons formless potential in the non-physical could lead to physical matter?
There is quantum theory, so maybe it's in the math, but I don't understand it that way either.
Just trying to sort through the issues.
From a Materialist perspective, the concept of "Potential"*1 is not just counterintuitive, but unreal : either a thing is real, or it's not. But Plato was an Idealist, so the notion of something-from-nothing could make sense, if that "field" of nothingness*2 had the hypothetical power of Potential. To non-idealists that sounds like Mysticism. But quantum pioneers were faced with making physical sense of squirrely subatomic systems that wouldn't commit to a meaningful position or momentum until measured by an outside agency. The Copenhagen Interpretation of that non-sense was a compromise between theory & practice. Although the Superposition principle*3 --- described by a statistical wave-function --- seems to be super-natural, in practice repeated experiments confirmed the mathematical existence of that strange state of formless (statistical, mathematical, potential, immaterial) quasi-being.
As a result of that Ideal/Real compromise, and their use of Buddhist & Hindu metaphors, those pioneers gained a reputation as mystics*3. So, more pragmatic, and less theoretical, physicists, such as Richard Feynman decided to avoid getting into murky philosophical swamps, by focusing on practical results instead of theoretical understanding of what's actually happening : "shut-up and calculate". Yet, other scientists (e.g. Penrose & Tegmark) were more accepting of Mathematical Existence as contrasted with Material Existence. Also, several respectable physicists have come to terms with the mystical implications of Quantum Physics*1.
If you are interested in gaining a better understanding of spooky Quantum Physics, from a philosophical perspective, check-out the book*4 by science writer, Phillip Ball, editor of the science journal Nature. But, be advised that the ardent Materialists on this forum will advise you to avoid hypothetical philosophizing, and just accept their pragmatic realistic doctrine. :smile:
*1, Philosophical Potential :
Matter is the potential factor, form the actualizing factor. (Aristotle further posited the existence of a prime mover, or unmoved mover, i.e., pure form ..
https://www.britannica.com/topic/potentiality
Note --- Ideal or Potential or Mathematical Form (pattern; design) is a subjective mental concept, while Real or Actual or Material Form (shape ; substance) is an objective empirical observation.
*2. Quantum Field Potential :
The quantum potential energy, as introduced by David Bohm, is defined and interpreted within symplectic quantum mechanics. It is a form of energy which cannot be localized in space. It represent the energy associated with the spatial curvature of the square-root quantum fidelity.
https://hal.science/hal-03591111/document
Note --- In physics, a Field is not a material object, but a zone of space with the potential to manifest real particles of matter. In their statistical potential state, they are called Virtual (not yet real) Particles.
*3. Superposition :
Superposition is the ability of a quantum system to be in multiple states at the same time until it is measured.
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/superposition
Note --- Multiple possible or potential states is an ideal statistical concept, not a real stable object. That's why quantum physics is a statistical science instead of an empirical science. Empirical measurements are metaphorically said to "collapse" the superposed non-local field (like a popped balloon) into a particular mundane location.
*4. Quantum Mysticism :
The leading writers in the field were not "crank" New Age authors but highly experienced physicists such as Fritjof Capra, David Bohm, John Wheeler and Paul Davies.
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Quantum_Mysticism
*5. Beyond Weird :
Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different
____Phillip Ball
FYI___
What is the Nyquist information theory?
The Nyquist theorem specifies that a sinuisoidal function in time or distance can be regenerated with no loss of information as long as it is sampled at a frequency greater than or equal to twice per cycle.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/nyquist-theorem
Note -- This math is way over my head. So I'll stick to amateur philosophy.
Harry Nyquist comes up here occasionally.
I'm not related.
Harry Nyquist worked in the same areas as Chaude Shannon. Their work was with electronic communication. Seems unfortunate to me that it is viewed by many as the science of information. Their work should be viewed as electronics engineering and mathematics.
Yes. What's logically missing from the Big Bang theory is a pre-existing Causal Agency of some kind. Most BB theorists just assume as an axiom (without evidence) that Causal Energy & Natural Laws existed prior to the beginning of space-time, as we know it. I agree. But, for my own philosophical purposes, I refer to that combination of Causation & Organization as EnFormAction.
I assume you are asking for scientific reasons, instead of philosophical conjectures, to explain how "nothing" could become "something". So here's a link to an article by theoretical physicist & astronomer, Marcelo Gleiser*2. He assumes, again by reasoning beyond evidence, that Quantum Mechanics (immaterial mathematical Field*1) existed somewhere out in pre-space-time, and just spontaneously burped-out the living & thinking world we call Reality. He doesn't directly refer to a conjectural "Multiverse" as the Agency of Energy Fields & Limiting Laws, but that's what some imagine to be the Forever Cause.
Likewise, I assume, based on similar conjecturing, that the combination of Quantum Causation and Information Organization (EnFormAction) pre-existed the enformed world we experience today as Reality. Plato & Aristotle knew nothing about Quantum Physics, so they referred to that same Hypothetical world enformer as the First Cause or Prime Mover. That Immaterial Nothing is what is still missing from Materialistic theories of Cosmology & Ontology.
My thesis and Gleiser's thesis are in agreement. But he's using scientific terminology (formless Field), while I'm using philosophical vocabulary (formless Potential) to describe the immaterial nothingness that transformed into material somethingness. Is it magic, or just Logic? Is it Reason or Conjecture? :smile:
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*1. Field : Quantum theorists provide some rather abstruse mathematical definitions for that abstract alternative to concrete Atomism. But what they are referring to is, underneath the jargon, a non-local emptiness (void) where something happens. In other words, it's Nothing that has the potential to produce Material Things.
*2. Quantum nothingness might have birthed the Universe :
We can contemplate the idea of a metaphysical emptiness, a complete void where there is nothing. But these are concepts we make up, not necessarily things that exist.
https://bigthink.com/13-8/quantum-nothingness-birth-universe/
I read your references and I still have trouble even having an opinion. All I see is problems when we propose materialism or monism especially when it comes to a first cause. Your reference mentioned the void might not really be nothing. I'm still considering that. Sorry it takes days for me to have a response but I run through various possibilities and I don't see any that don't have philosophical problems.
I like the phrase 'giving form to the formless' because that's how I understand information.
It's our brains that give form to the formless. What we see of human activity is a demonstration of its effect. However, as a force of nature I don't see evidence of this in things beyond our reach. So on a small scale our brains give form to the formless and can direct matter and energy, but I don't see it at cosmic scales or pre big bang. I'm looking at a number of things.but mostly just having a difficult attempt at getting a handle on it.
Yes. The concept of "something from nothing" is radically counter-intuitive. But scientists, such as Gleiser seem to be using the word "nothing" with tongue in cheek. However, a mathematical Quantum Field is as close-to-nothing as you can get for an empirical scientist. Some physicists still insist that a Quantum Field is made-up of particles. But then they offer a paradoxical label --- Virtual (almost real) particles --- for those supposed bits of matter*3. Yet, Gleiser clarifies that his "Nothing in the Void" is not actual tangible Matter, but intangible mathematical "Vacuum Energy" (which we perceive only in its effects). So, I'll let you ponder the puzzle of the somethingness of Energy : is it a qualia or a quanta?.
In my own thesis, I try to clarify the paradox further (perhaps in vain) by defining Energy as Potential, which is not real until Actualized by an exchange of Form (perceptible pattern of relationships). Unfortunately, it's my unconventional use of the term "Form" --- as a mental/mathematical abstraction instead of a physical/material object --- that does not compute in a materialistic context & vocabulary.
In my thesis, Energy is not a material substance, but a mathematical ratio/relationship : e.g. Potential / Actual. As a philosophical concept*1, Energy is Causation : the relationship between prior Cause and after Effect*2; known as "Time" or "Change". Which is an abstract intellectual inference. So it must be conceived by reason instead of perceived by physical senses. That rational metaphysical notion is essential to the thesis, but seems to zip right over some heads without effect.
The bottom line for me is that we can, by rational inference, trace all Real things and Ideal concepts back to a pre-bang Platonic First Cause. That hypothetical pre-time Cause is not necessarily a person or thing, but perhaps an abstract infinite axiomatic principle of Potential : the power to impart actual Form to the statistical (virtual) Formless. By that I mean "Potential" is like the mathematical possibilities of gambling odds : ratio of possibility to actuality. We can only understand such un-real stuff by means of metaphors abstracted from sensory experience. For me, a universal all-encompassing First Cause of some kind is necessary for a unified philosophy of Monism. For Materialists, that unprovable Axiom might be a hypothetical eternal Multiverse. For others, it's a personal deity. What do you think the ultimate causal Singularity might be?
I'd better quit while I'm behind. Does any of this mathematical metaphysical non-sense make sense to you? Most of us, even would-be philosophers, are innately biased toward a Materialist worldview. So, to even mention "something that is not a thing", sounds like BS. But if you can imagine such a non-thing-with-the-power-to-cause-change (Ideal Potential), the rest will fall into place. :smile:
*1. Potential : In philosophy, potentiality and actuality[1] are a pair of closely connected principles which Aristotle used to analyze motion, causality, ethics, and physiology in his Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, and De Anima
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiality_and_actuality
*2. Causation : We only know it as the passage of Time : before states relative to after states.
http://bothandblog7.enformationism.info/page63.html
*3. Quantum Nothingness : Even though Virtual Particles are hypothetical entities --- based in part on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Theorem --- scientists take them seriously. A may2023 Scientific American article is entitled : The Weight of Nothing. It describes an experiment intended to weigh the mass of Vacuum Energy photons as they "fluctuate in & out of actual existence". The article says "even though we can't capture these virtual particles in detectors, their presence is measurable". And measurement is a mental action.
In my own philosophical thesis of Generic Information, I refer to those virtual/real states as Potential & Actual. So the experiment assumes that in the microseconds of their transition from Virtual/Potential to Real/Actual & back existence, the experimenters will be able to measure the Actual portion of their fleeting existence. Nevertheless, for all practical purposes --- for those of us lacking precision instruments --- the empty vacuum is weightless and thingless.
Something I just came across are the returns coming in from the James Webb Space Telescope. There seems to be questions now that suggest the big bang theory needs revision. Something about distant galaxies appearing smaller that they should be with current theory.
That would be my best guess on how this origins problem will ultimately be solved. Or AI could solve it just by looking at more combinations than we are inclined to. It might not be that far off.
It might be an area where philosophy has limits and astronomers, physicists and mathematicians have the advantage.